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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 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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Hey! Have SOME respect. This is history being preserved here.
"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
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When it was first launched in 1985, the computer technology was 10 years out of date by western standards.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
But please don't take that to mean that bathing is optional in the US. It's your civic duty to practice good hygeine.
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
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)
For those like me who are geographically challenged, Bath is in the United Kingdom, a couple of hours west of London.
Ah, but the museum is at the Swindon campus of the University of Bath. Swindon is between Bath and London, about 1.5 hours west of the capital. The glorious Eddie Izzard once described Swindon as being like Fresno without the charm. Which is about right.
Sailing over the event horizon
" 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
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.
Marcus Hammerschmitt, a german author, wrote a science fiction book about it. A really good read, if you understand german.
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)
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.
The pac man collects all the dots while the 4 ghosts wander aimlessly, pretending to work. Then when the board is cleared, they take pac man's dots and divide them equally... except for the highest ranking ghost who gets a larger share because he is more equal than the others.
Dance Dance Revolution of the Proletariat.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
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