Video games made in the USSR (2020)
rbth.com
rbth.com
I had dinner with him at his house later via connections through my incredibly sociable and connected mother, he was a delight, very, very clever, and had lots of physical puzzles that he invented and made himself. I am glad he made money off it eventually.
Especially whenever there is a current event with lots of news it is nearly impossible to find anything that is too close to the subject.
It would be great to be able to restrict search to older results, to avoid being in the shadow of more recent articles. Even adding "USSR" did not help at all, almost everything I got was related to recent events.
I've had this problem sooo many times in the past already. Google is way too focused on the latest information. Just yesterday somebody also pointed this out in a comment, about that website link that made it to the HN homepage that help find the right glue for two different materials, which was an example for an old rarely changing but still relevant website.
Anyway, on topic, here's a list that I found starting out from trying to widen the search from the starting point that I knew Antonov is Ukrainian:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_design_bureaus_in_Ukra...
https://www.value.today/headquarters/ukraine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_of_Ukraine
"Donbas: What’s Ukraine Losing—Industrial Hub, Breadbasket or Both?" -- https://www.russiamatters.org/blog/donbas-whats-ukraine-losi...
Here is a video showing a pretty cool - albeit pretty unreliable, according to what I read - 1960s motorbike that was made in Ukraine: https://youtu.be/DvxcK645HF0 -- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnepr_(motorcycle). Dnepr (Ukrainian: Дніпро) is a motorcycle brand produced in Kyiv. I became interested in this bike while reading this RR story from a Ukrainian author - with lots of brilliant author-made painting-illustratiuons (if you open the inline images in a new tab you will find they are a much bigger resolution; It's worth scrolling through the chapters even without reading anything, just for those pictures): https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/54085/the-armorer-and-the-...
Yangel OKB, designers of the frankly speaking ridiculously overpowered R-36 ICBM series was in Ukraine (including work for turning R-36 into Tsyklon and Dnepr satellite launchers), as well as teams responsible for Zenit carrier rocket (also used as boosters on Energia).
There was also other R&D and manufacturing works scattered across Ukraine, but outside of those and already mentioned Antonov they were mostly related to areas that weren't my hobby so I can't recite them from memory. Lots of heavy industry related to tanks and related vehicles near Kharkiv, at least.
EDIT: Also, post USSR breakup Ukraine ended up having to run a nuclear "weapons" program despite disavowing nuclear weapons - because they had full chain nuclear weapons industry from raw materials to final warhead assembly, and it was considered good idea to keep those people employed lest they be hired out by more militant places.
That's strictly due to geography. There are not too many places in USSR where one can build decently sized wharfs.
My understanding is that he overstepped his boundary as a scientist here and lack recognition for that particular theory.
But I’m a random guy; I might be off base myself
Every territory got conquered at some point. Most "Quite Brutally". This is how current countries were born.
Moscow ending up the one who actually pulled it off is kinda ironic, though, given that it was very much an upstart that wasn't even there when Kievan Rus was still a polity united under a single ruler. Goes to show just how effective collaborationism (in this case, with the Mongols) can be to build a power base.
Maybe not bigger, but the people of Novgorod now live in Russia and believe they are Russians. What's with that state-centric view? Ukrainians are Ukrainians despite multiple occupations, but if Novgorodian people believe they are Russians it's illegitimate and they lose all the claims, and are now relegated to have their claims go through Kiev->Moscow. Only "pure" identities with existing independent states can have claims?
This "Ukraine is the true Rus, and Russians are some splinter northern Finno-Ugric goblins" nationalist narrative is just tiresome and incoherent. It's pretty obvious that both sides have about the same level of claim.
Obviously. However their relation to the Novgorodian republic is about as strong as that of modern Italians to the Roman Republic. Also I think any such claims are absurd and absolutely irrelevant (imho this applies to Kiev/Novgorod and to Moscow).
> This "Ukraine is the true Rus.. nationalist narrative is just tiresome and incoherent
Sure, you're right. However this narrative seems to be mostly a response to Russian claims that Ukraine is not a nation and that it should not exist.
