Soviet and Post-Soviet old Arcades

[Sinyavin]

2 frankodragon

 

Do you have any information about Polish old arcades?

[+frankodragon]

2 hours ago, Sinyavin said:

2 frankodragon

 

Do you have any information about Polish old arcades?

There is a museum in Warsaw.  Looks like they have many modern machines though.

 

 

Also a number of Atari 800 games have originated from Poland.

 

 

[+x=usr(1536)]

On 12/26/2020 at 3:42 PM, Sinyavin said:

The old arcades from Soviet Union and Post-Soviet countries. Let's start this thread.

 

"S.O.S." game.

 

 

 

One thing I always found interesting about some of the Soviet arcade games is that they ran on ZX-Spectrum-clone hardware.  I can't recall any Western arcade games using that platform, so it's really rather unique.

 

FWIW, I have a massive interest in history, but specifically the Soviet period: having grown up in Ireland (which has always been a neutral country, but effectively NATO-aligned) at the end of the Cold War, we received a number of USSR-made electronic devices, cameras, etc. that weren't readily found elsewhere in the West.  Additionally, Shannon Airport at the time required all transatlantic flights entering or leaving Irish airspace to stop there before proceeding to their destination; if a flight between Moscow and Havana had landed, you would occasionally see uniformed Soviet and / or Cuban army soldiers lounging around while they waited to take the next leg of their flight.  There was other stuff, too, but I'll cut it short for now

 

Please share more of your experiences - there are more than a few here who would love to read about them.

Edited January 10, 2021 by x=usr(1536)

[youxia]

I grew up in Poland in the 70s-90s. It wasn't a barrel of laughs but also not as bad as the really dark Stalin era, and more relaxed than Russia or East Germany (I think).

 

I'm not sure if stuff like rock was actually banned (eg Rolling Stones played a gig in Warsaw in 1967), but it simply wasn't sold anywhere. So it was all about swapping things which those lucky ones, who either had family abroad or went there, brought in.

 

There were "arcades", usually a few per city and an odd machine here and there (train stations, bars, etc).  An "arcade" near my house in a small town was  an old caravan with a few games crammed in. I recall playing Scramble in it circa 1981-3, so we clearly weren't that far behind , even if it was a bootleg. It was my first videogame. Before that I did play on some pinball machines thou. But since we were mostly broke, pocket money was unheard of, and we had no steady income (eg like paper rounds) it'd be mostly about watching other big boys play (and hope they won't try to mug you or, if you were lucky, leave a credit in by mistake).

 

I don't remember any machines originating in our region, never seen any of those Russian ones either. Everything was from the West/Japan. We had Pong clones and those Nu Pogodi Game & Watch Russian rip-offs.

 

Found this vid, apparently a first  Polish arcade, circa 1972. Mostly one arm bandits, but some pinballs too (we called them "flippers").

 

 

A few photos in this article: https://gry.wp.pl/automaty-w-naszym-baraku-historia-salonow-gier-6116963860698753a

Edited January 10, 2021 by youxia

[+x=usr(1536)]

1 hour ago, youxia said:

those Nu Pogodi Game & Watch Russian rip-offs

 

We had these as well, but they were really only found in the dingier discount electronic / electric goods shops.  The boxes that they came in used really bad English to describe the game, but the handhelds themselves were entirely in Cyrillic.

 

 

It would be decades before I'd learn what Nu, Pogodi! was.  'Электроника' (Elektronika) was arguably the first Russian word I managed to work out the translation of on my own, and there were a fair few of their devices available - calculators and radios particularly spring to mind.

[+frankodragon]