One summer, growing up, I once made the top score on a game of Road Blasters at an arcade in Lake George, New York.
The next summer, my initials were still at the top of the list (but they were gone the next summer). I’ve spent a lot of time playing video games, both in the arcade and at home. But I never realized until today how good I had it.
Wired.com just posted an interesting feature about Soviet-era arcade games. There’s a photo gallery containing some of the game cabinets and one or two screenshots. It might just be their dilapidated state, but these games look bad.
What’s more, according to the article, these communist timewasters did not have high score lists:
“That kind of competition wasn’t encouraged,” explains Alexander Stakhanov, one of the museum’s founders and engineers. “If you got enough points you won a free game, but there was no ‘high score’ culture as in the West.”
Looking back, some of the games in our arcades years ago are primitive. But they were light years ahead of Adventures of Comrade Marioski in Capitalist Land.
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