> Russians are some splinter northern Finno-Ugric goblins
Nah... Politically and somewhat culturally they are probably closer to the Mongols (I'm actually half serious, the authoritarian and imperialist tendencies ingrained in Russian culture were probably inherited from the Golden Horde rather than Kiev/Novgorod.)
If you are leaning towards the former then this could be extended even further: Soviet Union only ever harassed itself. There were no occupied Baltic states, there was no Ukraine, etc etc - just one big happy family called USSR.
No, you just constructed a false dichotomy.
Russian Empire and its successor states USSR and Russia is a product of imperialism that was born in Kiev when Grand Prince Vladimir has brought Orthodox Christianity to those lands. This imperialism conquered some territories, lost some territories (Kiev proper), then regained them back and conquered a lot more, then splintered. The current war is the result of the imperialist successor of the original Kiev regime to gain Kiev back.
If you hold another opinion - that Ukrainians are mixed descendants of people who came to live in this area in ~15 century after it was devastated by Mongol invasions and later steppe nomads plundering in 13..14 centuries, then no, Russia could not have harassed it in 'ancient' times.
Outside. Specifically, Volga Region, Kazakhstan, Urals and Siberia
This Wiki article describes it in details
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%93...
Yet you use it.
> I lean towards
Maybe because you just want to use it? Just look at the map[0], read the legend. Explain who were the people in 18, 17, 11 regions?
That's 14 years before 1933, and the border was not there by then, but...
I would prefer a slighly more credible resource than a postcard made in times of great turmoil.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Evropays...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2f/Su...
There was no border in those territories for so long, anything they could have drawn wouldn't really have any meaningful historical connection. So IIRC they went by the Russian Imperial demographic maps and claimed most territories on those showed >25% "Malorossians". Ironically, this ended up pilfering some territories from Belarus, as well - note where Pinsk is on that map!
But, of course, this possibility does not exclude the other. If this was the primary motivation, however, it neatly explains why some southern Russian regions were also severely affected despite not having any separatist tendencies.
The discussion basically amounts to "are heavy-handed anti-crime policies targeting urban youths racist against Blacks or not?"
- "No they aren't, because they target all urban youths, including Hispanics and Whites, and not just Blacks" - "Yes they are, because they affect a disproportionate share of young Black people. The fact that they affect a disproportionate share of young Hispanics doesn't make it less racist"
If, of course, what you're telling is true.
Using "Soviet" and "Russian" interchangeably was, in my opinion, mostly a Western phenomenon. I don't remember Soviet propaganda mixing the two. It always felt weird to me when in Cold War Hollywood movies they would refer to USSR as Russia, or Soviets as Russians. You wouldn't do it here. Usually they put emphasis on "Soviet man", not on particular ethnicities.
Putting an emphasis on the Soviet man who always speaks Russian language, I can understand how that could create an impression of everyone being Russian.
Communists were internationalists and judged people based on their social class, not nationality. Many areas of the USSR, including in Russia proper, did experience precisely the same level of suffering and death from hunger.
Also, food requisitions in Ukraine which led to Holodomor were organised and conducted by native Ukrainians. It is easy to look up that most senior party and NKVD posts in 1932-33 in Ukrainian SSR were held by Ukrainians - how many posts in Gestapo were held by Jews? For some reason Hitler didn't put Jews in charge of the Holocaust.
It was not a systemic attempt also: if the USSR leaders wanted to kill of all Ukrainians, for some reason they didn't do it systematically at all, year after year. Maybe they didn't want to kill all Ukrainians, after all?
Holodomor, hunger in all other parts of the USSR, Stalin's terror were all the result of the Soviet rule, deeply rooted in class struggle ideology and complete disregard for human life. A lot of people died of hunger simply because Stalin needed to export food taken from them to pay for his Industrialization. No, nationality did not play a role in choosing whom to plunder. Food requisitioners took food from whoever they could find.
