History of the Russian gaming industry [Part 1]

So we got to Russia, starting this difficult journey almost 2 years ago from China. It’s time to figure out what was happening in our country. The gaming industry arose in the USSR, only a couple of years behind the West. But before going to the early 1980s, I think it is necessary to understand why it did not arise earlier. After all, the USSR until the very end remained one of the leading powers in the world with developed science, culture and industry. But for a number of reasons, there is a myth according to which the USSR produced tanks, Kalashnikovs, smelted cast iron and other metals in unimaginable quantities, but high technologies were not conquered or were used only for military products. Of course that wasn’t the case. Therefore, I will briefly describe the development of computer technology. This is important for understanding the situation in which production found itself in the late 1980s.

Since the 1940s there has been a phenomenal development in science, technology and economics in general. Since the mid-forties of the 20th century, a number of innovative industries have been rapidly created, such as nuclear, aviation, rocketry, computer technology, electronics, where our country was not inferior to the United States, and on a number of points was noticeably superior, not to mention other countries that were just climbing out of post-war devastation.

MESM (Small Electronic Computing Machine) 1948, authored by S. A. Lebedeva

In 1948, when in the USA and England only a few scattered teams were engaged in the development of individual computer samples, and there was not a single operating computer in the world, the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Technology (ITM and CT) of the USSR Academy of Sciences was formed in the USSR on the initiative of Stalin.

It should be noted that in the 50s, Soviet electronics were at a high level. Industrial production of semiconductor transistors in the United States began in March 1958 by Fairchild Corp. at a price of $150 per piece. And information about the characteristics of domestic “crystal triodes” was published in the sixth issue of the popular magazine “Radio” for 1955, and in 1956, two years earlier than in the USA, industrial production began. By 1956, transistors in the USSR were not only widely available, but also cheap (in terms of American money, less than a dollar apiece).

But starting from the mid-50s, the situation changed dramatically. Growth rates are slowing, and real failures are emerging in a number of areas. Here’s what a Japanese billionaire said about it in 1991 Herosi Terawama, addressing Soviet economists: “You don’t talk about the main thing, about your primacy role in the world. In 1939, you Russians were smart, and we Japanese were fools. In 1949, you became even smarter, and we were still fools. And in 1955 we grew wiser, and you turned into five-year-old children. Our entire economic system is almost completely copied from yours, with the only difference being that we have capitalism, private producers, and we have never achieved growth of more than 15%, while you, with public ownership of the means of production, reached 30% or more. All our companies display your slogans from the Stalin era.".

But the development of computer technology did not stop. In the second half of the 1960s, very successful compact computers for engineering calculations of the MIR series were developed, which became the immediate predecessors of personal computers – they were already designed for individual work with engineers – specialists in various fields, and not just for specially trained programmers. Moreover, in those years there was no trace of stagnation in the computer field – technology was developing very quickly. For example, the first Soviet integrated circuits containing several dozen transistors appeared in the mid-1960s, and less than 10 years later, by the mid-1970s, the USSR had already begun producing microprocessors and other complex microcircuits containing thousands of transistors. The first Soviet universal microprocessors and microcomputers based on them were created in 1974 – almost simultaneously with the appearance of similar devices abroad.

Of course, all Soviet serial PCs of the late 1970s and early 80s were purely professional models intended for very serious use. At that time, people were just beginning to get used to such personal computers, which, by the way, did not cost so little – about the same as a car, or even several. There was no talk of releasing any “gaming” computers for home use at that time.

