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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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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
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
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 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.
But the TV in this thing is not a stripped down unit, it is a whole TV set, little legs and everything!
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
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...