1988: P.R.E.S.T.A.V.B.A. | Hacker News Reader

1988: P.R.E.S.T.A.V.B.A.

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207 pointsaaronareed64 comments

For non CZ/SK people reading this. This story is an extremely niche example of "anti" communist games.

For example, transgoogle this article https://gaudeo.sk/jaro-filip-online/ and watch the video posted there, which is from 1986 and it was airtimed in the state television as an 8-episode-long series.

Jaro Filip, the guy from the '86 video is openly saying that he is playing Alien 8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qv6yLoibUS0 and he is joking about it quite casually.

By the way, Fuxoft - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWfQH6o8T9I nowadays a crypto-millionaire (part of Golden Triangle, together with the guy mentioned in the OA, https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Triangle ) did some nice text adventures like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1P56S5vdW0.

By the way, the first official games/programs distributor for CZ/SK and even UK/US titles was probably Ultrasoft. These games in the article were not official games, well, there wasn't a market for this thing in the 80's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrasoft Maybe you will know titles like Quadrax, Jet-Story or Tetris 2.

Pretty fascinating niche. On one of my trips over there a Czech cousin told me how they had to be careful even dubbing Michael Jackson tapes in the 80s since American media was not allowed at all. These games seem a lot riskier.

Edit: Thanks to the comments on this it seems things weren't so dire in the 80s. My cousin was a kid then--perhaps he was recounting more 70s era stories from his older sister or something! In any case, it's fun hearing about all of your memories since my first visit over there was in 1990. :)

It wasn't banned per se - it was just that with a non-exchangable currency getting hold of a copy of anything was difficult.

Some western productions would make it through the iron curtain, but they needed to be checked and usually censored beforehand. Politically correct (in the original meaning of the expression) poster art was a genre in and of itself:

https://www.fanthatracks.com/news/collecting/star-wars-poste...

Woa. Those posters are really good. Totally different aesthetic than the film, but I think they draw from the Eastern Block's long tradition of Sci Fi that was more artsy and less action, far as I understand it.

Ironically because of the political system back then - censors did only a cursory check whether the work meets the guidelines (no gore, nudity, positive depictions of "imperialist" America) and there obviously was no push to make the poster "sell" the movie - authors had a lot of artistic freedom, so they experimented.

50s yes, 60s maybe, But in the 80's? Nah. 80s especially were the very best, my friend ;). Think of it like a more prosperous Cuba of 2021.

Check this out: Gumení chlapci (Rubber Boys) 1984 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFnmy6q9d8M

1987 Diskopríbeh (Disco story) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pac_Uabo-hY

1988 Kamarát do dešte (A friend through the rain) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0b-DC7GJIe8

I mean, unless your friend was into politics, it wasn't so tough in the 80s. At lest for the more commercial music. Punk or Metal people have it hard, but Jazz or Pop/Rock was ok.

This is one rock band from 1985 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz_y401AFOo

Paradoxically they made an anti communist anthem a few years later, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJucQNdBJo4

Don’t forget 1987’s Bony a klid which had Frankie goes to Hollywood’s "Relax" as a main music theme (legaly) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg2w5uE-814

And then there are also Návštěvníci (The visitors) which is basically Daft Punk, just 30 years earlier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSjda4QF9wI

Yeah, of course: https://youtu.be/BxIxvQgdR7Q?t=62

The visitors soundtrack was done by Karel Svoboda, my favorite piece from him is this: https://youtu.be/TexUnMWTk04

I really liked those Czecheslovakian-German coproduced kids movies quite a lot!

That must be some kind of joke on their side because e. g. Michael Jackon’s Thriller was released in CS in 1984 by Supraphon (LP monopoly at the time).

Access to the west music was certainly limited but not impossible, due to proximity to Austria and Germany it was very easy to watch and listen to their stations and as described above, some LPs were even released in CS. I remember drooling over Depeche Mode’s Music For The Masses back in cca 1988 but it was above may pocket money-grade.

But I’m talking about the eighties when the gerontocracy was unable to deal with people’s desires, the regime was certainly much tougher in 70’s.

He’s not a USD millionaire, only CZK millionaire.

Considering he sold 15M CZK of Bitcoin two months ago and has much more left, he is USD millionaire.

> od roku 2013 jste od svých přispěvatelů v 75 transakcích vybral 112 bitcoinů.

