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Weird But Cool – Illegal Video Games From The 1980’s During Iron Curtain Era
Illegal Video Games From The 1980’s During Iron Curtain Era, Part Of The Slovak Design Museum.
English translations of early Slovak digital games from the late 80s period, created in cooperation with Slovak Game Developers Association by Stanislav Hrda, Slavomír Labský, Marián Kabát, Darren Chastney and Maroš Brojo.
ABOUT SLOVAK DIGITAL GAMES TRANSLATION PROJECT
Slovak digital games translation project introduction
Maroš Brojo
Multimedia curator at the Slovak Design Museum
The history of digital games in Slovakia dates to the first half of the 1980s. Its beginnings are mainly associated with amateur and semi-professional development, whose emergence and formation in that period was conditioned mainly (but not only) by the popularity and spread of the ZX Spectrum computer and its first clones in Czechoslovakia, such as Didaktik Gama or Didaktik M from the Didaktik Skalica factory.
It was at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s that the first generation of creators, influenced by commercial game development from Western Europe or the United States, was formed in our country. Several local communities were gradually formed around the phenomenon of video game creation all over Slovakia. There was an active exchange and copying of games on cassettes in Svazarm’s interest groups, fans of personal computers exchanged their experiences, and many of them, following the example of the West, began to create their own games, which were shared among friends and acquaintances all over Czechoslovakia.
Today, we consider games from this period to be a key part of the history of home production, which, like other historical works, belongs to our cultural heritage. Historical and theoretical research on digital games, to which entire university departments are devoted and which is considered a regular part of academic research by several experts around the world, has been going on for a long time without the rest of the world having the opportunity to get acquainted with our national production.
Indeed, a huge problem in this area is the fact that the vast majority of our games from this period were created in the Slovak language. Games produced in this way are thus inaccessible and unplayable for foreign researchers working on the history of national productions, larger geographic regions, or specific game genres across different countries. The problem is particularly acute for the text adventure genre, built primarily on interactive text rather than the graphics and action of contemporary games.
The project of translating Slovak games from the 80s and 90s aims to start a gradual translation of the most important early games from this period, doing such translation directly at the level of the original software, so that the games are runnable (for historical accuracy) on 8-bit computers from that period. At the same time, users of modern computers will be able to run the games on modern hardware thanks to emulators. With the permission of the authors already secured, we plan to gradually translate and make available to the public 10 selected major text adventure games in the first year, and at least 10 to 20 other works from the period in the following years.
Professionals from two fields are involved in the project and are key to its realization:
1) translation studies
2) programming + knowledge of historical works
For the first area, we worked with a trained translator and translation coordinator who had pre-existing experience in localizing video games, Mgr. Marián Kabát, PhD, a graduate of translation studies at Comenius University. For the second area, we collaborated with original creators of games from this period, who also do programming as part of their profession and who participated in the technical component of the project (text extraction and implementation of translations into the games). Mgr. Stanislav Hrda, a graduate of theoretical computer science at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Comenius University, currently works as a sales consultant at the distributor of Cisco network elements, game creator and member of the then Sybilasoft group, and Ing. Slavomír Labský, a graduate of IT at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Slovak Technical University, a leading personality of the Slovak demoscene, author of games from that period, currently works for Eset as a digital infiltration analyst. Stanislav Hrda is, among other titles, the author of the game Šatochín (1988), whose sample partial translation we used at the beginning of the project to verify and demonstrate its feasibility. Project coordination and promotion is provided by Mgr. Art. Maroš Brojo, a graduate of Audiovisual Studies at the Film and TV Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts, who works at the Slovak Game Developers Association as a general manager and at the Slovak Design Museum as a curator of the multimedia collection, where he is also engaged in historical research of contemporary Slovak computer games.
The games translated over the next 2-3 years after the end of the project will represent almost the complete video game production from the period of 8-bit computers in Slovakia, with an emphasis on text adventure games. All translated games are, with the permission of the authors, freely distributable for research and non-commercial purposes.
Due to the way the video games have been translated, they are playable via media such as floppy disks, cassettes, and memory cards even on the original hardware, making it possible to achieve almost complete historical accuracy when playing them. For convenience, however, they can also be played on well-known emulators such as Speccy or ZX Spectrum 4. On behalf of the entire team, we firmly believe that the translated games will bring you an enriching insight into the video game history of Slovak creators in Czechoslovakia and reveal a hitherto unexplored branch of the local history of the now dominant and globally widespread medium.
How were games created in the countries behind the Iron Curtain?
Stanislav Hrda
Game developer
Microcomputers came into homes in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was no different in the countries behind the Iron Curtain, often referred to as Soviet satellites. Typical of these countries was that microcomputers were quite difficult for people to obtain, so they smuggled them in from the West, since domestic production of computers was either non-existent or involved relatively underdeveloped computers with inferior specs, which was, of course, quite a handicap for gaming.
The videogame enthusiasm mainly affected children and teenagers, who in countries with non-existent copyright protection were copying games from the West and playing them at home or even in existing computer clubs. The more skillful ones went from playing games to trying to create them. However, the games were not sold in shops and the authors were not entitled to remuneration. Therefore, practically no one could engage in video game programming as a business activity, and adult programmers worked at most in state institutions on large mainframe computers. Thus, video game programmers became mainly teenagers. The possibilities were limited; not many people at that age could create truly perfect games with nice video game graphics, but without a financial reward.
Text adventure games became a very popular domain. These could also be programmed in the simpler Basic language that every home computer had built in. Text-based games offered the opportunity to imprint one’s fantasies into a world of characters, locations, descriptions of reality or fantasy at will. That is why hundreds of such video games were created in the 1980s in Czechoslovakia. The authors from the ranks of teenagers portrayed their friends, but also heroes from films that were distributed on VHS tapes or from the pop-cultural world of the West from the occasionally available comics, films, TV series and books.