Quick Visit to the Soviet Arcade Museum

Almost two months ago now, on the 29th of February, I jumped on an Allegro train in Helsinki and headed for St. Petersburg. This marked the start of my Trans-Eurasian adventure, which has now taken me through Russia, Malaysia and China to Vietnam, using purely vehicles on rails, tires and the odd boat or two. My intent is to eventually reach Singapore, which would mean that I’d then have traveled from the northern most capital of continental Eurasia to the southernmost one. I’ve been blogging about my travels along the way, if anyone’s interested to find out more.

However, we’re here to talk videogames, right? More specifically, videogames from The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, commonly known as the USSR. During the first or second day of my trip, thinking back this long is a bit of a blur now, I had the pleasure of visiting the Soviet Arcade Museum in St. Petersburg. The establishment is one of two such museums, with the other located in Moscow.

The St. Petersburg branch was located inside a stereotypical soviet-era industrial lot. Inside, the place revealed to be a sort of half café-hangout half museum. All the clientele were locals, or at least Russians, mostly couples out on dates. The décor drew heavily from soviet nostalgia, of course, with soviet-era telephone booths, propaganda posters and other knickknacks furnishing the surroundings of the bar/cashier at the center of the museum. After paying a few rubles, I was handed a pouch of soviet kopecks (ruble cents) and set free among the around three dozen machines set up in two floors. Around half of the games were not working at all, and of the other half seemingly a third were missing parts of their controls, lights or were in some other way compromised.

But I did succeed in playing around ten of the games on display. There were a few common themes among these games. Shooting, winter sports, driving, flying and submarines. The Duck Hunt style shooting games were the easiest to understand. The most functioning out of the shooting games was Sniper 2, which was just a simulation of target shooting, but worked well and was actually quite fun.

The driving games were extremely simple, and didn’t seem to be competitive as such. Instead, in most of them I just trying to avoid incoming traffic or simply enjoy the driving experience. The amount of various flying and submarine games was surprising. The flying usually involved Asteroid-style 2D combat, but one game (the name of which unfortunately escapes me) had me chasing enemy aircraft in a sort of alley-run with a surprisingly effective sensation of being in control of the airplane and having to struggle against turbulence.

What made all these games very impressive indeed, was the heavy use of animatronics and various kinds of visual trickery through the use of lights, mirrors, layers of glass and magnetized metal particles. Very few of the games actually employed screens as such. The submarine games for example had me looking through a periscope at a moving diorama full of islands, rough seas and enemy ships, with my torpedoes and the resulting explosions shown by lights moving and blinking from underneath the water made of plastic. And Tankodrome was just a sort of diorama where you drove a tank around, attacking enemies and avoiding incoming artillery fire.

In addition to these experiences, there was bowling, some interesting puzzle games, pinball and many machines which I did not understand the rules to at all.

Gallery

Overall, the Soviet Arcade Museum was a good place in which to kill an hour or two while waiting for my local friend to finish his workday. I definitely recommend any fan of arcade history, Soviet history or the combination of the two to visit and soak in the amazing art design and interesting technical solutions on display.

But now, back to figuring out transport solutions into Laos, where I don’t expect to see or do much videogamin'. However, if any of you have suggestions of videogame related places to visit in Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia or Singapore, drop a comment here or fire at me with a PM.

Great read, thank you!

Oh wow. Those arcade cabinets are cool. Awesome pictures.

Great write up! The Moscow museum was covered (all too briefly) on Richard Ayoade's travel show earlier this year:

Interesting stuff, thanks for sharing!

Great read! I recall playing some of these as a kid in the 80s in Moscow. The 3rd game in your photo is "Воздушный Бой" or "Air Battle".

Fun read! Kinda makes for a more colourful companion piece to @jasta's recent travelogue blog :P

Awesome stuff. It is so interesting to see some things I probably wouldn't have otherwise, especially those pinball tables.

Wow, that was a great peek into Soviet arcades. Thank you.

Fascinating stuff. The Barbican Centre has a travelling games exhibition that I've visited a couple of times, though that's from the Western/Japanese perspective that most of us would be more familiar with. Seeing that, and even more so with what you've shown of the Soviet Arcade Museum, I find that for me what's most fascinating about classic games is mostly the very early days, before things like control method and display technology had settled into some well-established standards. Modern controllers and pixel-based graphics are very flexible - they allow for an extremely wide range of experiences - but there's enduring charm and appeal in abandoned avenues like the vector displays of games like Asteroids, or even the presumably entirely electromechanical physical dioramas in some of the above machines. The submarine attack in the Travel Man clip (Торпедная Атака - "Torpedo Attack"?) has a really cool and for my money quite cinematic look. Of there's a lot gained in being able to make games for ubiquitous, powerful, general purpose devices in this day and age, but there's definitely also something lost in terms of imagination and ingenuity when it comes to the actual mechanics of how you interface with the game. Bespoke systems have a hard time competing in the modern big business of video games, but they're always worth a try if you manage to find one.

Thanks for sharing! That pinball game with the clown looks sick.

Thank you for regaling us with tales and pictures of your travels! It's great to see little known arcade games being preserved like that.