Photo gallery of vintage Soviet arcade machines

Connal Hughes and Anjel Van Slyke's photos of a 1980s-era Soviet arcade machine reveal that even light-hearted recreation was a grim affair behind the iron curtain.

Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines (Thanks, Rachel!)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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freshacconci

Grim? Nyet. I’ve been in some pretty grim capitalistic arcades, comrade. Industrial blight, neglect, cigarette smoke and teenage boredom is universal.
redesigned

can’t resist: “in soviet russia you don’t play games, games play you.”

Tankodrome looks sweet!
ripley

yeah I think you’re starting from a “if it’s Soviet-era it must be grim” cold-war hangover.

They look as fun (especially if you are imagining them new, not rusty) than a lot of the standard arcade-game boxes. that cool big space-bubble? I’ll take that over the pac-man table..
- Trent Hawkins
  
  From what I recall it’s a basket ball game. The buttons represent a spring at the bottom of each cone line indent which shoots the ball up. The goal was to land it in your opponent’s net.
  
  Kind of like Foosball, but basketball rather then football.
  
  And the only thing grim here is the editorial.
  - toyg
    
    Yeah, I played with loads of those basketball games at seaside resorts all over Europe in the eighties.
    
    I think Mark got it wrong this time.
IronEdithKidd

The only thing grim about these games is the fact that they’re painfully behind their western counterparts of the same vintage. While we were playing 8-bit home consoles, they were playing Pong in a state-sanctioned fun-zone.
Jean-Luc Turbo

The games had nothing on the grim “sparkling water dispenser” and the toilet.
askjacob

Great to see a gallery of pics with these being played. The last time I saw photos of these machines they looked abandoned in bare spaces, with almost clinical style pics of the machines. Melancholy pictures of good times passed.

Seeing them in their natural environment, being played is much less reflective, and fun!
scott

I was behind the Iron Curtain in the eighties and it freaking rocked. The beer was good, the vodka great, the commie chicks were fine, and willing. Radio Free Europe was the greatest Rock n Roll radio ever, when you don’t know what the hell you are talking about, shut up.
jeligula

Coin-ops in the USSR? Or were they labor tokens?
Anonymous

Torpedo Attack (Ð¢Ð¾Ñ€Ð¿ÐµÐ´Ð½Ð°Ñ ÐÑ‚Ñ‚Ð°ÐºÐ°) was the best!
Anonymous

There is a nice site about soviet era arcade games
http://15kop.ru/en/
LightningRose

No Mold-a-Rama machines?

It’s no wonder they lost the Cold War!
Astragali

I took a look at the photostream… “Good Shot” looks just like something we had in the arcades, as does “Winter Hunting”.

Having never been to the USSR, I was particularly intrigued that the signs on the Traffic Sign Quiz are very similar to British ones (especially the “road narrows sign”…

Anyway, if these were in English rather than Russian, many of them would not have seemed out of place in mid-1970s Scarborough, Filey, Bridlington, Hornsea, Withernsea, Cleethorpes, Mablethorpe or Skegness. Pockets loaded down with heavy 10p pieces. Ah, happy days.
Donald Petersen

I’m with Mark on this one. That first image, for example. It looks like it’s meant to be analogous to the Skill Crane found in every Chuck E. Cheese to this day. But instead of the decadent capitalistic embarrassment of riches filling up two thirds of the tank, you get a half-dozen Soviet Army men, a couple of jacks, some Ping-Pong balls, a handful of toy cars, a sprinkling of gravel, and what appears to be a couple of Chick comics (though that *can’t* be right). And maybe a toy flashlight. Even the crane itself looks beaten down. And the color scheme is straight outta my son’s diaper. The palette screams 1973 to me. Just look at its surroundings: apparently the kids relieve their oppression after a gaming session by taking bites out of the doorway as they pass through.

Maybe other commenters have gone to the wrong arcades, but even allowing for the smoke and teenage angst, the arcades of my youth were colorful wonderlands of lights and beeps and laughter and spilled Coke. The neon colors! The cascade of glittering quarters jingling out of the change machine like Scrooge McDuck’s nocturnal emissions! Pin-bot! Centipede! And Tempest… oh, dear god, Tempest!! The Miami Vice color scheme of Moon Patrol, whose jaunty theme music is still stuck in my head today!

