The image is called "Satochin."
atochin.
The Slovak Design Museum released a collection of text adventures from the region. The games capture a moment in history when the first generation of Slovak developers were learning their craft and sharing it with their friends.
The museum did not always cover games. The general manager of the Slovak Game Developers Association presented the multimedia collection. He says that getting the patronage of a museum gives you more credibility. People start to have a different view of this being part of something important. Our heritage and culture.
The 10 games that make up this first batches of translations and re-releases were selected for their historical significance. They captured a part of the late ’80s in what was then Czechoslovakia, a Soviet satellite state. The Soviet Major fought Rambo in Vietnam. It was against the regime, but it was very revolting.
One of the developers behind atochn was involved in the preservation project. He and his friends published atochn after they were fascinated by the American movies that made it across the border on VHS tapes. He says the game is making jokes about the regime and the army. It is hard to win. Rambo will kill you 10 times because you were not lucky and you made the wrong choice. It was funny for my friends.
You get more credibility when you get patronage of a museum.
In my experiment with atochn, the Soviet soldier lost his life in a number of gruesome ways, including being crushed against a coral reef within a few minutes of starting the game. The player could play as Rambo in the game if they binding the keys "KGB" as controls.
At the time, game development was mostly a teenage hobby. There was no chance of making money out of games that weren't sold in shops. These games were shared by Hrda and others for entertainment. Frantiek Fuka, a developer from the Czech Republic, had previously inspired Hrda and his friends. He told them that they should take a toothbrush with them when the police come to catch them. He laughs and admits that he was a bit afraid after that.
:noupscale is a file on thechorusasset.com
He and his friends continued to make games. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989 led to more democratic governance and a market economy being established in Czechoslovakia, Hrda, then 18, created a real company to sell games. He says that programmers in Czechoslovakia were able to create high-quality games for the ZX Spectrum with financing now available. The creation of Hrda, Fuka, and others were left to be played in Eastern Europe only because people in the West moved on to more advanced computers.
A few years ago, Hrda was involved in an exhibition at the Design Museum that showed off games from the ’80s, allowing people to play them on the original hardware. There were more exhibitions planned. The website is described as a backup virtual exhibition, but also as the beginning of a database as they continue to develop the project further. There are images of the hardware, box art, and so on from the period, as well as the games, which can be run on emulators on modern PCs. The next goal is to add scans of Slovak game magazines.
If you are brave enough, you can try our games.
The website makes the games accessible to a wider audience. The team was lucky that a lot of the work was done by fans of the ZX Spectrum, so they didn't have to scrounge up much from cassettes and the like. It was easy to find the original developers in order to get their permission. He says that most of the community was very friendly and that a lot of the authors know other authors.
The games had to be disassembled so that Slovak text could be replaced with English. Slavomr Labsk and Marin Kabt wrote about their experience in a post on the Slovak Design Museum website. The process of taking the games apart and replacing them was explained by Labsk. The challenges of contextualizing era- and location-specific references were described by Kabt.
He hopes that the games will come across in the translations, like the writing in atochn. The 1987 game "Pepsi Cola" appears to be the one that English-speaking people are most interested in on social media. The player has to steal the drink's secret recipe. Western players are curious about the recognizability of the brand. He says it might be strange that we also knew about the Cola in the East before 1989. The most popular soft drink wasPepsi Cola. It had been sold in the Soviet Union.
The games have been made available because of their historical value. Hrda wants people to enjoy them like his friends did when he made them. He hopes people will have fun with them even if they are very old. If you are brave enough, you can try our games.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
