This web page was created programmatically, to learn the article in its unique location you possibly can go to the hyperlink bellow:
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/i-played-communist-germanys-only-arcade-cabinet-and-you-can-too-comrade/
and if you wish to take away this text from our website please contact us
Weird Weekend
Weird Weekend is our common Saturday column the place we have fun PC gaming oddities: peculiar video games, unusual bits of trivia, forgotten historical past. Pop again each weekend to seek out out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have grow to be obsessive about this time, whether or not it is the canon peak of Thief’s Garrett or that point somebody within the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
If the German Democratic Republic (GDR)—that’s, East Germany—is thought for something, it is an irrepressible sense of enjoyable. And but, someway, the nation solely produced a single arcade cupboard throughout its whole 41-year existence: the Poly-Play—six toes of East German engineering in creamy wood-grain, manufactured by VEB (Volkseigener Betrieb, or publicly owned enterprise) Polytechnik Karl-Marx-Stadt, the town now known as Chemnitz.
Produced in 1985 and numbering round 2,000 altogether, the Poly-Play was a chimeric assemblage of elements not made for arcade cupboards. Its monitor was a repurposed German TV set, its cab produced by furnishings maker VEB Raumkunst Mosel. It was a vivid window right into a computerised, socialist future that loomed throughout GDR vacation houses and youth centres.
That it was unique in East Germany’s manufacturing output shouldn’t be taken as an indictment. The socialist half of Deutschland was, if anything, a lot less suspicious of gaming than the west, which banned kids from playing arcade games in 1984. In fact, planners and ideologues hoped the proliferation of computers and gaming software would spark the imaginations of a new generation of engineers, and the state encouraged citizens to get into home computing in official magazines like Der Funkamateur.
East Germany was just late to the arcade. By the time it was producing the Poly-Play, its comrades in the USSR had been producing arcade machines of one form or another for around a decade. Though to be fair to the Germans, it wasn’t the country’s first gaming machine. That honour goes to the BSS 01: a proletarian Intellivision that nobody actually purchased and nobody actually favored. People did just like the Poly-Play, although, and I used to be decided to seek out out why.
Arbeiter, Bauern, nehmt eure Gamepads
I’m telling you all this because A) I am very unwell, and B) I recently learnt you can still play the Poly-Play today. Either by flying to Germany and finding a still-functional cabinet or, slightly easier, using the emulator that some preservation hero has uploaded to the Internet Archive. You may also slap a core for it onto your MiSTer, if you happen to’re an actual pervert (I imply that as a praise).
It might be the GDR’s solitary arcade cabinet, but you got a lot of bang for your 50 pfennigs. The machine’s U880 microprocessor—a hardy, dialectical knock-off of the Zilog Z80, produced by a distinct VEB with Karl Marx within the identify (it’s a must to marvel in the event that they ever received confused)—would run any of eight video games for you. These had been:
- Hirschjagd (Deer Hunt)
- Hase und Wolf (Hare and Wolf)
- Absfahrtslauf (Downhill)
- Schmetterlinge (Butterflies)
- Schießbude (Shooting Gallery)
- Autorennen (Motor Race)
- Merkspiel (Memory Game)
- Wasserrohrbruch (Water Pipe Burst)
It is with deep regret that I inform you the majority of these games do not hold up in the era of Baldur’s Gate 3. Hirschjagd is a game about annihilating deer on a timer, your crusty shotgun barely capable of spitting its pellets further than you can throw a punch. Schmetterlinge is interesting in that it appears to be a game about a squat goblin on an insane quest to denude the entire countryside of butterflies, but is otherwise not fun to play. Autorennen dares to ask ‘What if Formula 1 proceeded at a pace slightly below walking?’ Schießbude is Space Invaders if the invaders were ducks trying to assault your silo of… legumes or something. Which is a pretty scary prospect, to be fair.
So let’s not talk about those. Instead, let’s talk about Wasserrohrbruch, which I’m unilaterally declaring PC Gamer’s Game Of The Year 1985. You might not expect great things from a game named “Water Pipe Burst,” but this is because you lack the remarkable vision of your socialist forebears.
Wasserrohrbruch is an anxiety game: a hidden ancestor to Cart Life. You are a helpless yellow man in a cellar whose wasserrohr has bruch’d. You have a bucket and no one is coming to help you. Droplets form on the ceiling and fall at speed to the floor, where they gradually begin to flood the entire room, soaking your shoes, your shirt, your neck, creeping higher and higher.