Would anyone really rather drop their kopeks into that Leninist-beige tractor? Or whatever-the-hell Orwellian mind-monitoring youth-control device is pictured at lower right? It looks like it came straight from RobCo Industries in a Fallout game, only with more oppressive coloring.
Gilbert Wham

Put me in the ‘why so serious?’ camp too. I grew up in a seaside town in northern england in the ’70s. Honestly, that looks like exactly like it.
Donald Petersen

And boy, I really can’t wait to play “Traffic Sign Quiz.” Or my new favorite: “Inquiry Office.”

Bummer that latter one isn’t actually a real game, according to the fine print. Looks like great fun:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/a_dangerous_business/4168448347/in/set-72157622871645087/
pidg

Every time there’s something about the Soviet Union on Boing Boing, it’s a “grim affair”, or “people’s lives were miserable”, or “children were taught to expect death at any moment”…

At the end of the day, it’s just another form of racism.*
Anonymous

That first one is not an arcade game. That is where you put your kid when going shopping. You put your money in and the door opens at the end, you place your rug rat inside and close the door and take your key and simply retrieve your child later, they are wonderful they filter the air so that people around donâ€™t need to smell the dirty diapers and are 100% sound proof. The biggest problem with them was the self cleaning cycle as they where set mechanically, sometimes some poor totâ€™s parent would forget to take the youngster out in time and well the scolding hot water and soapâ€¦â€¦â€¦. I’m kidding BTW (no pun intended).
Alex_M

Yeah, why so stereotyped in here?

It’s been 20 years since the Wall came down, and the people of East Europe learned the West was not quite as how it had been portrayed to them. It’s well overdue that westerners learn that the way the Soviet Union was portrayed in the West was not exactly the unvarnished truth either.

The people who created these games weren’t party ideologues intent on making overtly ideological and things. They’re the same kind of people as design games anywhere else, just working under a lot worse conditions. Communism sucked, and nobody knows that better than those who lived under it. Dumping on their work to illustrate how Communism sucked is a dick move. It wasn’t their fault if it sucked.
cabbotage

“Grim”: Maybe. “Utilitarian”: Yes!

Watch some of the videos and you can hear people playing the other machines in the background. When the “museum” was full of people, it was no different than being in a local arcade when I was a kid. Absolutely awesome!

Also, it’s an easily overlooked link at the end of the article, but don’t miss the mind-blowingly awesome game posters (eg: spider monkey on a skateboard).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/a_dangerous_business/sets/72157623077517590/

-Connal
Anonymous

I dunno, man. Search for “old arcade” in Google images, and you get some pretty grim affairs of our own.
Anonymous

Why do you think it’s grim?

I think those designs are way more playful than the designs we saw on west.
Anonymous

Grim? I dunno, man. Imagine these things new, unscuffed, unyellowed, their colors bright and inviting. Put ‘em in a room that’s not as decrepid as the games. The playful cabinet of this Pong clone would look at home right next to the glittery blobject of a Computer Space cabinet.
querent

My favorite arcade in the world is at Oskar Blues in Lyons, CO. You can get a pint of Dale’s Pale and head down to the arcade where every machine has a cup holder.
Crispinus211

In Soviet Russia, ball pongs you.

(Someone had to say it.)
Donald Petersen

Wow… the People’s Farm Tractor of Fun looks horribly representative of what the Reagan Administration taught me about Communism.

My world is shaken!
pidg

Check it out, you can play one of the games here:
http://morskoy-boy.15kop.ru/game/

If this was built in the West, BB would report it as being a “delightful vintage arcade game”.
- Jean-Luc Turbo
  
  Ð²Ð¾ÑÑ…Ð¸Ñ‚Ð¸Ñ‚ÐµÐ»ÑŒÐ½Ð°Ñ Ð²Ð¸Ð´ÐµÐ¾Ð¸Ð³Ñ€Ð° Ð³Ð¾Ð´ ÑÐ±Ð¾Ñ€Ð° Ð²Ð¸Ð½Ð¾Ð³Ñ€Ð°Ð´Ð°!
  
  And the online version is too! ‘tanks for posting!
Anonymous

Oh, I dunno…except maybe for the
“motorized infantry company in defence” –which truly is “grim” — I’d say most of these are similar to what I saw in arcades and bowling alleys in the U.S. in 1970′s. And that turnip-puller is actually kind of charming.

The games were a bit cheaper-looking, dingier, and probably 5-10 years behind the West, but still…
Anonymous

Don’t see whats so “grim” about them? Look pretty good fun to me! =)