If you want a real genocide example perpetrated by the USSR, it is the Chechen expulsion. Systematic, not led by Chechens, ban on settlement remained for many decades. Holodomor was neither targeted only at Ukrainians, was led in Ukraine by Ukrainians, was not systemic, was never a policy of any kind.
Poke through the wikipedia article on the subject, it's well sourced, and I think anybody can see that though there was famine across the USSR at the time, the situation in Soviet Ukraine was unique for many reasons, including in terms of how hard they were hit by the famine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
Name one Jew on a senior leadership (~Gauleiter level) position in Nazi Germany. There were certainly tons of Ukrainians occupying positions on all levels of power in USSR. Hell, Ukrainian nationals held top position in the USSR far longer than Russians did. Imagine Nazi Germany headed by a Jew?
As for Wikipedia article, at this age the question is very political and Wikipedia reflects that. Some Ukraians want the first place in this victimhood olympics, and the current political situation favours them in the current political landscape, so they can bend history interpretation to their interests. But you know what, if we use very specific words like "fascism" or "genocide" to name different things we don't like, these words will eventually lose their meaning and become generic insults.
Was Holodomor a tragedy? Sure. Was it a genocide - a targeted systemic effort to kill people of one specific nation - not even close.
Btw, I too could take part in this victimhood olympics if I wanted: my grandparents have fled the Voronezh area (near the Volga river) in 1947 because of extreme famine [0] that killed a lot of people. Note the wording in English version:
"Regions that were especially affected included the Ukrainian SSR with 300,000 dead, and the Moldavian SSR with 100,000 dead. Other parts of the Soviet Union such as the Russian SFSR and the Byelorussian SSR were also affected with 500,000 deaths." - so "especially affected" areas lost fewer people than Russian SFSR which was "also" affected. Unfortunately, these tragedies that were a result of a Soviet rule are viewed through nationalistic lens today, and are being used in propaganda pieces.
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1946%E2%80%...
It's not true. For example: Andrey Kolmogorov (Soviet Union) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrey_Kolmogorov
Nikolai Lobachevsky (Russian Empire) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Lobachevsky
Ivan Vinogradov (Russian Empire, USSR) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Vinogradov
And many others.
Do not spread propaganda. Be objective, please.
Anything East of Berlin is "Eastern Europe" for instance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsLlYY50zec (English subtitles)
I knew that Soviet Ukraine had ~50 million people. Almost 20% of the USSR, and a bit less than France, Italy, or the UK at the time. I knew that Ukraine was one of the most developed and densely populated parts of the USSR, and of the Russian Empire before that. I had some idea how the borders had moved over time, and how the cultural boundaries were ambiguous as a consequence. I just had not realized how often that ambiguity would show at individual level.
Ukrainian peasants were offered free land and transport if they moved east in an attempt to solve these two problems, and many used the opportunity.
Russia needs people, after all.
We really are mostly the same people and we should really be friends. Everyone would benefit from that. It's a shame that the ambitions of one person are splitting us apart like that.
You seen Gagarin meme from early war?
Where he call from the past and ask who is the foe that Russia and Ukraine are fighting against; together?
It’s easy to spot russian person: visually, by russian accent, by English accent, by the way of carrying themselves and so on.
There were always tons of different queues: not 100% accurate, but many good heuristics.
They assume if the other people know russian language and understand their culture it means everything else is the same. But lots of nations in that region in addition to understanding russian language and culture have their own.
A and that is why it can never be said that we are the same people.
At a minimum such statements and observations come as the result of ignorance - there are not many russian people that I know that would come and visit Ukrainian museums or ask for a tour or ask a question about Ukrainian history.
If you have settled world view and don’t try to learn of course you will not see counterexamples of what you believe in IRL and you would just write decades old cliches like “we are the same people”
The United States is a nation of nations, and while the same ignorance of local history is broadly true, there can be brotherhood despite that. I'll admit, though, that the US is showing some fraying of those bonds.
You don’t start with “brotherhood”.
A you start with respect. Respecting your neighbor. Respecting people practicing some different religion, or having different sexual orientation, or speaking different language, or practicing different traditions.