However, some things were still released in the USSR. First of all, classic game consoles. "Palaestra-02" has been produced since 1978 at the Leningrad Production Association named after. IN.AND.Lenina, g. Lviv-49, Ukraine. It was the first industrially produced television game console in the USSR. The set included five sports games Tennis, Mini-football, Volleyball, Squash, Training. The first three games are similar, but in the Tennis game there is one player on one side. In mini-football and volleyball there are two players. In Football, the goalkeeper and striker move alternately. In Volleyball, both the goalkeeper and the striker move. Squash and Drill are similar, but there are differences. There are two players in Squash and one in Drill. The Videosport game console has been produced since 1980. It also had sports games with similar gameplay (football, tennis, handicap football, rounders), but there was also an electronic shooting range (for this there is a light gun). It was relatively inexpensive – 96 rubles.
But by this time, the Atari 2600 (1977) already existed with replaceable cartridges, although at first in the conditional competition of consoles in the USSR and the USA this was not critical due to the monotony of Western games, but it is obvious that the Atari 2600 had much greater potential. Over time, the lag became more and more critical and instead of intensifying their own developments, they relied on borrowing Western technologies, which were the last to be introduced into consumer electronics. And this already doomed scientific thought to stagnation and digestion of ideas five or even ten years ago.

"Leader" (1980)
The “Eureka” console was produced since 1989 by the Kharkov plant “Electrobytpribor” and it also had only five sports games: Football, Tennis, Volleyball, Squash, Hockey. And at the end of the 1980s there was a radical lag behind the West for an entire era. The reduction of this gap began in the early 1990s with the release of consoles based on the ZX Spectrum with replaceable cartridges: the Pyatigorsk console “Leader” (1992), the prefix “Elf” was produced since 1993 by the Tsvetotron plant (Brest).

Slot machines were produced in abundance in the former Soviet republics from the early 1970s. Some of them offered additional playing time as a prize; in machines with material winnings, toys or souvenirs acted as prizes. The manuals for Soviet slot machines stated that they were not just entertainment, but a tool for “active leisure and development of the eye.”. Games in which you had to shoot at people rather than animals or targets were banned. This, of course, did not apply to enemy ships in “Battleship”. In the late 1970s and early 80s, slot machines were quite primitive and could not be compared with at least “Space Invaders” (1978). Technically, Soviet slot machines can be divided into two groups: mechanical (or electromechanical) and electronic (based on discrete logic or microprocessors). The latter usually used a TV screen based on a BK (Household Computer) or ZX Spectrum.

Game room Moscow, Yalta, Leningrad, summer 1989

It all started with mechanical machines: football, basketball. Then electromechanical ones appeared: “Battleship”, “Hunting”, “Sniper”, “Well, Wait a minute”!"etc.d. Electronic games usually included games for two: “Magistral”, “Magistral-M”, “Motoracing-T”, “Target Ball”, “Ping-ball”, “Radar-T”, etc. So they were typical arcade gaming machines. But by the end of the eighties, the gap with the West began to be reduced. The company "Extrema-Ukraine" in collaboration with the Ukrainian "Terminal" released quite modern games like "The Little Humpbacked Horse" (1988) – a platformer reminiscent of Pitfall from Activision. After 1991, the company began producing poker machines.

Journalist The SCD Report after visiting the USSR in 1991 he wrote: “I have not seen a single program or game made in the Union, but I know that they have software. I think piracy is popular because it saves them a lot of money.". “And one day, when I was wandering around a department store (if you can call it that), I saw a lot of children. I walked over to see what they were crowded around. It turned out that the store had a bunch of old consoles, like Atari 800 XL, Atari 2600 and the like.".

Interesting fact: Machines were often purchased for use in children’s groups, for example, boarding schools or pioneer camps for the entertainment of sponsored children. In this case, the coin-accepting unit was simply replaced with a game activation button.

But the PC played Vegas-Moose-Casino.co.uk a much more important role in the history of digital entertainment in Russia. And it’s not without reason that until recently the domestic gaming industry and players were associated with computers. And it all started during the times of the USSR. Since about 1983, PCs have become a popular type of electronics abroad, including home ones. Accordingly, the Soviet leadership and industry, as well as amateur enthusiasts, could not help but react to this. And so, in mid-1984, the first domestic home computer, the Electronics BK-0010, finally appeared on the shelves of Electronics stores in the Soviet Union. It cost at first 540, then 600 rubles – about the same as a color TV or a good stereo system, which was not cheap, but quite affordable for the majority of the population (the average salary was 300 rubles). On the other hand, there is no need to exaggerate the demand for such PCs in those years and their importance – most people quite logically perceived them simply as an expensive toy that had no serious practical application.

