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Video games made in the USSR (2020)

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Re: Video games made in the USSR (2020)

#41

Post by RugnirViking »

batter wrote: post #40
RugnirViking wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true. I feel like there is a bit of both here. Around the 1950s to 1970s, they were capable of some pretty impressive projects, civillian and millitary. Things like mass rollout of power infrastructure, road networks, city construction, the space race, etc. their GDP is today estimated to have been around half that of the US had at the time. Their growth in production numbers for tanks/planes etc throughout ww…

Yeah, just 100k+ of wasted lives on single project only, but engineering worth it, right? https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1980-2/bam/

You are engaging in severely bad faith. I never mentioned that project, and certainly never said 100k lives were a worthwhile cost. That is not how we do things here on hacker news.

Re: Video games made in the USSR (2020)

#42

Post by RugnirViking »

qaq wrote: post #35
RugnirViking wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true. I feel like there is a bit of both here. Around the 1950s to 1970s, they were capable of some pretty impressive projects, civillian and millitary. Things like mass rollout of power infrastructure, road networks, city construction, the space race, etc. their GDP is today estimated to have been around half that of the US had at the time. Their growth in production numbers for tanks/planes etc throughout ww…

USSR spent most of it's GDP on military plus central planing is unworkable system especially with all the idiotic soviet KPI's on top of it.

Is that true? I would be interested to see the numbers on that. I would have expected their spending to be on a similar-ish level to the US at the time (which while high, probably never crossed the 50% mark)

Re: Video games made in the USSR (2020)

#43

Post by kemitchell »

danielodievich wrote: post #20

Tetris creator Aleksey and few of his company were bought out and borught to Seattle in early oughts by Microsoft and they made a bunch of games for MSN Zone. There was one called Hexic that I remember him posting into a Russian email alias with an offer to take whoever got 5 black pearls first to dinner with him, which I think took out od a good portion of Russians on that channel out of circulation for a day or two…

Thank you for sharing this story!

Re: Video games made in the USSR (2020)

#44

Post by xkcd1963 »

qsort wrote: post #39
Waterluvian wrote: post #3

Because of the war against Ukraine, I’ve become more aware of Ukraine’s role in the USSR when reading up on history. One thing I’ve noticed is just how much of the most impressive technological feats came from Ukraine.

The association "USSR = Russians" is part of the systematic attempt by the soviet regime at cultural (and sometimes literal) genocide. The 90th anniversary of the Holodomor was just two weeks ago.

I've to step in here, because also native Russians starved during the Holodomor. My grandmother saw half-starved people and corpses as a child in the city

Re: Video games made in the USSR (2020)

#45

Post by qaq »

RugnirViking wrote: post #42
qaq wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USSR spent most of it's GDP on military plus central planing is unworkable system especially with all the idiotic soviet KPI's on top of it.

Is that true? I would be interested to see the numbers on that. I would have expected their spending to be on a similar-ish level to the US at the time (which while high, probably never crossed the 50% mark)

It's more you have to realise that the way things were structured there was never an honest count. As an anecdotal example my father in-law was chief eng. at Kharkov factory that was producing Nuclear Missile guidance systems and other high end mil. parts. Factory had 10,000 employees yet officially it was producing electric razors and things like this were the norm.

Re: Video games made in the USSR (2020)

#46

Post by kemitchell »

bombcar wrote: post #15
GuB-42 wrote: post #5

There is a joke about how Tetris has been the most effective soviet weapon against the US, causing more damage in productivity losses than anything else the USSR did during the cold war.

Microsoft’s Solitaire might compete, being bundled with windows itself.

Maybe old Netscape folks shouldn't feel so bad.