He still has some more, didn't cash out everything this year ;)

There is a lot left of the 1980s spirit in Czechia.

* Willingness to do things by hand (such as sewing improvised masks in spring of 2020 at home).

* General distrust towards authorities.

* Caustic, dark sense of humor.

* Readiness to be cynical/heretical about every Sacred Cause pushed by the media or activists. Americans would probably be genuinely shocked at the reception of the BLM movement here.

* Corruption, unfortunately. Or at least high perception of corruption. Reality may not be as bad anymore, but we refuse to believe that things have gotten better.

* And, yes, the latent fear of Russian tanks rolling through the country again.

> Americans would probably be genuinely shocked at the reception of the BLM movement here

It's not really surprising that a country that wasn't itself a colonizer nor exactly colonized (Hitler aside) and has few nonwhite immigrants wouldn't understand the American situation while also being naively racist.

"nor exactly colonized (Hitler aside)"

You would have to put a lot more aside. Pretty much the only two eras of national self-determination since 1621 were 1918-1938 and 1989-today. This nation is located on a crossroads of powerful interests.

We have two major non-white communities in CZ. One of them are the Vietnamese, who came as guest workers in the 1980s and are climbing rapidly on the societal ladder. Their kids are integrating into the elite of the nation very fast, universities are full of them.

The second one is Roma (Gypsies), with whom the mutual relations are pretty bad. Welfare dependency, crime etc. Once Roma start moving into some neighbourhood, an exodus of everyone else follows. This is not unique for CZ, though, this pattern of failure is seen everywhere with sizable Roma communities, from France to Bulgaria and Russia.

One of the reasons might be that successful Roma leave the community and intermarry with whites. That was case of my dear friend from the ground school. She is 100 per cent Roma, her kids are 50 per cent, but they no longer have any contact to the community. She says it would be too dangerous; too much of a drug habit there, kids not exempt.

Czechia is not "uncolonized", either. The Soviet actions in 1968, the German annexation in the 1930s, an episode which includes the assassination of Reynhard Heydrich [1] leading to the Lidice massacre [2] are recent examples. There are also less remembered things.

I have heard from my few Czech friends about the amount of art that Swedes stole from Czechia. [3] See the section "Sack of Prague". The English page is rather slim. It is better to see an automatically translated version of the Czech page on the stolen art treasures. [4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Heydrich

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacre

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Prague_(1648)

[4] https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%A0v%C3%A9dsk%C3%A1_loupe%C...

> Willingness to do things by hand (such as sewing improvised masks in spring of 2020 at home).

This is good and bad. Nobody I know can recommend me a plumber because "we all know how to do that ourselves" - ironically the reason I need a plumber is because of a shoddy DIY job performed by previous owners of my flat :D

And as an aside - I was really sad when N95 and FFP2 masks were mandated. The psychological boost of everyone wearing their own lovely little custom masks together was really cool and bonding. They were the last connection to the early successful response to covid, when they were deprecated it seemed to be around the time where everyone just sort of gave up.

> The psychological boost of everyone wearing their own lovely little custom masks together was really cool and bonding. They were the last connection to the early successful response to covid, when they were deprecated it seemed to be around the time where everyone just sort of gave up.

True. Now that I think of it, it was an interesting time when the masks were first mandated virtually overnight. Back then it was okay to wear a mask which was obviously made from a kitchen towel, then people gradually shifted towards wearing neatly-made ones.

Yeah that period was really something! I was among the first few hundred positive cases here, and ended up quarantined in my flat for six weeks due to some testing anomalies. The "masks everywhere" stuff started while I was indoors, and when I finally emerged it was totally surreal to walk around in streets which were empty other than a handful people in masks all with their own colours and patterns.

Yeah, it was crazy - when I finally ventured out on a sunny day during the first wave, there was hardly anyone on the otherwise crowded streets and main squares of Brno (second biggest city in CZ) and anyone left had a mask of some sort. Really surreal! :)

Shame it all went to hell when the next wave hit in autumn. #bestincovid again, just the other way around...

Yeah, the respirator mandate was basically a reaction to people not caring about using masks properly anymore, so the main effect - infected people with a mask of any kind being much less likely to infect others - could no longer be assured. So by mandating everyone to have a FFP2+ respirator it was less likely people will get infected when they encounter the next infected person without a mas or wearing one incorrectly/for show.