The first thing to note is that this was a completely original Soviet development that did not have any obvious foreign prototypes. Second, it was one of the world’s first fully 16-bit home computers. Moreover, many sources write even more specifically – the world’s first home 16-bit PC. The BK0010 package included 1 MK-60 type tape cassette with game programs on Focal and in machine codes. What’s noteworthy is that it included “TETRIS” (1984) by Alexei Pajitnov, slightly modified for the BC video mode. BK0011 and, later, BK0011M included a disk drive controller and a floppy disk with OS-BK (RT11SJ) with an Inter Commander shell and an interface similar to Norton Commander for the IBM PC. The shell supported mouse control (UVK-01).

Istra-4816
In general, in 1985–1986, there was a real explosion in PC development in the USSR, including home ones. During these two years, such masterpieces as “Corvette”, UKNC, “Vector-06Ts”, “Istra-4816”, the first version of “Soyuz-Neon PK-11/16” were created, as well as interesting in their own way “Ocean-240”, “Irisha”, “Lvov PK-01”, “Sura PK8000”, “Radio 86RK”, “Specialist” and others. Another important event that stimulated the domestic computer industry was the decision of the Soviet government (1984) to universally study computer science in schools and equip educational institutions with computers. Due to retail sales and deliveries as part of school classes, BC became the most popular computer in the USSR. Over 8 years of production, more than 150 thousand BCs were produced.

Interesting fact: Like any Soviet household computer, the BK had practically no software support from the manufacturer, and most of the software was written by enthusiasts.

There were a huge number of games, but they were all the brainchild of talented single programmers. Even within the framework of various research institutes, video games were not developed as something experimental, not to mention the creation of an analogue to Mosfilm from the world of interactive entertainment. With the beginning of Perestroika, the leadership did not particularly think about how to make the people’s life better, but quite the opposite. Thus, the average game was in no way inferior in quality to the average Western one and was released for ZX Spectrum analogues – the most popular PCs. But such things as an AAA blockbuster with a certain production budget and a full-fledged team of specialists were unknown in the USSR. Of course, there were both clones of Western games and original projects.

And we can’t help but say about one of them. This is, of course, Tetris.

That’s what the creator himself, Alexey Pajitnov, spoke about himself: “I was a typical programmer and researcher. I worked eleven hours a day. Almost all young programmers are workaholics. And I was one of them. I came to games because of puzzles. Because of board games. I’ve always seen the game as a puzzle, a mental exercise. I’ve always liked challenging tasks.". And in 1984, Pajitnov wrote a game based on pentominoes – a puzzle. He believed that it would be much more interesting if we transferred it to a computer and created a game in which the elements would fall from top to bottom – a virtual analogue of the pentomino field. Initially, he wanted the player to simply place as many elements as possible on the playing field. But then the game would end in 10 seconds. There was no way to create a scrolling playing field, so he decided to make it so that the filled bar was removed and the field was freed.

The same Tetris from 1984.
Soon all of Pajitnov’s colleagues became interested in the game. He added a point counter and started giving it out to friends. Soon the whole of Moscow, and then the USSR, was playing Tetris. Copies of the game soon reached all over socialist Europe. It was a whole phenomenon, but no one tried to sell it. No private business has yet existed. And there was no one to sell Tetris. Home computers were just emerging. There were no stores where you could buy games. Sergei Orlovsky, president Nival Interactive recalled: “In the mid-eighties, computers were extremely rare, and people wrote games for fun, distributing them for free.”. And one day Pajitnov received a message from Robert Stein, founder of the Andromeda company, which sold Hungarian games to the West. He wanted to buy the rights to Tetris. Pajitnov said that the idea is not bad, but he needs to think. Stein considered this an agreement and began selling the rights to Tetris to publishers around the world. One of the publishers – Spectrum Holobyte, in order to emphasize the connection with the USSR, he packed the game in a red box with images of St. Basil, the hammer and sickle and a logo in which the word “Tetris” was written with an inverted letter “r”.

