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Rare East German Arcade Game Unearthed
Lancey writes "While hunting for work stuff I found this press release about an old Soviet games machine, apparently there are only three surviving units from a production of 1500 - most of them were destroyed after the Berlin wall came down. Thought you might find it interesting..." There are screenshots and photos in this BBC story.
I was fortunate enough to go on a trip to the (soon to be defunct) U.S.S.R. in 1988. Our last leg of the tour was in Moskow, where we stayed at the 'Pionir' hotel (where the capitalist swine were usually contained on their visits apparently)
In the lobby there was a PolyPlay and a couple other old "mechanical" video games... I recall a light-gun shooter and something else.
That array of games--being a 13 year old proto-geek--was actually the creepiest thing I experienced on the entire trip. The thought of Russian kids having "fun" on these creepy old bland games just kinda chilled my spine for some reason.
I hate Grammar Nazi's
In 1985, 68000s were only being phased in coin-op machines at the top-end. The Z80 was still the mainstay for a while longer. (You have to be kind and allow the 8088 and 68000 their 16 and 32bit-hood.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Well, I guess that fuxoft is right, it is most likely a shooting game :-)
BTW, folks, Frantisek was a great ZX Spectrum guru east of the Iron Curtain. That was quite a few years ago, but your games had quite a following :-)
By the way, note that it's actually spelled correctly (schIEssbude - shooting gallery) and not schEIssbude ("crap booth") in the screenshot of the menu.
(So why's it taking so long with Microsoft?)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Marcus Hammerschmitt, a german author, wrote a science fiction book about it. A really good read, if you understand german.
Yes it is. The government taxes me via a "TV License" which goes to the Treasury. The Treasury then pays the BBC. The BBC is funded by direct taxation. If you try living without a TV in the UK for any length of time, you will find out that you are harassed by the authorities to the point where you consider getting a TV license just to get them off your back. So, to all intents and purposes, there is a blanket, fixed-fee public broadcasting tax in this country under the guise of a "TV License." Yes, the elderly and visually-impared get a discount...
Stick Men
Looking at this poly play game reminds me when Krusty aired a Russian version of Itchy & Scratchy. The cartoon was really crudely done(think of the Cheat's animations) and there was a political slant. Okay, no political slant in Poly Play, but man look at that cheesy neon logo for the marquee!
And to think in west Germany they were making Porsches and such, and just over the border, crap technology like the Lada car. Funny!
As a citizen of former Communist block I distinctly remember there were MANY official amusement games (mechanical / electronic hybrids, not videogames). There was bowling (the "fake" one, where the ball doesn't really touch the hanging pins but presses sensors under them), there was "Zimnaya ochota" - shooting at blinking animals with lightgun, various "racers" (mechanical model traveling over the projected road), there was a sub shooting torpedoes at the ships (also mechanical, using ship models and mirrors). Most of them were made in Soviet Union. I even remember a Russian pinball (I think the theme was "Ruslan & Ludmila"). I suspect most of them were ripped of from similar U.S. games of 60s and 70s. But I also remember several communist VIDEO games. There was Russian game of multiplayer horseracing - there were about six or so horizontal racetracks and everyone had to press his button for a horse to jump over the obstacles. The color was provided by colored celophanes glued to the screen. I remember spending dozens of hours at the "arcades", watching these marvels. There was also definitely Pong made in Czechoslovakia (this was a home videogame you could buy around 1985). Also, several Nintendo Game & Watch games were ripped off and officially sold as Russian games. I remember THE EGG, which slightly changed the wolf's face and turned the hen into the hare, thus making it a game based on popular Russian "Nu pagadi" cartoon about Wolf battling the Hare...
--- Frantisek Fuka (Yes, that's my real name and you have no idea how it's pronounced)
Ordinarily, I'd chalk it up to the way German borrows fairly heavily from English (have a look here if you don't believe me). I suspect the East Germans didn't do nearly as much borrowing from English as the West did, though...do you suppose they ended up appropriating Russian words?
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Did it look like the Nintendo's Game and Watch type handheld? The game that I have has a wolf that tries to catch the eggs in a basket that are being thrown by the rabbit. Where did you find the one for the Palm Pilot?
This game was classic. I remember sitting around the computer lab in college playing this on machines when we had nothing better to do. The banana's would "explode" when they hit a building. We'd go thru the basic code and increase the size of the banana explostion. Quite fun.
Not until I discovered English language. :) In Czech, it's pronounced "fooksoft" and my name (Fuka) is pronounced "fooka" - like in Japanese.
--- Frantisek Fuka (Yes, that's my real name and you have no idea how it's pronounced)
It's true, English was less common in East Germany. However, many parents chose English first names for their children. So if you meet some middle-aged German with a name like Cindy, Barry or Peggy, chances are that they were born in the GDR.
I guess that was a kind of subtle opposition to the enforced communist culture.
i was thinking the same thing. could this be the origins of my favorite urban myth: the name poly play could have been mistaken/altered to polybius, and a game from communist areas during the cold war is a great starting point for a myth about a game that makes people go crazy. the part about polybius being a puzzle game, of course, could be based on the fact that the best game to escape through the iron curtain is tetris.
you know, as cool as this may be, i almost feel let down: I still want to find a Polybius cabinet and prove myself as a hardcore gamer, and somehow, this almost kills that fantasy for me.
I downloaded the ROM, and it works fine. How is this possible?
How can MAME emulate hardware which is 'Apparently based on a Russian minicomputer/PC of the day'? Doesn't the fact that the software works on MAME mean that the basic game hardware must be some stock system from the west?
I was wondering about that, too, here's what I found:
A MAME status report from April 2000 states that "Martin Buchholz sent in a Poly-Play driver (the only arcade machine ever produced in GDR, the former East Germany) with thanks to Jürgen Oppermann, Volker Hann and the Videogame Museum in Berlin (especially to Jan-Ole Christian) - without them, the driver would not have been reality."
This German article elaborates on that a little bit. Basically, they analyzed existing hardware and built a MAME driver for it. That's what they do for other games, too - usually, however, implementing a platform will give you more than one box to emulate...
(The museum people were quite happy to have the MAME emulation, of course, because one of these days, the hardware is going to fail, and now they'll at least still have the games in working order.)
The second article also talks about four missing games: Their names are in the software and people in the comments section remember playing them, but none of the surviving machines seems to have the games.
Their names are:
"Der Gaertner" (The gardener)
"Im Gewaechshaus" (In the greenhouse)
"Hagelnde Wolken" (Hail clouds - apparently some kind of Space Invaders clone)
"Der Taucher" (The diver)
Jens