Perestroika - The Last Game of the Soviet Union Era

A year before the collapse of the USSR, a talented programmer released a game that gained wild popularity in the West. The game was cloned, remakes were released and it was said that it perfectly reflects the picture of the Soviet reality of that time.

Personal computers in the USSR (and throughout the world in those years!) were a huge rarity. Games were created in an artisanal way, but sometimes they turned out to be masterpieces. The most famous of them is Tetris, developed in 1984 by programmer Alexei Pajitnov. Soviet programmers created only three computer games that became widespread. These are: Tetris (1984), Welltris (1989), Perestroyka (1990).

The Perestroika game was released a year before the collapse of the USSR. But in Russia, for the most part, they learned about it only in 1995. The programmer Nikita Skripkin developed Perestroika in 1989. The game was released in 1990 - it was released by the Locis cooperative. The game was developed for MS-DOS, and became popular in Russia only in 1995 after the launch of Windows'95. When starting the game, the player is greeted by a cheerful musical accompaniment "Dubinushka", and the screen saver depicts Mikhail Gorbachev against the backdrop of the Kremlin wall, which is about to fall apart.

In Perestroika, the player controls a small democrat who jumps around islands of freedom, collects various resources and tries to avoid malicious bureaucrats. The bureaucrats, in turn, take away all the accumulated resources from the democrat. The game has levels - stages of a long path of democracy development - and the well-being of the people (points) that you need to collect in order to move to the next level. The game itself was loaded with metaphors: the islands of freedom looked like lilies, the democrat looked like a green toad that must avoid red pests, and the location looked like a swamp. In the West, it was believed that it was this game that showed the state of society and the economy in Russia, where evil and fat bureaucrats ran after a poor entrepreneur. And it was dangerous to hang out on thin islands of freedom for a long time - the bureaucrats instantly ate the hero.

The game was praised for its quality: its graphics were rated higher than those of the popular Pac-Man in the West, and the soundtrack created a unique atmosphere. The game was so popular that the Czech team released a game clone called "ZX Spectrum", and in 1992, students from Moscow School 263 created a whole remake called "DIAR D/M"! The official remake was released in 1995 and was called "Toppler for Windows". In this game, the game mechanics were repeated and the graphics were significantly improved. This is how one of the levels looked in the English version This is how one of the levels looked in the English version of “Perestroika” By the way, the creator of “Perestroika” became a successful businessman – he opened a company where online games are being developed under his leadership. A few years ago, Nikita Skripkin announced that he was considering a continuation of Perestroika.