By 1988, Pajitnov had not given his consent, which did not stop him from selling 100,000 copies and porting to several platforms just this year. The game was released on all Nintendo and Sega consoles. Rights problems were settled only in 1989. Tetris played a critical role in the success of the GameBoy.

While many people have heard the name of the creator of Tetris, Alexei Pozhitny, few people know about the existence of another talented game designer: Vladimir Savin (founder of SW corp.), whose talent was revealed precisely during the time of BK-0010-01. When it seemed that the possibilities of the bookmaker had already been exhausted, the next game amazed us with even better graphics, dynamics, plot and gameplay. For more than 10 years, Savin was developing game programs for the first Soviet computer BK-0010 and its upgrades. Over the course of a couple of years, he wrote several successful games. One of the best Arcanoid clones is “Breaking Ball”. An absolute hit of all time, a multi-part game "PARATROOPER", consisting of 5 parts (each part had its own plot) and a loader. And also "Jetman", in which you need to fly over the surface of the planet, letting your ship through the gate, destroying enemy flying saucers and gaining points. After serving in the army, he retired from programming for several years. Then enthusiasts more than successfully ported the best games of that time from other platforms to BC (Digger, Bolder Dash, Arkanoid, Sopwith, etc. d.).

More information about games for BC can be found here

One of the first game programmers were ASP Corp. ASP – Alexander-Sergey-Pavel."Corp."was a buzzword, in those days any single programmer put his initials, attributed corp. – and now he is already releasing software on a par with the software giants. The software worked well for many people. A distinctive feature of the games were two files. The first is an excellent screensaver for those times, the second is the game itself. The game ran without a screensaver, and many did not rewrite it to save space on the cassette. And if earlier there were only BK0010 without a color output, and the games were predominantly black and white, then with the advent of BK0010-01, where there was a color output, the games became “multicolor”.

In the last years of operation of the BC (1996-1997), practically no games were written, but there were games like Duck Hunt with DENDY, which used a light gun on the BC. There’s a neighing dog there too.

A number of opportunistic games also appeared, such as "Perestroika" (1989) by N. Skripkina, in which the player had to guide a “democrat” frog through a swamp, jumping from lily to lily, while trying not to drown or be eaten by another “bureaucrat” frog.It was a creative adaptation of Frogger (1981). The game quickly became a hit.

Most of these developers, who started in the last years of the USSR, continued to make games into the 1990s. As the founder of R said.A. sogr., who worked in the turbulent 1990s:“Most likely, this is a way of self-expression, like art. If what we did can be called that. Well, in general, it’s like a drug; at the moment of work you completely leave and don’t come out for a long time, day or night. Until the “frenzy” passes (usually this is the most prolific period), and then the fine-tuning of the program begins, the most tedious, most difficult task.”.

Until the end of the 1980s, only their own, original Soviet-designed home PCs were mass-produced in the USSR. But by 1989, economic conditions had changed. In particular, it became possible to import imported computers and components without any problems. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, before the final opening of borders to imported goods and the complete destruction of the domestic mass electronics industry, there was a small but interesting period that can be briefly and quite accurately called the “invasion of the clones.”. And they cost much more than domestic ones – approximately from 1000 to 1500 rubles. At first, few people understood what it was and why: there were no programs for them in stores, and no information in popular magazines either. But when cassettes with games for Spectrum appeared in stores, the main advantage of these PCs quickly became clear – a huge number of ready-made foreign game programs developed during the 80s, in terms of quantity and quality no other models produced in the USSR could compete with it.