Microsoft even did it to the Soviet Union. And they got away with it that time! ;-P

Re: Video games made in the USSR (2020)

#47

Post by RugnirViking »

qaq wrote: post #45
RugnirViking wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that true? I would be interested to see the numbers on that. I would have expected their spending to be on a similar-ish level to the US at the time (which while high, probably never crossed the 50% mark)

It's more you have to realise that the way things were structured there was never an honest count. As an anecdotal example my father in-law was chief eng. at Kharkov factory that was producing Nuclear Missile guidance systems and other high end mil. parts. Factory had 10,000 employees yet officially it was producing electric razors and things like this were the norm.

I can believe that. They certainly had a lot of corruption and behind-the-scenes lying to make things fit, especially towards the end. However it seems to me that there must have been at least some growth there underpinning things for some time, else they would have collapsed much easiler, right? They also seemed to have an outsized economic impact abroad compared to other places with similar population that started the 20th century in a similar economic place (india, china, south america).

Re: Video games made in the USSR (2020)

#48

Post by asveikau »

mafuyu wrote: post #18
Dig1t wrote: post #13

Compare what happened to the creators of these games with the creators of popular titles in the USA and Japan. Tetris is an especially interesting one; Tetris was a worldwide phenomenon, a huge hit in the US that sold a huge number of copies. The creators of Tetris saw none of the profits from their creation. Their game was seized by the state as soon as it became popular and they never really profited. Compare to si…

The creator, Alexey Pajitnov, was eventually able to see some money from his creation after emigrating to the US and cofounding The Tetris Company. The Gaming Historian channel has a great documentary video on it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fQtxKmgJC8

Kind of a tangent, but it'd weird to me that this man chooses to transcribe ж as j in his surname. Typically ж would be zh, and I think of j as a palatal consonant.

I had to look up the Cyrillic spelling of his name to be sure I wasn't misunderstanding.

I guess some English speakers would be more comfortable with J for that sound.

Re: Video games made in the USSR (2020)

#49

Post by nosianu »

anotherstalker wrote: post #23
Waterluvian wrote: post #3

Because of the war against Ukraine, I’ve become more aware of Ukraine’s role in the USSR when reading up on history. One thing I’ve noticed is just how much of the most impressive technological feats came from Ukraine.

Care to highlight interesting examples and industries for us unlearned?

I just wanted to ask Google to find a more comprehensive list, but I was reminded of a serious search issue that I would like to see addressed at some point:

Especially whenever there is a current event with lots of news it is nearly impossible to find anything that is too close to the subject.

It would be great to be able to restrict search to older results, to avoid being in the shadow of more recent articles. Even adding "USSR" did not help at all, almost everything I got was related to recent events.

I've had this problem sooo many times in the past already. Google is way too focused on the latest information. Just yesterday somebody also pointed this out in a comment, about that website link that made it to the HN homepage that help find the right glue for two different materials, which was an example for an old rarely changing but still relevant website.

Anyway, on topic, here's a list that I found starting out from trying to widen the search from the starting point that I knew Antonov is Ukrainian:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_design_bureaus_in_Ukra...

https://www.value.today/headquarters/ukraine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_of_Ukraine

"Donbas: What’s Ukraine Losing—Industrial Hub, Breadbasket or Both?" -- https://www.russiamatters.org/blog/donbas-whats-ukraine-losi...

Here is a video showing a pretty cool - albeit pretty unreliable, according to what I read - 1960s motorbike that was made in Ukraine: https://youtu.be/DvxcK645HF0 -- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dnepr_(motorcycle). Dnepr (Ukrainian: Дніпро) is a motorcycle brand produced in Kyiv. I became interested in this bike while reading this RR story from a Ukrainian author - with lots of brilliant author-made painting-illustratiuons (if you open the inline images in a new tab you will find they are a much bigger resolution; It's worth scrolling through the chapters even without reading anything, just for those pictures): https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/54085/the-armorer-and-the-...

Re: Video games made in the USSR (2020)

#50

Post by rosnd »

shmerl wrote: post #11
Jensson wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is there anything wrong with the linked article?

The article looks neutral (besides for spelling of city names using Russian notation).

Which, to be fair, is something that much of the Ukrainian population still does. It's mostly foreigners that see this as something important.
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