BTW, in practice it was ever only required indoors, many people flatly ignored it outside. Loopholes like "no need to wear a mask if you don't go closer than 2 meters to somebody did not help.

For sure was not a pleasant experience going out for a walk with an at risk family member who has not been vaccinated yet, to avoid all those inconsiderate potentially infected people getting too close.

We of course had masks but the did not...

Sorry, I'm adding another reply as I re-read and realised this point was interesting too. I hope I'm not derailing this too much but I don't get to speak openly about CZ stuff with people so when it pops up on HN I get very interested. Re BLM, this one is a bit of a mixed bag in my experience - the categories I see are:

1. people who are on-board with BLM (most/all of my friends)

2. people who naively take it on face value that there's no explicit laws against people of colour, there is no problem and the idea of systemic racism is just stupid reactionary western[0] snowflakes being a bit try-hard

3. people who believe they are sort of post-racism - they can crack racist jokes because "I don't see race", oof

4. far right wingnuts, the same stripe as everywhere else (US, UK, Germany etc) - no more numerous here than elsewhere

5. people who don't really understand - they're relying on second-hand explanations which are often badly explained

I am curious if this is the same as what you have observed. I feel like #2 and #3 are misguided but not beyond help. #5 are really interesting, it's easy to miss that the majority of the population are completely at the mercy of whatever interpretation or translation they've read, heard or watched. One instance I am aware of was someone in the comments of idnes on FB or something with an "ALL LIVES MATTER" banner on their profile. My friend engaged her politely to figure out what was going on and was kinda shocked. This was a person with a disability who'd completely sympathised with the BLM movement, and wanted to show solidarity. Keenly aware she wasn't black and possessing only rudimentary English she had seen "all lives matter" mentioned around the internet and decided that was a good statment to use. It never clicked for her that it was a reaction against the BLM movement rather than one in solidarity with it. Maybe this is obvious but it was a bit of an eye opener for me.

Anyway my general feeling is that I don't think Czech Republic is more anti-BLM (or more racist) than other European countries. Certainly the anti-BLM protest here in Brno had people numbering in the dozens (20-ish?) and were countered by crowds in the hundreds. It is easy to be a bit shocked at attitudes here towards these things, but I think or maybe hope it's down to some people being a little naive or sheltered. I think that the right person spending 15 minutes talking could turn most people around on the subject. Maybe :)

[0] = I haven't heard anyone here refer to "westerners" in English or Czech, but there is definitely an attitude of "you guys over there are too sensitive sometimes". I couldn't think of a better term for that general idea, it wasn't meant as a slight.

Ok downvotes suggest that my observation is not only not shared by others but is considered ... harmful? I’d like to know what part people disagree with or find particularly bad

Since Substack is currently down, the following Ars Technica article on the same subject (AFAIK) is a good alternative:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/10/how-indiana-jones-fou...

"Mrazik" was another text game in this genre - you were some kind of agent infiltrating a Soviet military base.

"Rylek dryly remembers a then-typical experience with magazine program listings"

Ahh, yep. I remember the fun of typing lots of BASIC DATA line entries from a magazine into my C64, and getting something very unexpected, and no obvious way to find/fix the typo. Getting a VicModem was a godsend, so I could just download things and go.

Same here. Compute!'s Gazette. There's an archive if you ever get the hankering for nostalgia lol. https://archive.org/details/compute-gazette

I don't know how many times I spent many hours over several days typing pages of code from the magazines into the C64, have it be buggy, spend hours trying to fix the bugs only to have them release the code for their bug fixes the next issue, which took a month. It was very slow learning.

I remember buck in the time in Yugoslavia one of the federal radio stations broadcasted Spectrum computer games over the air (FM). You could record the game to the tape and actually play it later.

Copying games was as simple as copying a music tape, you only needed a tape recorder with two heads, those were very popular at the time for the same reason.

You used VicModem from behind the Iron Curtain?

Yugoslavia wasn't exactly part of the USSR block after 1956 and it actually was part of the group of independent nations.

I didn't notice anything about Yugoslavia in the article...? I thought the comment referred to Czechoslovakia.

My bad, HN doesn't make obvious to screen readers who is answering to whom and I thought that you mean the comment with the Yugo radio programs.

So basically screen readers blindly stumble into comment trees? Never thought of that.