Well-known examples of serial models of Soviet Spectrums: Byte, Delta, Orel, Quorum, Magic, Symbol, Ural, Kvant, Impulse, Santaka, Forum, Gamma, Robik, Synthesis and many others. The distribution of Spectrum and programs for it proceeded spontaneously and almost underground, through radio markets and “advanced” acquaintances of radio amateurs.

Assistant-128 was produced in Smolensk. It was an IBM compatible computer. It was assembled on the basis of an Intel 8086 clone processor – KR1810VM86.

In general, such piracy was common in the USSR. There are textbook examples like the fact that the Tula sewing machine is an exact copy of the machines that were produced at the German Zundapp factories, the GAZ-21 Volga car was inspired by the 1954 Ford Mainline model, and the KVN-49 TV is very similar to the American RCA 621TS, etc.d. Last but not least, this was made possible by the fact that the state did not sign any treaties on international copyright law. For example, the USSR acceded to the Universal Copyright Convention only in 1973, and even then only partially. This made it possible to copy Western designs with impunity – although in the opposite direction (that is, when they copied from us) it also worked. For example, the Japanese camera “Cosina CX-2” was a copy of the “LOMO Compact-Automatic”, from which the word “lomography” came.

At the same time, the texts of game programs were published in magazines like “Technology for Youth” and “Young Technician”. They even published assembly diagrams for the computers themselves. In 1985, the book “Amateur Television Games” was published (Radio and Communications Publishing House), republished in 1989. In addition, before the creation of the K145IK17 IC, the Palestra-02 home game console was produced in the USSR.

Comparing the BK-0010 with foreign home computers of that time, one can notice that in all respects it looks quite decent and the widespread myth about some kind of “backwardness” and unoriginality of Soviet computers in this case is absolutely not confirmed. BK-0010 and BK-0011 are closer in their characteristics to such universal and even professional computers as Apple II, Acorn BBC and IBM PC. The BC was focused on displaying arbitrary graphics, not gaming, the sound generator is also more typical for non-gaming PCs.

But in the end, the “people’s computer” of the 1990s was not the BK’shka, but the ZX Spectrum – and this was inevitable. Over the course of five or six years of experiments at BC, enthusiasts have created high-level gaming and system programs, but time has already passed. If such a level had been reached immediately – by the time the first BC model was released – everything might have turned out differently..

ZX Spectrum on Soviet soil
However, this outsider also had its positive sides. If games for the PC, Spectrum and other commercially successful platforms were then created by serious and profit-hungry large companies, which few people considered shameful to deceive (illegally copy the game, hack the security, distribute a hacked copy, etc.). d.), then at BC everything was different. The games were written by “their own” – guys aged 14–18 years, many of whom could easily be met in "Moscow BC Users Club". Of course, they didn’t write for money. There really were a lot of games; creating them was considered a very respected business, which even turned into a kind of competition: whose game will surpass all the others, who will receive the admiration of the bookmaker community. The last massive surge in the activity of BC creativity can be considered 1997. Other areas (development of games, system programs, hardware), even at that time, had long been gradually fading away and no deviations from this trend were observed.

>Could you tell us in more detail the history of the creation of this or that program?.

