The Alternate Universe of Soviet Arcade Games (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The Alternate Universe of Soviet Arcade Games (2015)

atlasobscura.com

136 pointsSerCe45 comments

I remember how Konyok-Gorbunok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpWkJuXGQic was just driving me nuts, I was just 6 y. o. and couldn't handle the frustration from losing on the 3rd screen. This game was just inhumane, I've only seen 20-year olds being good at it.

Wait, even the YouTube playthrough video died?

In Mother Russia, game plays you.

… sorry couldn’t resist!

XD XD XD

Yes, I was growing up with these, and spent a lot of 15-kopeck coins in these devices. The graphics was awful, but the games were... playable. The shooting games worked flawlessly. The "sea battle" torpedo launcher simulator was awesome, with realistic ship silhouettes. The games were not unlike Tetris: simple, but ingenious and addictive.

>15-kopeck coins

Honestly, that is the strangest thing about this whole article. Why would the Soviets mint a coin that can't be combined with other coins of the same type to make a full ruble? It just seems really unnatural.

Why do American stores charge you $1.99 instead of $2.00? The 15 kopeck coin was used to make change when you were charged 0.85 rubles.

Some images: https://www.google.com/search?q=15-kopek+coins&tbm=isch

The sad thing is that my grandfather gave me a collection of “rare” coins when I lived in Ukraine. When I moved to the US I couldn’t take them with me. Would be worth some money today and more memories.

because $1.99 is less than $2. it's a marketing thing. $19.99 => "For less than twenty dollars, you too can have a ShamWow".

whenever you see something that makes you think "why" like this, 99/100 you can blame it on PR/marketing.

I've also heard that this wasn't the case, but that it was to force the cashier to "ring" the transaction through to get the cent to return and not just pocket the $2. And that the custom just stuck.

AFAIK the 15-kopek coin existed already during the Russian Empire. The “mid-range” coinage came in multiples of five: 5, 10, 15, 20, 25.

Why coins of the same type should make a full ruble? In Soviet Russia there where coins for 1, 2, 3, 5, 10, 15, and 20 kopeck. I never thought that a divisibility of ruble by a coin value might be a thing to consider.

I don't think it is something that people consider, just an aesthetic quality of most currencies around the world.

I can't think of a single other currency with a non-divisible coin (although I'm sure they exist historically). Even the old pre-decimal pounds/shillings/pence were all neatly divisible.

It's not that much of a problem when you can buy a lot of basic things with just the coins, I guess.

There's a Russian Wikipedia page about this you can churn through translate if you don't read Russian:

https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D1%8F%D1%82%D0%BD%D0%B0...

The basic gist of it is that it's of 18th century, pre-Soviet origin, back when kopeks were srs money and there it was useful to have denomination between 10 and 25 kopeks.

In Soviet times, retail prices were set centrally and printed or sometimes physically stamped on the products themselves so things adding up to a ruble is not something central planners had to worry about too much. You could guarantee prices in cast iron as seen on the handle of this skillet:

https://i.imgur.com/OxPA6Ij.png

Thanks, that explains a lot. The 3 kopeck coin is blowing my mind even more, though!

Oh the three kopeck coin was the most important coin. It went into the shared-glass soda machine.

https://www.rbth.com/history/332037-ussr-vending-machines-vi...

Thanks again, man. Maybe it seems strange, but from where I sit it's always really interesting to read about the little things from the Soviet era that so many people remember fondly.

We're all raised with stories of the famines and the gulags and all the horrible things that the communists did, so to see things like the old arcade machines or sodas or the best ice cream in the world (apparently!) is always really jarring in a positive way.

On a visit to the Estonian SSR in 1987 I bought a bottle opener that had the price of 15 kopecks stamped on it. I assume this was quite close to the cost of production, possibly establishing that shared ownership of the means of production totally works for uncomplicated commodity "kitchen infrastructure" products, cutting out marketing costs and pricing variances. Certainly it did not close off opportunities for making fancier bottle openers. Win!

The US issued a 15-cent BANKNOTE in the 1870s. It's a complete non-sequitir. It was part of a sort of emergency issue meant to replace the silver coins that disappeared during the Civil War and weren't returned fast enough, but there was no 15c coin to replace.

More relevant to this community, it always made me think about the abstract math of change making algorithms.

With the coin denominations we have in the US, the optimal (fewest number of coins) change can always be made by going for the largest coin available less than the remaining balance due. It's entirely possible to make a currency system that was not the case.

