Visitors play retro arcade games at museum

A museum of arcade machines is providing a trip down memory lane in Moscow. The units were popular entertainment decades ago and have been fixed and reinstalled for the younger generation to play. Table basketball, football, shooting and racing machines - these symbols of a bygone era can be played again at the Museum of Soviet Arcade Game Machines.

Moscow, Russia: This is gaming retro style. These classic arcade machines were part of every Soviet childhood, not so long ago. While many museums instruct visitors to look but don't touch, it's entirely the opposite when it comes to the exhibits here. People can push buttons, turn handles, and generally compete against their friends in a nostalgic journey to 40 years into the past when these machines were especially popular in the Soviet Union.

"It was extremely popular. People would queue for too many machines. I personally remember that you were given three or four coins, you spent them, then you would spend one more hour watching others playing, peep through the periscope, at the Sea Battle game there are also two view windows, so when one person plays, two more can watch how he or she hits ships more accurately than you do," says co-founder of the museum, Maksim Pinigin.

Of course, the museum has a Sea Battle machine for visitors to try.

The player looks through the periscope and pretends to be a submarine commander, trying to hit ships with torpedoes.

It's also the machine that sparked the inspiration for the museum when one of the founders decided to install it to play at home 13 years ago.

"First of all, Sea Battle was the most popular game machine, second, the most common, if someone played an arcade game machine in the Soviet Union, most likely it was the Sea Battle. It is from this machine the production of game machines started in the Soviet Union, so it is the very first Soviet game machine. And so, it is considered the symbol of the Soviet game machines industry," says museum administrator Ksenia Zubareva.

The first machines here were restored in a garage.

After that, the museum founders realized that there are many more interesting units and the pleasure of playing nostalgic games could be shared, so they went on collecting more exhibits from around the country.

Forgotten and broken down, the Soviet-era arcade game machines were discovered in abandoned parks, Soviet Houses of Culture, empty pioneer camps, and schools, sometimes even in military departments.

But the museum founders didn't always get to them in time.

"It used to be like a stab to our hearts when we learned that just a little bit before our arrival all the game machines were passed over onto scrap metal collection," says Pinigin.

The Soviet arcade games industry lasted from the 1970s up to the early nineties when the Soviet Union collapsed.

About 90 types of machines were produced at 18 secret defense plants.

Almost all of them were copies of international game units, translated into Russian and modified to accept Soviet fifteen kopeks coins – still used by museum visitors to make the units work.

"It's kind of sad to say this, I'd like to say that it was all Soviet-made, created by our guys, but honestly speaking, the majority are copies, because the industry in the US and Japan started to develop much earlier and was much stronger, but maybe it was not remembered so well by Americans and Japanese, because they had a lot of other entertainments, while Soviet kids as well as adults, had perhaps a little less such fun," says Pinigin.

Although based on international machines, the devices were adapted to Soviet ideology - any financial gain was excluded while education and development were put at the forefront.

There were a few Soviet inventions too, like this traffic signs quiz which had an educational aim.

"It is believed that Soviet engineers tried to input not only the game element into the machines, the entertainment, but also some element of development for the children, in the first place. Almost all machines develop fine motor skills, that is by pressing the buttons, accurate eye, speed of reaction and so on. Such machines were set to educate in the themes such as traffic signs and traffic rules," says Zubareva.

Now there are about 80 working exhibits that people can try.

Despite modern high-tech entertainments available nowadays, the museum is as popular among younger generations as older visitors.

"I personally liked basketball, I liked football, I liked the shooting range, I adore shooting, I would do shooting in the usual shooting range, but this one was great too," says visitor Aleksandr Makarov.

"It is interesting to indulge in the time when our parents used to play all this. For them, it was all new, and I want to feel their experience and emotions that they used to get when playing game machines," says Yekaterina Yermakova.

The museum has two branches – in Moscow and St. Petersburg - and about 500 exhibits in total, including those waiting in the warehouse to be reinstalled in the future.

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