Well. CAVE RESCUER – it was a very long time ago, I only remember that I briefly saw somewhere, it seems on ATARI, something flying along a hole, and it caught fire.
AMERICAN RACES – almost the same, but there I wanted to “outdo” Savin according to the road algorithm. I didn’t have enough speed, and I didn’t succeed at all. NINJA FORCE was something! I remember I had the idea for a long time and decided to try it. I remember there wasn’t enough memory and I had to deploy sprites directly into RAM. At that moment when the ninja turns around to run in the other direction, if you look closely, you can notice a pause. In general, this is perhaps the only thing for which I have warm feelings to this day.
GALAXY HERO is perhaps the fastest toy in terms of the speed of its writing.
ATV-simulator – Andryukha pumped up graphs from SPECTRUMa, and there were all the tilt phases of the motorcycle, and of course it became a pity to throw them away just like that. Well, they did it, but it was unsuccessful. As always, there was not enough memory, I had to compress the sprites, and this, naturally, affected the performance. Of course, there was no room in RAM for the “graphic screen”; it looks very disgusting on the screen. In general, almost nothing remained from the original plan, and in general we came to the conclusion that it is impossible to make analogues with SPECTRUMa on BC, otherwise the latter will suffer. Our largest item is STARSHIP TROOPERS – 700 Kb. But this is far from the limit. Moreover, we believe that our level has fallen; in pursuit of beautiful, large sprites we are losing in complexity, algorithm refinement, and performance. If you have graphics, you can make a game on 20 MB. But at the same time, the game itself should also be interesting, varied, exciting, and not boring. The larger the software product, the longer the development time (collecting material, creating sprites, writing an algorithm, debugging, etc.). d.) All this requires enormous physical and moral costs. This means that the number of programs created is no longer an indicator. For example, there are more files in STARSHIP TROOPERS than there are all programs B. Bortnik.

It is quite natural that in the Soviet planned economy, almost devoid of competition, existing almost autonomously from the world market, there was no race in the sphere consumer electronics – in this area, the USSR usually only had to follow Western countries in order to “keep up with the world level,” and this automatically meant a lag of at least several years (necessary for identifying technological and market leaders in the West, developing a similar element base, creating similar devices, organizing mass production, etc.d.). One of the decisive roles in all this was played by the miscalculations of the country’s leadership, who underestimated the prospects for the development of consumer electronics.

At the same time, since the late 1980s, PC production has increasingly been subject to market principles – usually not the best and most modern models were chosen for production, but those that were already “promoted” and made it possible to obtain the greatest profit at minimal cost for production organization, user support, etc.d., which resulted in a real boom in Soviet analogues of the ZX Spectrum, which turned out to be simply ideal for domestic enterprises (simplicity of design and minimal cost at high retail prices, a huge selection of ready-made programs, including games, support in the press, etc.d.).

As a result, if in the segment of cheap home computers the best Soviet models were quite competitive in their parameters, then in the field of more expensive and powerful home PCs there was simply nothing to compete with. However, from the very beginning of the 90s, literature on Spectrum topics began to appear en masse: descriptions of games, PC devices, assembly language and BASIC programming, printed and electronic magazines, etc.n., which significantly spurred interest in such PCs, both among radio amateurs and among the masses.

Looking ahead, I will say that in the 1990s, domestic programmers made a great contribution to the collection of software for Spectrum: they created several successful disk operating systems (for example, IS-DOS) and a huge variety of system, application, game, training and demonstration programs for this class of PC. Since all Spectrum analogs were not its complete copies, but only “imitated” the operation of Spectrum hardware, and the specific circuits of these PCs were very different and very numerous, almost all domestic “clones” had some kind of incompatibility with the original ZX Spectrum (not all games and demos worked, or worked incorrectly or not quite correctly). And since 1991, during the Spectrum boom, we began producing our own processors, but this lasted only a couple of years until the destruction of the Soviet legacy in the field of knowledge-intensive production by the mid-1990s.

Summing up the results of the Soviet period of game development, we can say that it went through several stages: from the first simple consoles, slot machines and PCs of our own design, to complete and thoughtless copying of Western designs. But even in this situation, our own production retained the potential for development. Just look at China and its reputation 15 years ago and now. But to implement a similar scenario, the will of the country’s leadership was needed. But, as we know, on December 25, 1991, the USSR ordered a long life and one could forget about economic growth. It was even sadder with the games. Organized production has not been established for more than 10 years. And by the end of 1991, only groups and single enthusiasts were present on the market. But there was still nowhere to wait for funding.

How domestic game makers got out of this situation and much more – you will learn in the next part.