I was browsing through some old travel pictures and once again found my pictures from the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines in St Petersburg. I have no idea if it's still there, obviously no one outside can visit right now. But it was an amazing place to see - they had collected all these old machines, with some fascinating information. Apparently anything fantastical was frowned upon by the authorities at this point in the Soviet Union, so as a game designer your options were going for realistic, grounded things like sports, hunting, or war - or if you wanted to be unrealistic you could go for Russian folktales. And then the tech was limited also, so you see fewer things on screens and more mechanical machines. Really interesting to think about the constraints!
I apologize for the picture quality - I'm not very good, and this was 2014, and also I was using a knockoff phone I had bought in Istanbul after I got pickpocketed by a sex worker in Bucharest.
