Aircraft bombing games...
Gun games...
Aircraft shooting games...
Gun games...
Submarine games...
Games that look like Stalinist torture racks...
Gun games...
Wait a second. A theme seems to be developing here. There are no silly games with donkeys throwing barrels. No games with giant centipedes. No games where frogs dodge traffic. No....
Pong?
Just war games. Does this mean the Soviet regime might have actually been using video games to spurn its young comrades on to battle? Remember, during the 1980s, Russia was crushing Eastern European uprisings every few years, had invaded Afghanistan, and was under constant threat from NATO and the US. Were these games just pieces of Soviet propaganda?
It's not a completely ludicrous suggestion. The US Army did it 20 years later when they developed
America's Army and sold it commerically (the game lets you can blast Iraqis to your hearts content).
Maybe these games were virutal training sets for young Red Army recruits. Or maybe not. While there are a disturbing number of military titles for such an early era in gaming, there’s also this little gem:
Obviously just a Russian horse picking up tomatoes, right? How cute. Or wait... are they landmines?
(in the interests of objectivity, it should be pointed out that there was an ice hockey game and a basketball game... neither of which featured nuclear-tipped anti-ballistic missiles or Stalin screaming “death to capitalist pigs”. So it's probably a far-fetched conspiracy theory).
Posted by ShaolinCowboy 08/04/09
It's March 1983. Cold war tensions between the US and the Soviet Union are reaching boiling point again. President Ronald Regan fronts a packed public assembly in Florida and denounces the Soviet regime as an "evil empire". He says the US will develop a "Star Wars" missile defence system. The Soviets respond by threatening a new arms race.
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