29.03.2012 / World Bulletin
Behind the Iron Curtain
Pioneer camps at the Black Sea and walks at the Parks of Culture.
These are just a couple of things that kids in the Soviet Union used to do in their free time back in the Eighties – along with playing arcade games.
The thing is, Russian arcade games were quite different from the ones we’ve come to know and love in the “capitalistic” world.
Made at secret military factories from the Seventies up to the Perestroika, most of these machines were not video games with computer microprocessors.
On the contrary, they often relied on complex mechanical movements that were all cutting-edge technology at the time.Former Eighties kids Aleksandr Stakhanov, Aleksandr Wugman and Maxim Pinigin saved these forgotten and broken down Soviet-era arcade games and restored them. The result is a nostalgic Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines in Moscow, collecting the amazing remnants of Soviet kids fun: 37 machines mostly in working order.
A pleasant plunge into a game playing past that was not too different from our own, after all – although the hammer-and-sickle emblem appearing on the old Soviet 15 kopek coins you need to drop into the machines definitely conjures up a bygone time.
From sea battles to tank training, from ice hockey to horse races, they have everything it takes to awaken the arcade hero in you.
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