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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.
How long will it be before it's on MAME or on a pinball simulator?
...announced reruns of Worker & Parasite cartoons.
Ill take pong over "crap booth" any day
I'd rather play a game of `Catch the drips in a bucket or drown'. That just rings of a good time!
I didn't spend all that time playing Dungeons and Dragons and not learn a little something about courage.
A Beowulf-ski cluster of these
In soviet russia, the dots eat you.
it's made of cardbord, can fold into a briefcase, but does get 50 continues to the quarter rubel!
The More Laws, the less Justice --Marcus Tullius Cicero
It is always a good day when you get paid to surf the internet.
Google search on "Soviet Video Games".... Hey, does this guy post on slashdot?
Have you Meta Moderated t
I find it strange that the BBC would decide to host this article on one of the game machines in questions. Tis a pity.
-m
#
# Modus Ponens
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...appears to be a carnival shooting game... or something.
Hey! Have SOME respect. This is history being preserved here.
I only have four thousand others, so I could use a new game.
They both sometimes have joysticks. They both take lots of quarters to play.
Good attempt troll!
however this is cool (and k3wl) on many levels- but the most important being the paralellism that occured on the other side of the iron curtain (perchance you, being a mental midget, are in actuality too young to remember the race with the Red Menace)
The east/west one-upmanship is interesting in itself, but taken to a geeky subculture of video games, and its really cool. And 31337.
Good luck on all future trolling attempt, Hacker Dave.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
"Crap booth" is not as interesting as it seems, but apparently communist Germany and capitalist America aren't really that different.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
For those like me who are geographically challenged, Bath is in the United Kingdom, a couple of hours west of London.
Craig Steffen
http://www.craigsteffen.net
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When it was first launched in 1985, the computer technology was 10 years out of date by western standards. It has text-based graphics generated with a Russian 8-bit processor compared to the 16-bit processors used in western home computer games, or 32 bit processors used in western arcade machines at the time
In 1985 where was MY 16 bit game console and 32 bit arcade machines?
Hell, Super Mario Bros 2 came out in 1985. "Western life" wasn't that advanced.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
When I read that the machines had been dismantled, I assumed there was some sort of political theme, which made me want to write a Pokemon meets Michael Moore game.
"Look! Secret Service in front of Saudi Embassy! <snaps picture>"
What does that have to do with old nintendos?
http://www.DaveNet.biz/
The Berlin wall was the largest official game of Breakout to have ever existed. They won.
"I think everyone is an agnostic but just doesn't know" - Frazz
'Put it in "H"!!!!!'
What? Missing the "In Soviet Russia ..." posts, eh?
Your score is averaged with everyone else's scores? There are no high scores, only the people's score. For snitching on your neighbor's capitalistic views, you get an extra Blue ghost dot though.
www.facebook.com/DareDefendOurRights
www.fairtax.org
In the former East Germany... games pl^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H you play games!
Reviews with a twist! http://www.sardonicbastard.com
Proving once again if there's one thing you can say about East Germans it's that they really knew how to have fun.
Well, it certainly could be worth quite a bit and it is a fascinating find, but priceless? Perhaps they should list it with Sotheby's. Do you think it will fetch more than a Vermeer?
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
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naturally, being a commie Pac Man game, you would team up with your commie buddies as comrades (ghosts) fighting against the capitalist pig (ie. Pac-Man).
Makes you wonder if that was subconsciously the point of the original Pac-man, in reverse.
Bratwurst-Time (The burgertime counterpart)
Soulkrauten (soulblade...but everyone looks like Sigfreid)
Aryan 51 (a shoot-em-up game)
Operation Wulf (a Taito port)
Building Castle Wolfenstein (Tetris clone)
And the yet-to-be-released:
Kaiser Gassem Forever (hey, it's about as bad as Nukem)
" So Pac Man was a communist?"
Not a chance. Else Pac Man would have stood waiting in line for hours to get one dot, and all the bonus items would been deemed decadent Western evils. Unless you entered the secret "Member of the Politburo" code, in which case see below.
No, Pac Man was purely a consumerism capitalist, endlessly gobbling up things, the faster the better in order to gobble still MORE things, all while dodging the tax collectors to the best of his ability.
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
From the article: "The Poly Play videogame was Eastern Bloc's answer to the capitalist's Pac Man"
In short, the object of the game is for the ghosts to crush the despotic tyrant McPacMan. After voting two of the ghosts as their representatives in the socialist ghosts party these two ghosts share all the dots between them leaving one dot for the other two ghosts to share. The number of votes each ghost gets is based on the number of dots in their region of the screen.
The belief in a biblical god is an ignorant one
The original champions of DDR!
sulli
RTFJ.
I wonder what is the power consumption of this gadget. Probably you have to switch-off one or two districts in the neighbour and it needs an additional water cooling. A Soviet refrigerator, for example, consumes probably 1Kw and most of the energy is converted to sound as it is louder than a truck...
Sorry Dave, Mekkab can't let you do that.
Game Overdrive - Gaming News
I had one of those. And I know about a dozen of other PolyPlays
Its rare, but not that rare. there are more PolyPlays in Germany (east&west) than PacMans.
