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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.
...announced reruns of Worker & Parasite cartoons.
Ill take pong over "crap booth" any day
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
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# 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.
They both sometimes have joysticks. They both take lots of quarters to play.
"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When it was first launched in 1985, the computer technology was 10 years out of date by western standards.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!!!!
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
It's been in MAME for quite some time.
PolyPlay is one of the the (few) legal ROMs for MAME. From Mameworld.net:
(C) 1985 VEB Polytechnik Karl-Marx-Stadt.
Owing to the collapse of East Germany, there does not appear to be any copyright holder for this software.
There's a link there to download the game. So go grab your favorite version of MAME and play the game! Interactive news! It's the future!
Casual Games/Downloads
'Put it in "H"!!!!!'
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/
It's on MAME. Google for "MAME polyplay". I actually played it. Problem: It's really boring.
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...
Owing to the collapse of East Germany, there does not appear to be any copyright holder for this software.
I'm not certain the MAME guys should be so sure of that though. Had it had any commercial value whatsoever, you can bet someone would've claimed it.
There have been cases of rights disputes over Soviet creations, not to mention the big fuss over Tetris back in the day.
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.
Japanese (basically extra levels to original): 1986
USA (Doki Doki Panic + Mario sprites): 1988
-l
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Marcus Hammerschmitt, a german author, wrote a science fiction book about it. A really good read, if you understand german.
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.
I'm not certain the MAME guys should be so sure of that though.
You make the mistake of assuming people really care about the legality of MAME (or any emulator, really, although at least for most of the single-console emulators, they have homebrew games to justify their existance).
Really, how many arcade machines can you fit in your living room? Even (former) arcade owners would realistically only have the right to use a few dozen games at most. Yet most MAME users have literally hundreds, if not thousands, of games.
Not to say that strictly legal users don't exist, but I would consider them in the tiny minority.
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.
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.
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.
Indeed. We're fortunate MAME is as comprehensive and functional as it is today. As DRM becomes more commonplace, and games become as crappy as the movies they're spun off from, you can expect MAME's popularity to increase. Concurrently, you can expect the making and/or use of emulators to be crushed legally, by stuff like the INDUCE act which doesn't even care if there's a legit use.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Dance Dance Revolution of the Proletariat.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
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.
The page linked above also has a link to a MAME file.
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
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.