Beyond Tetris: a brief history of patriotic video gaming in Russia

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/18/-sp-tetris-russia-video-gaming

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The Russian gaming industry is best known for Tetris, the classic game which turned 30 this year, but has until recently had little recognition outside of the Russian-speaking world.

In the west the perception of what it means to be Russian in a game (or in a film) is built on familiar tropes. They are the bad guys smoking cigarettes, swigging vodka, dressed as Soviet soldiers or gangsters.

So, besides accurate depictions of its citizens, what does the Russian industry have to offer? A closer looks finds games that have intersected politics and patriotism for the past three decades: from Soviet arcades to post-apocalyptic depiction of wars.

The Soviet Arcade Game Museum caused minor ripples in the blogosphere lately, revealing a wealth of early mechanical arcade games from the late 1970s to mid-1980s, lovingly maintained and preserved.

The games on offer were “healthy”, politically-approved Soviet youth pursuits: shooting, folk games and sports. Military and space operations were also available, giving schoolchildren the chance to live the fantasy of being a sniper or a cosmonaut.

Early ones included the classic arcade game Morskoi Boi (Sea Battle), which lets the gamer fire torpedoes at enemy ships through a periscope:

Another was Gorodki, a simulated traditional Russian folk game similar to skittles:

By the mid-1980s engineers were looking to provide portable, hand-held games to meet an increasing demand for consumer products. They came up with the igra mikroprocessornaia (microprocessor game), known as Elektronika.

The small, boxy consoles look almost cartoonishly Soviet, but according to a post on English Russia they were cloned from Japanese and American games. Russian programmers used the skeleton frame and added characters and sports popular in the homeland.

This early Elektronika game, Nu, Pogodi!, featured the wolf from the cartoon of the same name. The aim is to catch the eggs before they fall and hatch.

As personal computing became more accessible games evolved, testing users to calculate distances, speeds, prioritise actions and engage reflexes through logic test and puzzles.

They were played on the highly sought-after Dendy, a Taiwanese clone of the Nintendo-NES or on the Kvant-BK, a clone of the ZX Spectrum. Fighting and racing games from abroad were also popular at this time.

Then in the early 1990s, Russian studios began making original games for the mass market which broke through into the English-speaking world. Ex-Commodore users might remember 7 Colours, made available outside Russia:

In a climate where engineering, science and mathematics were highly prized, games promised mental training. They were socially palatable, devoid of political ideology and they offered a comforting view of the world.

These simple, hard-to-beat, games were not an exclusively Russian craze, but there was a certain cultural logic to them: in a climate where engineering, science and mathematics were highly prized, games promised mental training. They were socially palatable, devoid of political ideology. They offered a comforting view of the world: strategise; make the correct moves and a win is assured.

On the cusp of the new millennium K-D Labs released Vangers, which went on to become a cult classic. It offered a world confused by alien technology, the terror of constant warfare and the unknown enemy – a powerful metaphor for post-Soviet Russia.

From the early 2000s Russian games started to draw heavily on historical recreations of war and military strategy games.

There was IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad, a detailed flight simulator based on the second world war’s eastern front and The Truth About 9th Company, a “documentary game” in which the player experiences the historic battle for Hill 3234 during the Soviet war in Afghanistan.

Whilst IL-2 Sturmovik could be seen as a love letter to military aeroplanes, The Truth About 9th Company was a political statement.

Dmitry Puchkov, an English-to-Russian film and games translator, claims he inspired the project, calling it a reaction to the erosion of Russia’s “historical memory” and a counterpoint to the “lies” about Russian military history.

When the game was shown to delegates at the World Russian People’s Council, it was described as being able to “educate young people in patriotism but also provide objective knowledge about military affairs, history and geography”. Using gaming to promote ideologies had gained traction.

Alas it was not warmly welcomed by gamers as the controls and the game-play were mundane.

Then there’s Nival Interactive’s Allods Online, thick with Russian folk references and Sovietesque cities. It features two factions: League and Imperium. The League (elves, humans and tiny anthropomorphic animal triplets named Gibberlings) live in rustic towns and lush forests. By contrast the Imperium (a coalition of orcs and undead) are a military-industrial, empire-building society with an autocratic leader.

The concepts of League and Imperium echo Russian culture and history. The idealisation of a simple, rural life and the glorification of military power, progress and strong leadership.

The course hasn’t always run smooth, but today the Russian gaming industry is an economic and creative powerhouse. It has diversified, it has money to spend and it has made space for independents in the mix.

There are long-running series such as Rages of Mages or IL-2 Sturmovik, as well as War Thunder, the PC game that lets players pick Soviet or German for a military arsenal “to match their style of play” and boasts 6 million players.

There are independent developers such as Ice-Pick Lodge, the Moscow-based company which has won awards and European recognition for its novel and creative approach. It recently crowd-funded $41,000 to create the popular game Knock-Knock.

This year the organisers for Igromir, Russia’s largest gaming expo, estimate that 140-150,000 people attended. It was held in conjunction with Russia first Comic-Con – conventions for fans of computer and video games attended by hundreds of thousands around the world each year.

Yet despite this the industry still feels oddly disconnected from the rest of the globe. Only the most controversial or remarkable games are covered in the English-language press and we’re a long way from being able to pick out Russian games as easily as those from the US or Japan.

For a long time, the perception of Russians in games has been filtered through a heavy-handed western lens. But there are a whole world of characters, scenarios, alternative histories and settings that developers can draw on. Perhaps in time this rich and varied industry may just enjoy the global exposure it deserves.

A version of this article first appeared on The Calvert Journal, a guide to creative Russia