“brotherhood” is about recognizing that we are all human despite all the differences in the ways we live.
First do that. And that is fundamental difference between the US and russia.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B3%D1%8D%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%B...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Russian_dialects
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9D%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B5%D1%87...
There's so much no such sound that I've seen Hebrew and Arabic transcribed into Russian with the character "h" for that sound.
> Does this phenomenon have some name, as googling didn't turn out much?
Certainly not a formal one. Хэканье? Or maybe simply украинский акцент?
It should be noted that even in Russian, /ɣ/ used to be the more common pronunciation throughout the Empire until the end of the 19th century or so, due to the influence of Church Slavonic (in which it is also /ɣ/). And it's still preserved in modern standard Russian in some words, such as бог (god) - /boɣ/.
Or the lucky bastards are in NATO already, out of your reach?
Heh, it's kinda stereotypical that a Russian citizen wouldn't notice the difference between themselves and Ukrainians.
From my perspective as a foreign observer, the average Russian tends to be much more badly behaved than a Ukrainian. When I hear someone speaking Russian being very loud and obnoxious, violent, lacking manners, showing little empathy and lots of entitlement, 9/10 (I'd say always but maybe I'm forgetting something) it's a Russian citizen, not a Ukrainian.
I'm speaking as a Russian ethnic who's not a Russian citizen.
I don't believe there's ANY difference between Russians and Ukrainians. To me it's the one nation and that's about it. Ukrainian-Russian war is a civil war fueled by the West, it's not the first civil war in this world and won't be the last I guess.
Yes, there are of course a lot of similarities between Ukranians and people in Russia, as there are between Ukranian and Polish people or between Polish people and people in Check Republic.
Interestingly enough, historically, Russia's culture was "Ukrainianized" around the 17th and 18th century, being heavily influenced by Kyiv's culture (influences can be seen if you look at the history of painting, music, architecture). But that's another topic.
Looking at your example.. a German can go to Austria and will understand 95% of the language spoken and probably 99% in Wien. Sometimes there are different languages within a country like in Switzerland, is Switzerland now culturally divided or one culture even though they speak four to five languages there? Also one would get regional differences of the same language like dialects, and it might even go down to the lowest common multiple like words that only you and your friends/family use.
Next: Many Ukranians do speak Russian and some Russians speak Ukranian. If you use language as the canon for culture definition then yes, Germans and Austrians share the same culture because both speak German.
I never heard that Russia's culture was Ukranianized. After the moscowians kicked the Mongols out of the region around the 14th century Moscow became the center of power. I would be happy if you could cite me some source of this.
> If you use language as the canon for culture definition
I'm not, I was simply dispelling from the start the idea that speaking the same language means having the same culture. By that rationale we could say that USA, Canada, Ireland, Scotland, England, Malta and India have the same culture, which would be ridiculous.
> I never heard that Russia's culture was Ukranianized... I would be happy if you could cite me some source of this.
So glad you asked. I'll provide two sources (well, one and a half) that can't be suspected to have any bias against Russia, and after that I'll let you do your own research.
One is Nikolai Trubetzkoy, who once wrote: "Таким образом, старая великорусская, московская культура при Петре умерла; та культура, которая со времен Петра живет и развивается в России, является органическим и непосредственным продолжением не московской, а киевской, украинской культуры." - http://www.hai-nyzhnyk.in.ua/doc2/1928.trubeckoi.php
The second one, I'm sure you'll recognize for yourself. "Киев - мать городов русских" - https://news.obozrevatel.com/politics/49831-putin-nazval-kie... .
> After the moscowians kicked the Mongols out of the region around the 14th century
Haha. You're oversimplifying to make it look like a rosy battle for independence, when in fact Moscow simply enhanced its power by opportunistically backstabbing its neighbours and being the main collaborators of the Mongols. As an example, Moscow was an ALLY of the mongols when putting down the Tver rebellion. That is how Moscow managed to increase its power and become the dominant force in the area; in modern terms - by being a collaborator with the occupant. Sorry, I guess they forgot to mention this in school.
