Wired has a great story on a group of Moscow university students who have opened a Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines in a bomb shelter under their dormitory. As the article explains:
"From the late '70s to the early '90s, Soviet military factories produced some 70 different video game models. Based largely (and crudely) on early Japanese designs, the games were distributed -- in the words of one military manual -- for the purposes of entertainment and active leisure, as well as the development of visual-estimation abilities.'"
If you think the concept of government-produced arcade machines designed to enrich the lives of the workers is wonderful, wait til you see the machines themselves. These great hulking beasts look like they've been ripped from the set of an early seventies BBC sci-fi series. Bulging monitors, rudimentary controls, brutalist design - of course, early US arcade machines were similarly ugly, but this lot were being produced until the nineties.
Imagine if the Cold War were still raging (alright, don't bring the current Putin/missile situation into this, you know what I mean...) - how would communist gaming have developed if left in isolation from Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft?
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