There are several different cab versions of it (due to lack of rescoureces)
And its really not worth anything........not really.
...as I was looking forward to the /. effect jokes about the polyplay being used as the server.
Oh well, at least we can still IMAGINE A BEOWULF etc. etc.
-Tut
Health-Hack.com
Japanese (basically extra levels to original): 1986
USA (Doki Doki Panic + Mario sprites): 1988
-l
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"While hunting for work stuff "
/. logon info then??
So, your boss knows your
Seeing as how the games seem to be in German, why is the game machine named (and prominently so) in English? (Or is "Poly Play" also German?)
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
If not, there should be.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Marcus Hammerschmitt, a german author, wrote a science fiction book about it. A really good read, if you understand german.
In the screenshot it resembles that old Atari Pacman. Ahh the memories....
"If you have done 6 impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways" -- hhgg
Could the pinacle of superior Soviet gameing technology stand up to the 3D card accellerated game fests of today?
Sadly, for many of the games on the shelf these days, the answer is yes. I'm willing to be ploy play could still stand up to a lot of the fare they sell for 60 euro in east(ern) germany today.
"Capitalist Fools! Only classless video game offer true excitement!
May the Maths Be with you!
"Cool, but lame, i cant speak for others but who really cares about a Jurassic nintendo?"
Why'd you even post a comment?
"Derp de derp."
It looks to be a fairly new place. They have an electronic newsletter, but it only goes back to the middle of last year.
I'm going to the UK in August, and it's now definitely on my list of places to go!
Craig Steffen
http://www.craigsteffen.net
...that there's "only" about half a dozen "Soviet Russia" jokes in this thread. ;) (In Soviet Russia, game plays YOU!)
It's interesting to see another example where there was a real east/west struggle to compete with each other; Space race, nuclear arms race... Pacman :)
And you may say that the games are a little boring, but are they boring to the people who grew up on games like Pacman and Missile Command? And even if they are, when you live in a much more restrictive country than a lot of countries in the west were at the time (or are now), I'd say they were probably a lot more interesting than a lot of the "recreational pasttimes" around at the time. It's not as if it was really a choice between that or a Nintendo Console; it was probably that or pretty much nothing.
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!
Even though I was going to post something like it myself when I read the topic, I salute you :)
Just a shame today's mods don't get it...
For those who don't get the joke it's a play on words (or acronyms rather):
DDR = Dance Dance Revolution (popular arcade dancing game)
DDR = Deutsche Demokratische Republik (the official name of the state of East Germany)
Is it just me, or do a lot of native English speaking people seem to have a problem with the difference between "ie" and "ei"? I would understand if they always wrote "ei", but I see too many instances of "wierd" for that to be true. Odd...
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)
Because I played one in California in the mid 1980's. At the time I just thought it was some old defunct company. Hare and Wolf is just too familiar.
Why is that a 0 score - I chuckled....
Ave Molech Setting
True story, the original writers of the game were going to call the game "Puck Man" hence the shape. They changed their mind because malitious players could scratch out a part of the P and make it into an F.
At the end of the game, instead of "Game Over", will we see "Endut! Hoch Hech!" ?
It translates to "How are you gentleman. All your dacha are belong to us..."
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
I wonder how long it will be until someone has ported Quake to it.
at least for most of the single-console emulators, they have homebrew games to justify their existance
There is also at least Vantris, a tetramino game designed to replace the ROMs on a Vanguard PCB. I'd like to see if I can get my head around various 8-bit arcade PCB architectures in order to port tetraminoes to as many as possible.
how many arcade machines can you fit in your living room?
If you have a MultiJAMMA arcade KVM switch, you can fit up to eight arcade games into one cabinet. Then how many cabinets can you fit in one room?
Still, granted on other counts.
The list of games in the article is not complete. There was at least one other game in another version of Polyplay. I have to admit I forgot the name, but it was supposed to mean steering Buran through an asteroid belt. You evaded lumps that kept crossing the screen horizontally at increasing speeds. You could also shoot, but only one shot could be on the screen at any time and hitting amounted to having the asteroid reset to a position at the end of the screen. IIRC, it scrolled from left to right, not the common right-to-left way.
I'm not quite sure, but I think there also was an Asteroids clone. Perhaps I'm mixing this up with "Schiessbude" - after all, I played this machine 15 years ago and wasn't even in school then. But it is a pity I don't remember more of the Buran game - MAME doesn't have this one, and if none of the three machines left have it, it is probably lost.
blow your mind already
... you're the home town of one of the best bands of all time: XTC!
;)
Name one decent band out of Fresno.
-Jellisky
Possibilities: In 1985 it was called Crap Booth since everyone would stand in line waiting to play it. Similar to everyone standing in line to use the toilet or waiting for toilet paper when a shipment arrived every month. After 1989 (Berlin Wall fell) - "Crap Booth" was what everyone called it when they saw the Pong and Colecovision shipments which got dumped on them. Lastly, people who lost at it all screamed Crap that they wasted a month's salary (in rubles) to play Hase und Wold (a crappy Pac Man rip-off)
Why does this article represent this machine as "only one approved" and such? During the Soviet era there was a relatively large number of various coin-operated arcade machines. Many of the were electronic-mechanical machines (like basketball machine that shoots an actual small rubber ball into actual baskets, or light-sensor-based "shooting range" machines), but later they were accompanied by computer-based videogame-type machines. Once again, there was great variety of these machines and sometimes it was possible to encounter in some rural city a machine that was never seen in the capital cities. And no, they were not finished with wood. The were mostly metal and plastic.