Edit: perhaps this is something they teach you in school - around the time of Peter the Great, a series of reforms were introduced to Westernize Russia, and many people refused to comply because they believed it to be against the cultural and religious norms by which they and their ancestors lived. This clash led to persecutions and an exodus, with many people fleeing Russia in all directions. Descendants of those people (Old Believers, but not only) still live, to this day. So in a sense, the Old Russian culture, the authentic one, only lives in a few places around the world outside of Russia, whereas the current so-called Russian culture in fact originates from the West and Ukraine. Вот это поворот!
> Well, I can keep going. One possible definition of culture is "stories that we have in common". Ukraine has its own literature (in the Ukrainian language, but not only), its own music, its own religious cult (Kyivan Patriarchate, rather than Moscovian), a very different political model, different personalities, different role-models.
I recall you saying there were "big" cultural differences and this is what I disagree on from personal experience.
> So glad you asked. I'll provide two sources (well, one and a half) that can't be suspected to have any bias against Russia, and after that I'll let you do your own research.
Both sources you sent are Ukranian sites... I was hoping for some serious book or wikipedia where we could have a neutral look at it. I'm sorry but your claims are silly and I no longer regard you as proficient in this topic.
> Haha. You're oversimplifying to make it look like a rosy battle for independence, when in fact Moscow simply enhanced its power by opportunistically backstabbing its neighbours and being the main collaborators of the Mongols. As an example, Moscow was an ALLY of the mongols when putting down the Tver rebellion. That is how Moscow managed to increase its power and become the dominant force in the area; in modern terms - by being a collaborator with the occupant. Sorry, I guess they forgot to mention this in school.
I got it from here: https://thecrashcourse.com/courses/russia-the-kievan-rus-and... yes Moscow was an ally of the Mongols but they later kicked them out, it doesn't change what I initially wrote.
Something general to mention.. People from the 14th century and from Peter the Great are long dead. It's the people that live today that make up a nation. It's more about to which culture you want to belong to, not so much about where you have been born or which language you speak.
EDIT: Having rewatched the crashcourse video I can now mention that because of the Mongols many Rus (this is how the people called themselves living in the Kievian Rus) moved to Moscow. So while we could agree that Ukraine influenced Russia back then, it would be wrong, because neither did Ukraine or Russia exist at that time, only the slavic Rus, one people.
I didn't, it was someone else who made the claim, but as far as I can tell it's true. It's also true that there are great similarities, but at the end of the day the two countries are different, and have been for a long time.
An Englishman could say "I don't see big cultural differences between us and the Scots or the Irish, we're the same people", but that would be very ignorant. Just like Ukraine and Russia, simply because they share some cultural elements, doesn't mean they're the same people, the same country or have the same culture or history. In fact, the deeper you dive, the more differences you find.
But I can see that when you're not looking, it may appear that the differences are minor. I can't speak to your personal experience, but from my point of view (I'm not a citizen of Ukraine or Russia; in fact I'm a Russian ethnic), there are significant differences between the two populations, not just culturally.
> Both sources you sent are Ukranian sites...
Really? Confirmation was literally a Google search away. I put in the effort to find the sources and you couldn't confirm them?
Confirmation of source #1, from a non-Ukrainian website. For context, since you couldn't be bothered to look it up, Nikolai Trubetzkoy was a Russian linguist and historian who founded morphophonology. The passage I quoted is reproduced in this book (but I'm pretty sure you can find it in German books too, if you're curious):
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=qcE2CwAAQBAJ
Confirmation of source #2, in live video from kremlin.ru at 36:30. http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/20603
> I got it from here: https://thecrashcourse.com/courses/russia-the-kievan-rus-and...
Hmm, sounds like an extremely lossy compression. Using this type of hand-wavy abstraction of details we can indeed conclude that not only are Russians and Ukrainians the same but also Belorussians, Latvians and Moldavians.
> It's more about to which culture you want to belong to, not so much about where you have been born or which language you speak.
Most people don't actively seek to make this choice, they simply live their lives and belong to a culture or another, so this is a bit of a red herring.