You can stem this tide by catching the droplets in your bucket, but this is impossible at length. The drops form haphazardly and two-at-a-time, often at opposing ends of the room. Catching all of them is impossible, and worse: when your bucket fills, you have to ascend the stairs at the left-hand side of the room to throw your caught water from the window, as more and more droplets form and fill the room while you do it. It’s like a videogame version of the art installation of a robotic arm attempting to mop up its own blood. The finish is inevitable; it will probably solely be postponed. I like when video games have a message. I assume that is about Perestroika.
Genosse Pac-Man
Hase und Wolf is kind of a banger, too. Not because of its gameplay. God no. In the hand, the game is just a worse Pac-Man—imagine that game except with more fiddly controls that will invariably get you stuck on corners. It’s the Pac-Man they’d make you play in hell.
Hase und Wolf is interesting because it’s a product of the great fraternity of socialist nations. In 2025, we all live in America. We share a language of Hanna Barbera cartoons and Simpsons gags—the USA exercises a level of cultural hegemony impossible in any other era.
It’s the Pac-Man they’d make you play in hell.
In 1985, that wasn’t quite as true, and a solid chunk of the globe lived under Soviet cultural hegemony instead. Thus, Hare and Wolf—a game based on the iconic Soviet cartoon Nu, Pogodi, aired by the GDR’s Deutscher Fernsehfunk state broadcaster underneath the German title Hase und Wolf. I feel this would possibly make it East Germany’s first and solely licensed videogame.
It’s additionally a nightmare. There’s the very fact you will get caught on partitions, certain, but additionally finishing a spherical makes your wolf enemies endure mitosis—growing in quantity till it is you in opposition to a complete pack, desperately making an attempt to faucet the directional buttons simply evenly sufficient to spherical a nook with out mashing your face into it. The solely benefit is that your enemies endure from… one thing. Possibly melancholy, given their relatable tendency to spend giant chunks of the sport occupying this or that nook of the map and simply type of vibrating barely. Give them time. They’re desirous about stuff.
Bad news all: My Bewertung is ausgeschieden
A close runner-up to Wasserrohrbruch is Abfahrtslauf, which is a game about skiing and dying. You are a happy purple man whose dream is to get to the bottom of a mountain, opposed only by god and physics.
This is not Alpine Ski. For one factor, you are heading south as an alternative of north, For a second factor, the sport is virtually daring you to kill your self each second. The comparatively easy objective is to navigate your skier between the piste markings and to the end line within the shortest time attainable. If you do a variety of turning, you possibly can keep a fairly wise pace, get only a few factors on the finish, and convey disgrace on your self and your loved ones.
Far better is to point your skis firmly at the mountain’s base and pray. Heading straight down means you gather speed alarmingly quickly, the game’s jaunty soundtrack accelerating to the point that it becomes a high-pitched drone in your ears and the act of pulling off the required slaloms becoming an impossibility.
You will collide with a piste marker and join the ranks of the martyred dead, but right up to that point it will be incredibly entertaining to attempt to maintain some level of control over the runaway train of your skis.
Poly-Played Out
I think, fundamentally, what I find interesting about the Poly-Play is that you can read the socialist bloc’s hopes and failures in it. On the one hand, here was the bold plan for the future: new cadres of engineers, weaned on the flashing lights of the arcade, ready to lead us into a cybernetic communist future.
And on the other, well, the games were knock-offs running on a knock-off chip, already obviously outpaced by their peers in Japan and the US. That’s not necessarily down entirely to some inherent inferiority—if anything, it’s a fairly remarkable adaptation to the conditions of the CoCom trade embargo that tried to cease many high-tech items reaching the USSR and its allies (and would not that ring a bell?)—however the information are what they’re, and it is laborious to not see the Poly-Play as a testomony to the pace at which the west and its allies had been outstripping their rivals on the daybreak of computing.
Then once more, the west did not have Wasserrohrbruch. Let’s name it a tie.
*A humorous side-note from the Poly-Play Wikipedia web page, which I can not confirm however very a lot take pleasure in, is that East German youngsters rapidly came upon they might rip-off far more performs out of the machine by tricking it—insert a single pfennig in simply the best approach to idiot the machine into considering it had gotten a full 50. This was tolerated as a result of, hey, this ain’t no capitalist enterprise.
This page was created programmatically, to read the article in its original location you can go to the link bellow:
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/i-played-communist-germanys-only-arcade-cabinet-and-you-can-too-comrade/
and if you wish to take away this text from our website please contact us
