Innovation
Photos: Cold War ZX Spectrum clones spawned behind the Iron Curtain
Video games gave Eastern Europeans an escape from the harsh realities of everyday life, yet few had the opportunity to play them.
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East Europe's retro games
Home computers and video games were a luxury in Eastern Europe before the fall of the Iron Curtain and in the troubling years that followed it. People had to stand in line for food rations and basic household items, and many lived in cold, dark apartments, often experiencing power outages.
Even in such circumstances, there were a few developers, like Andre Weissflog, from East Germany who got paid to write video games. They learned to be resourceful and worked on computers that were often cloned from the UK's Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
Soon, studios such as the Budapest-based Andromeda Software started to work for Western European and American publishers.
Some of the games created in Eastern Europe copied or adapted titles made in the West.
However, there were also creative ideas, such as Tetris by Russian game designer Alexey Pajitnov, which quickly spread among enthusiasts and became a global phenomenon.
Political satire was also present in Eastern European games. One such example was the Russian game, Perestroika, where bureaucrats try to catch a democrat frog. Video games were stored on audio cassettes back then, and even on vinyl records.
Some Western European titles also entered the bloc, brought in by pilots and diplomats, who hid them inside their suitcases to bypass airport security checks.
Usually, communist countries didn't allow Western storage media such as audio tapes, disks or VHS tapes through customs to prevent what they called 'Western propaganda'.
Here are some of the most popular games to come out of Eastern Europe.
Caption by: Andrada Fiscutean
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