> It's the people that live today that make up a nation.
Couldn't agree more. That said, it's been 30 years since USSR collapsed, 30 years of free Ukraine. Even assuming that in USSR, Russia and Ukraine were the same country and people (reductio ad absurdum), in these last 30 years Ukraine had its own parallel history to Russia's, and are a different country with a different culture. You'd be hard-pressed to find Russians who know the name of the Ukrainian president that preceded Zelensky. Or Russians who can tell you anything about the history of Ukraine. "Same people"? I think not.
We're quickly headed to the point where there'll be fewer Ukrainians who remember living in USSR than Ukrainians who don't. As time goes on, this cultural link that was created in USSR is weakening more and more, up to the point where it will remain in some nostalgic minds of old people.
But you'll also find many old Ukrainians who are less nostalgic about USSR, and will be quick to point out that for them, USSR (well, Russia) was always the oppressor.
Russians are slaves sent to fight a war in another country. Ukrainians are free people who want to stay free. It has been like this for hundreds of years, ever since Muscovy started expanding like a cancer.
I'll give you a spoiler - Ukraine will NEVER AGAIN be a part of the Muscovyan empire. Enjoy living with that thought.
Ukraine is currently undergoing the same kind of national divorce. Ukrainian roots don't matter, what matters is that one supports the idea of Ukraine being a distinct nation with its own way.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:English_people_of_Iri...
Especially STALKER, given its fanbase. It's a bit soul draining to think that people who played this game are now fighting each other, probably using things they learned from it.
Given all that's going on, I found it jarring that it uses the Russian spellings of Kharkiv and Kyiv. I did find the content a little interesting. The other articles on that site seem rather strange, like they exist purely to give westerners more favorable views of the Russian state.
Anyway, it is true this website is state owned and the other articles have heavy propaganda vibes.
There does seem to be a serious de-russification vibe, stronger than ever and definitely not just something foreigners are interested in.
I'll give just one small example that I'm reminded of... There's been a lot of drama about signs when you enter a town. Russians will capture a town, paint the sign with their flag, change spellings to replace і with и, etc. Ukrainians will recapture, repaint, and switch to their spelling... It's a thing.
The website is government owned.
Look at the front page. It's not journalism. It's promoting the image of a country.
If they had something at the bottom saying "paid for by Russian tourism board" then it'd be fine. I just wouldn't call it journalism.
Fortunately the Party sees humans as cogs in a perpetual motion machine, so their machinery will break down soon, moreso the more they FakeTok...
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/chinese-startups-to-...
Musical.ly
Co-Founders and Co-CEOs: Alex Zhu and Louis Yang
Money raised/valuation: Approximately $100 million in total/valuation unknown
Investors: Greylock Partners, GGV Capital, Qiming Venture Partners
Why they made the list:
Most people using Musical.ly—many are American teens—don’t even know the app is built in China. The app allows users to create 15-second music videos of themselves lip syncing and dancing to pop songs. Musical.ly now has 85 million users worldwide, with 10 million daily active users, and has been consistently in the top ranks for photo and video apps in the U.S. and Europe. Greylock partner Josh Elman, a Musical.ly investor, called it “the next phenomenon in the media industry since Snapchat.”
Musical.ly stands out as the first Chinese company that only targets customers who don’t live in China. The app does not even have a Chinese-language version. Over half of its users—called “musers”—are in the U.S., with another 35% from Europe, according to co-founder Alex Zhu, who is from China but has worked in Silicon Valley.
Musical.ly is trying what Mr. Zhu calls “user-generated ads.” Last month, the company started an advertising campaign for Coca-Cola, where users film their own Coke-related videos. It is also experimenting with virtual gifts on its new product, the live stream app Live.ly. “Our vision for Musical.ly is to make it a YouTube on mobile,” Mr. Zhu said. The Shanghai-based company has no immediate plans to enter the Chinese market. Mr. Zhu points out that teens in China are usually too busy with academic work to have time to generate content.