HN markup for comments isn't great. It's table cells and spacer gifs. Visually, threads are clear, semantically, they aren't.

Usually, a comment tree is made as list of lists. HN does not bother with semantic tags though and the information does not reach the SR.

Oh my, this sounds like a really valuable feature. I wonder if the folks maintaining HN would consider adding accessibility enhancements like this.

Maybe it would be helpful if the devs added some sort of "reply to" ARIA tag to each comment? That wouldn't be too hard, would it?

Hey dang, if I mention you this way, will you notice the above suggestion? It seems pretty easy and pretty valuable!

You can also email him, he's very responsive.

E-mailed. :-)

I was commenting on solely the "typing in code from a magazine" experience.

There are some good stories like this from other countries like Poland and Mexico in the book Video Games Around the World: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/video-games-around-world

That is such an amazing title

The submitted title was "Teens in '80s Czechoslovakia swapped tapes of text adventure protest games". We changed it that of the article. Not sure which one you mean :)

The article title is obscure, but in the best way—the way that invites exactly the sort of interest this site exists for ("I wonder what that is"...)

That was the amazing thing about being a kid in the late 70's and early 80's. Cheap computers existed that had the tools to allow you to pass programs to others like a mix tape.

Now with iDevices, you need permission from a corporation to pass programs to others. I would guess this might be problematic with protest games.

just use an android? Super easy to install.apk

You can make a small website. Even airdrop some html file with js included if you want it interactive and don't want to host it.

Wouldn’t you say it is easier now?

Just create a web based adventure game (you can export HTML/CSS with Twine for text based adventure games), encode the URL as a QR code and simply swap those with people?

Easier to get an maintain a website versus handing someone a cassette with a program on it? No, I think the program was easier.

Fair point. It seems that the web doesn't forbid you to do your own stuff on the side, it's just that the mainstream has become a commercial enterprise with its (large) share of constraint. Probably nothing new under the sun.

You'd still need to host it, which involves money, a way to pay for it (credit card), which includes proving/disclosing your identity (which would be dangerous if you're speaking out against an authoritarian government), sometimes you legally have to be over 18 or 21 to enter into contracts (so if the service provider finds out you're underage they can shut down your account even if you otherwise pay the bill), and hosting anything controversial or that goes against the mainstream is unlikely to stay up for long if it gets popular.

Every desktop browser comes with a development environment far more capable than any 8-bitter BASIC. You can paste your code in an email or an IM and send it to whomever you like. Teens interested in swapping 'subversive' code today would have a vastly easier time than they did in 80s Czechoslovakia.

How many people are capable of that though? Tech literacy (in terms of using a general-purpose computer and not a walled-garden) seems to be decreasing and the industry trend is to isolate users from it even more.

If nothing gets done it's probably a matter of time before general-purpose browsers end up only allowing "signed" web pages by default (this is already happening with extension API being deprecated, making things like powerful ad-blocking impossible on certain browsers).

How many people are capable of that though?

Anyone who cares to? It's not like 'tech literacy' was higher then and the point the original comment was making was that somehow, the kids today have it harder than 80s Czech teens. I don't think it stands up to scrutiny - it's not true factually now and to salvage the argument you have to come up with hypotheticals like 'only signed web pages allowed' and broadly complain about 'walled gardens' (you couldn't write your own game for your NES back then, either)

Even 'fantasy' versions of 80s-style environments exist, one of them was used to develop an actual hit game. Aspiring tinkerers have never had more choice.

> How many people are capable of that though?

Anyone with Google? It's not... rocket science

There are plenty of sites that will host a static site for free, and static sites can host client-side JS games or more.

It’s so tragic. We all have these supercomputers in our pocket and we’re not allowed to really use them. Imagine what kids would make if they could code apps on device and Airdrop them to their friends.

Might be? It already is: Apple has gone on record to oppose political statements in videogames.

The clickbait pullquote for this is, "If you want to criticize a religion, write a book".

This isn't loading for me(mobile or wifi), which I find weird since it's hosted on substack.

Edit: seems like all substack pages are down for me (except home). Not a good look for a service that hosts something so simple to get right. And too bad for this guy who is missing out on the HN subscriber wave.

Indeed.

https://substack.statuspage.io/

I must have got in early. Great read!

Capable people enduring in and working against hard times and painful leadership.

It's working for me now but https://archive.is/XnAFC also has it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com