As a trivial example:

In a hypothetical system with coins denominated 20, 15, 10, 3, 2, and 1 (basically the Soviet-era model without the 5-kopeck coin) the optimal way to make 25 units (15+10) is not the "largest first" way (20+3+2)

Heh, I also happened to visit and write about this place around this time. If you want more pics / details: https://medium.com/@wlycdgr/soviet-arcade-museum-part-4-seri...

(There are more parts on my Medium and I think Vice ran a condensed version)

On a tangent, this reminded me of `Nu, pogodi!` which I used to play religiously as a kid back in Eastern Europe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BnKowc7ssM

The originals are, by the way, available on eBay. I got a couple (Nu Pogodi and Avtoslalom) for nostalgia's sake. Work with modern batteries too.

This appears to be made after the animated series with the same title: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well,_Just_You_Wait!

The tarragon drink mentioned in the article is widely available in Russia, and even in “exclaves” such as Russian grocery stores in Toronto (Yummy Market).

Yes, you can also get it around New York at restaurants on Brighton Beach, stores like NetCost, etc

It's wonderful. The best soda flavor

One of the very few advantages of growing up on the east side of the iron curtain was access to the entirely electronic Japanese arcades and the Russian mechanical games. The volleyball wasn't half bad. There was also a space fighter with a periscope like divece and an array of mirrors. Some of these games were most fine, especially for their time

I recall in the 70s electro-mechanical games were pretty common here (Italy), just a few years before Pong, Asteroids and later Space Invaders and Pacman changed it all. There was that shooting game with the base projecting beams shaped as flying birds on a big screen and real size rifles with photocells that would score a point when hitting a bird, or the bear hunting game, probably using IR as I don't recall any visible beams, then F1 racing games, naval warfare ones, and many others I don't recall atm. And of course pinball, the king of all mechanical games. If I invested 10% of what I spent there I would have some serious money by now:). Those games were mostly electro-mechanical, built to perform one function and of course not programmable, they likely had just the minimum electronics necessary to play sounds or drive actuators. Taking one apart would have an enormous instructional factor.

The “radish” game makes me think of Sonic Blast Man where you have to punch a paddle as hard as you can to win the game. I was working part time at an arcade that received one of those - very popular but we had to pull it after three weeks by which time six people had fractured their wrists and sued the arcade for damages.

The radish game sounds like it would avoid the issues Sonic Blast Man had, but if a game like that were released in the US I could see overzealous people throwing their backs out, pulling the cabinet over on themselves, or wanting to use trucks and construction equipment to try and get unnaturally high scores.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_Blast_Man

Good thing that "Radish" was also quite heavy. Good luck moving around 200kg device.

Also, no scores, so no reason to pull harder once you've reached the "granddad" force level.

P.S: Author didn't mention that the name comes straight from the Russian fairy tale where only the whole family could pick up a recalcitrant radish out of the ground.

Ugh, I take back "no scores". There were.

So many sweet memories of my childhood. And loads of coins drained ;)

Those vending machines are so nostalgic. Wish I could find some of them or build a lookalike :D

Any pics/docs of internal workings? I'll give it a look later but don't expect much success as I don't speak Russian.

TFA states that the docs were classified and later probably destroyed. This was a side result of the games being manufactured in military factories

I read that, but people will do anything for money

More specifically -- someone may have taken them apart since then, or have pictures of the insides.

Yeah I’d love to see the internal construction. Also enjoying the Nixie tubes for the score on “Winter Hunt"

How does the business side of this work in a communist country? Did the state order these companies to build these games?

There were no companies, as that would require private ownership of factories and other means of production. As the article says these were built in state owned factories. There were no other kinds.

There were no other factories and even small business was mostly nonexistent until the late 80s and in some cases punishable under the law as “speculation”.

The Central Planning Committee decided that Soviet people need arcade machines (there were some lobbying, of course, and the idea was probably suggested by an official who visited Western countries and have seen them before). After the idea was approved in principle, the task was given to engineers to develop them: some were copied from Western devices, others developed from scratch. Then, factories were upgraded to mass produce these machines. Then, they were everywhere: in every large (government-managed) store, looking exactly the same. Soviet economy was strange and surreal.

"basketball" game logo looks like the Atari ;-}

Some of the devices were copied from the Western analogues (and some junior GRU officer probably smuggled these into USSR at some point).

title needs (2015)

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