Microsoft even did it to the Soviet Union. And they got away with it that time! ;-P
EDIT: Just read an interview with the author. Looks like he built the game in just one week. His email and personal phone number were included in the title screen, so he often got phone calls, including from mafia demanding he send them the prizes they won (hilarious things like "shoelaces from Procter & Gamble" and toilet seats). Even though the game was not officially sponsored, the actual show had two rooms filled with letters with similar demands.
The machine was composed of a 4 bit HT1130 CPU.
IDK if the MAME programmers RE it yet.
http://web.archive.org/web/20150417011515/http://brickgame.b... (Portuguese).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handheld_electronic_game#Handh...
[1] https://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,2...
Fun fact: Skype creators Jaan Tallinn, Ahti Heinla and Priit Kasesalu also started as game devs in the late Soviet Estonia. A game from 1989, Kosmonaut, is still available on the company's old website, along with other stuff from that era: http://bluemoon.ee/history/index.html
Keeping this old website online is a nice representation of humility and humbleness of the programmers -- and, it also adds a particular sort of quirkiness which is common for many Estonians (okay, I'm biased). Like, these hyper-successful startup founders still seem to be equally proud of those early creations, alongside Skype.
Ofcourse just having access to the latest chip designs doesn't mean you can mass produce them so it never amounted to anything even remotely challenging Western technological hegemony.
The bigger and more impressive challenge was "acquiring" the first batch of machinery required to build up the chip manufacturing industry despite the COCOM embargo, now this was apparently some James-Bond-like shit which involved 'proxy companies' in West Germany, which then conveniently went bancrupt to sell off their equipment, and 'somehow' this equipment ended up in East Germany a few months later.
It's not like people just didn't know how market economies worked, especially when this game was made. There were still individual and family enterprises in the Soviet Union: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprises_in_the_Soviet_Unio...
And by the 90s "blue jeans" integration was to the point that we shouldn't pretend Soviet gamers would be agape at the intricacies of capitalism in the wee simulation in Kommersant lol.
And the Russian state did employ economists.
Tetris is an especially interesting one; Tetris was a worldwide phenomenon, a huge hit in the US that sold a huge number of copies. The creators of Tetris saw none of the profits from their creation. Their game was seized by the state as soon as it became popular and they never really profited. Compare to similar Western or Japanese game developers who became rich and famous, started world-renowned companies, and generally had amazing careers that created an industry.
Good example of why communism sucks, in my opinion.
Wiki tells a different story
I had to look up the Cyrillic spelling of his name to be sure I wasn't misunderstanding.
I guess some English speakers would be more comfortable with J for that sound.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Russian
In that table, literally none of the standards cited use j for ж. J is often used for й, or part of я, ю, ё.
In Soviet international passports, transliteration was based on French rules but without diacritics and so all names were transliterated in a French-style system.
"French-style system" links to this article in French: https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcription_du_russe_en_fr..., which transliterates ж to j.
It is confusing that this mapping is missing from the table in the English article.
It’s possible to change your spelling in the US documents but now different documents have different spelling.
> While the term Communist state is used by Western historians, political scientists, and news media to refer to countries ruled by Communist parties, these states themselves did not describe themselves as communist or claim to have achieved communism: they referred to themselves as socialist states that are in the process of constructing communism
If we use genuine definitions of "communism" and leave to the side Red Scare American political non-definitions, we'd agree with the USSR when it doesn't call itself communist. We can happily disagree with them on their assertion that they were "in the process of constructing communism," the same we can disagree with the PRC's assertion that it's still doing the same today.
If you want to say something sucks, blame the Soviet-type economic planning model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet-type_economic_planning which featured absurd layers of bureaucracy that would result in, yes, the means of production being seized... and then misused by "intellectual party leaders" that thought they knew better than the people who, say, had been farming the land for hundreds of years, resulting in famine, or the other not-fun things about living in the USSR.
To your point, I can find absolutely no evidence that the USSR "seized" the game from Pajitnov. Do you have some? There was no intellectual property in the USSR, I'm not even sure what "seized" means in this context. Sure, he wasn't allowed to "sell" it in the Soviet Union, but it wouldn't really make sense in their economic system to "sell" the game. He was apparently nationally and internationally known for the creation, but it seems renown wasn't enough, he wanted commercial success as well, hence the emigration to the USA in the 90s.