...and moved everyone to Slough.
They were trying to figure out step #2
#1 Build Arcade machine a good ten years out of date.
#2 Dismantle 5 years later.
#3 Profit?
The search goes on....
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Dance Dance Revolution of the Proletariat.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
Some games considered by the East German government, but ultimately rejected:
The page linked above also has a link to a MAME file.
In Soviet Russia, dot gets Pac Man.
Not exactly right, but close. It was released in Japan as Puckman, and when Midway got the rights and released it in the US, it was renamed for the reasons you stated. for more info : the history of Puckman
Nobody believes the official spokesman, but everybody trusts an unidentified source. -- Ron Nesen
Exceptions to rules in English are usually dependent upon the origin of the word. For example: a Brazilian friend of mine and I were talking about English grammar one day and we figured out that English really doesn't have many irregular verbs. It has verbs which are probably of Latin origin (the ones that are roughly the same in English and Portuguese), and those which are of presumably germanic origin (the ones which aren't the same as Portuguese), and the latin verbs are conjugated one way, the germanic ones another.
I don't recall any other examples offhand, but seriously, to really understand English, you have to study at least one other European language.
Knowledge of this fact will be of absolutely no use to native speakers of non-indo-european languages. (If you tell them about it, be sure to rub their noses in it)
there no mention of linux vs. micro$oft in any of the posts until now, are the /.'ers changing habits?
i live on an alternate planet
BBC writers need to learn the meaning of "literal" - they say "Scheissbude" is literally "Crap Booth," but folks, "Scheiss" isn't crap. It's shit. I can understand them not wanting to use the literal translation, but why say it's literal? Why not just it's translated?
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
No, but Mario is.
Yeah, but the video game adaptation of Battleship Potemkin sucked. You could only play as the carriage!
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.
"And now the Soviet Union's answer to Itchy and Scratchy: Worker and Parasite!"
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
"schiess schiess" would just be crap.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Actually there was a minigame like that in the Tiny Toons - Wacky Sports game for the Game Boy. Instead of drowning the pipe (with Elmyra on top of it) came down when you missed drops and you had to feed them to Dizzy to move the pipe back up. It's rather fun, though the description here suggests that the GDR version is badly implemented.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Strange that the Poly Play would not include one of the best known games to come out of the Soviet Union...Tetris (now that would be cool)
I went to Poland a couple of times in the late 80s and what the arcades sported there were not quite as bad as this one.. I remember playing several classic western games such as Gyrus, Kung Fu Master and such..
I also got the chance to play an old game system for home use which was way outdated. Remember the old one with 10 or so games? This must have been some kind of clone of that system and it ran on batteries. It had a light gun with which you shot at big white squares that bounces around the screen.. This must have been in 1986-1987...
Aku - Soku - Zan - Saitou Hajime
This brings back memories. I was at a youth hostel somewhere in Thuringia (East Germany). I think it was 1988 or so. There was a Polyplay machine, but I've played only a few times. I wasn't too exited about it as I had already seen ancient western arcade machines like Pacman at a fair and some friends of mine had C-64s, all which had better games and graphics.
...there are very few of these machines remaining, which is what the article was saying. Originally there were 1500 Poly Plays made, but all except 3 were destroyed after the fall of the berlin wall.
I would wager that most of the others you remember probably met the same fate.
I am NaN
This game Poly-Play is fairly well known within the MAME community, as it is one of only three (of the thousands MAME supports) ROM games that are freely available! So, it is often one of the first games tried by a new MAME user.
Poly-Play is judged to no longer have a copyright at all, because it was state-developed and the old Soviet state no longer exists.
Another game is Robby Roto, a game whose programmer was ingenious enough to get a clause in his contract in which copyright control reverted to him after the game stopped selling! When this happened (unfortunately sooner than later, as the game was a flop), he got full copyright control of his ROM, and generously donated it for free non-commercial use.
The third game is Gridlee, a fun little game that is a favorite at California Extreme. I'm not sure of the story behind this one, but this ROM was also freed by the original developers of the game.
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
So that's where that horrible roundabout is! I've seen pictures of that ugly beast before.
I can't imagine how confusing that must be to drive on if you're not used to it.
Is it just me, or do a lot of native English speaking people seem to have a problem with the difference between "ie" and "ei"?
Du hast schon Recht. (You are correct)
The problem lies in the fact that, unlike in German, ei and ie have exactly the same pronounciation. Wierd and Weird would be pronounced exactly the same, unlike schiessen (rhymes with English "sheet", means "to shoot") and scheissen (rhymes with English "shy", means "to shit").
I've never had trouble distinguishing ei and ie when thinking or writing in German, but I still screw them up on occasion in my mother tongue, English.
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