sirocyl

This game, along with Gorby no Pipeline Daisakusen, need to be understood in the context of both a post-Cold War world and the place Gorbachev made for himself within it. The capitalist world, having proving itself triumphant over communism, celebrated its triumph the only way it knew how: by encouraging conspicuous consumption and converting everything into a commodity or symbol to be consumed as such. The two immediate examples of this are the first McDonald's in Moscow, which served as a harbinger of both the Soviet Union's collapse about two years later; and Gorbachev's Pizza Hut ad, which only served to rub salt in the wound - the one person charged with ensuring the USSR's survival, with keeping communism relevant as a global force, here lending his seal of approval to the very force that destroyed it.

That being said, the fact that we were getting these games well before we got that commercial illustrates just how quickly Gorbachev was willing to make himself a symbol to circulate within capitalist culture.