I push back because listen to the story of how it was introduced, as interpreted by Wikipedia:
> Pajitnov had completed the first playable version of Tetris by June 6, 1984.[21] Pajitnov presented Tetris to his colleagues, who quickly became addicted to it.[15]: 87 It permeated the offices within the Academy of Sciences, and within a few weeks it reached every Moscow institute with a computer. A friend of Pajitnov, Vladimir Pokhilko, who requested the game for the Moscow Medical Institute, saw people stop working to play Tetris. Pokhilko eventually banned the game from the Medical Institute to restore productivity.
Does this remind you of MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory around the same era? How much of what we love to use today has similar origin stories, and brought their creators no commercial success at all? Gnu, the linux kernel, the core of most of our industry is built on libre software developed in this manner in that time. Why immediately jump to the assumption "no capitalistic success = bad?"
Similarly, casual phrases like "life under communism", which are used by the populace in communist countries themselves, mean "life when communists are/were in control". Since no country achieved communism there's usually no reason to disambiguate.
It's perfectly understandable that one of the mechanisms used against this philosophical and political ideology is the modification of language to win rhetorical battles, but... we're going to push back lol.
Let's try this and see if you can relate: America is actually a socialist country. Between farm, airline, and oil and gas subsidies, oligopolies defended by regulation, and the seizing of the assets of society for the bailing out of banks, the American economic system is a far cry from capitalism. All the innovations that came from this economic system called American socialism we can attribute to this firm socialist organization of production and consumption. America is successful and a good place to live, more countries should strive for socialism.
Surely you see how frustrating this would be? Thus how many leftists feel when we argue for concepts we like about communism as it has actually been defined for centuries vs the rhetorical twisting done through necessity by Stalinists, Maoists, and McCarthyists (all in different directions, mind you). It becomes much harder for us to have conversations about the actual merits and values of a given system.
To whit: how can we describe a society that's achieved our goals of communism, if we use the same word to describe a society that's the opposite of our goals? Ignoring tankies for a second who have lost themselves in the sauce and pretend that the Soviet Union wasn't plagued by famine or that somehow the PRC is a socialist paradise despite the fact that they still pay for healthcare, can you see how difficult it is when I say "I want the shared resources of society to be leveraged to provide for people's basic needs, and for workers to be empowered to enjoy the full fruits of their own production, I want communism," and for two different people to say "You want communism? So you want (repeats definition of fascism)" or "You want communism? You want (repeats definition of capitalism)".
I get tired of words losing their meaning. If living int he PRC is "living under communism," what shall we call a system with common ownership of the means of production (the State, made of unelected officials, owns much of the industry in the PRC, but, some of it is privately owned by billionaires), no private property (the PRC has this in many ways, especially when owned by corporations), no social classes (the PRC has massive income divide and insurmountable socio-economic classes and poverty traps like much of the modern world), no money (the PRC runs plenty of international banks, and the basic needs of citizens are still paid in cash), and no State (need I explain the power of the State in the PRC)? Because that's what communism is, so I have no idea how to even have a conversation when the word is made to mean something else entirely.
Say it can't be achieved, say it's unrealistic, say it can only be achieved if xyz horrible thing happens, that's totally fine, that's an interesting conversation to have, but we can't have that conversation if we can't even settle terms.
Yeah, you won't become "rich and famous" (as you said) and be able to exploit others with your profits. Big fucking deal.
What you are saying is liberal capitalist ideology condensed: some people have "the right" to become "rich". But not everyone can be rich, being rich requires some people being poor. So if you think about what you are saying for a fraction of a second, you will realize that your ideology (the triumph of the individual who "deserves" to become "rich") requires exploitation and suffering of others.
Communism tries to combat that. Yes, you won't get rich, but at least children won't die of malnutrition. Children not dying > me becoming rich. That's a trade-off Im willing to make.