Bizarre Weekend
Bizarre Weekend is our common Saturday column the place we have fun PC gaming oddities: peculiar video games, unusual bits of trivia, forgotten historical past. Pop again each weekend to search out out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have turn out to be obsessive about this time, whether or not it is the canon peak of Thief’s Garrett or that point somebody within the Vatican pirated Soccer Supervisor.
If the German Democratic Republic (GDR)—that’s, East Germany—is thought for something, it is an irrepressible sense of enjoyable. And but, by some means, the nation solely produced a single arcade cupboard throughout its complete 41-year existence: the Poly-Play—six toes of East German engineering in creamy wood-grain, manufactured by VEB (Volkseigener Betrieb, or publicly owned enterprise) Polytechnik Karl-Marx-Stadt, town now referred to as Chemnitz.
Produced in 1985 and numbering round 2,000 altogether, the Poly-Play was a chimeric assemblage of components not made for arcade cupboards. Its monitor was a repurposed German TV set, its cab produced by furnishings maker VEB Raumkunst Mosel. It was a shiny window right into a computerised, socialist future that loomed throughout GDR vacation houses and youth centres.
That it was distinctive in East Germany’s manufacturing output should not be taken as an indictment. The socialist half of Deutschland was, if something, so much much less suspicious of gaming than the west, which banned youngsters from enjoying arcade video games in 1984. The truth is, planners and ideologues hoped the proliferation of computer systems and gaming software program would spark the imaginations of a brand new era of engineers, and the state inspired residents to get into dwelling computing in official magazines like Der Funkamateur.
East Germany was simply late to the arcade. By the point it was producing the Poly-Play, its comrades within the USSR had been producing arcade machines of 1 kind or one other for round a decade. Although to be truthful to the Germans, it wasn’t the nation’s first gaming machine. That honour goes to the BSS 01: a proletarian Intellivision that nobody actually purchased and nobody actually appreciated. Folks did just like the Poly-Play, although, and I used to be decided to search out out why.
Arbeiter, Bauern, nehmt eure Gamepads
I am telling you all this as a result of A) I’m very unwell, and B) I not too long ago learnt you may nonetheless play the Poly-Play as we speak. Both by flying to Germany and discovering a still-functional cupboard or, barely simpler, utilizing the emulator that some preservation hero has uploaded to the Web Archive. It’s also possible to slap a core for it onto your MiSTer, in the event you’re an actual pervert (I imply that as a praise).
It may be the GDR’s solitary arcade cupboard, however you bought quite a lot of bang on your 50 pfennigs. The machine’s U880 microprocessor—a hardy, dialectical knock-off of the Zilog Z80, produced by a distinct VEB with Karl Marx within the title (it’s a must to marvel in the event that they ever received confused)—would run any of eight video games for you. These have been:
- Hirschjagd (Deer Hunt)
- Hase und Wolf (Hare and Wolf)
- Absfahrtslauf (Downhill)
- Schmetterlinge (Butterflies)
- Schießbude (Capturing Gallery)
- Autorennen (Motor Race)
- Merkspiel (Reminiscence Recreation)
- Wasserrohrbruch (Water Pipe Burst)
It’s with deep remorse that I inform you the vast majority of these video games don’t maintain up within the period of Baldur’s Gate 3. Hirschjagd is a recreation about annihilating deer on a timer, your crusty shotgun barely able to spitting its pellets additional than you may throw a punch. Schmetterlinge is fascinating in that it seems to be a recreation a couple of squat goblin on an insane quest to denude the complete countryside of butterflies, however is in any other case not enjoyable to play. Autorennen dares to ask ‘What if System 1 proceeded at a tempo barely beneath strolling?’ Schießbude is Area Invaders if the invaders have been geese attempting to assault your silo of… legumes or one thing. Which is a fairly scary prospect, to be truthful.
So let’s not speak about these. As an alternative, let’s speak about Wasserrohrbruch, which I am unilaterally declaring PC Gamer’s Recreation Of The 12 months 1985. You won’t count on nice issues from a recreation named “Water Pipe Burst,” however it’s because you lack the outstanding imaginative and prescient of your socialist forebears.
Wasserrohrbruch is an anxiousness recreation: a hidden ancestor to Cart Life. You’re a helpless yellow man in a cellar whose wasserrohr has bruch’d. You’ve gotten a bucket and nobody is coming that can assist you. Droplets kind on the ceiling and fall at velocity to the ground, the place they steadily start to flood the complete room, soaking your sneakers, your shirt, your neck, creeping greater and better.
You possibly can stem this tide by catching the droplets in your bucket, however that is inconceivable at size. The drops kind haphazardly and two-at-a-time, usually at opposing ends of the room. Catching all of them is inconceivable, and worse: when your bucket fills, it’s a must to ascend the steps on the left-hand facet of the room to throw your caught water from the window, as an increasing number of droplets kind and fill the room whilst you do it. It is like a videogame model of the artwork set up of a robotic arm making an attempt to mop up its personal blood. The tip is inevitable; it could actually solely be postponed. I like when video games have a message. I assume that is about Perestroika.
Genosse Pac-Man
Hase und Wolf is form of a banger, too. Not due to its gameplay. God no. Within the hand, the sport is only a worse Pac-Man—think about that recreation besides with extra fiddly controls that can invariably get you caught on corners. It is the Pac-Man they’d make you play in hell.
Hase und Wolf is fascinating as a result of it is a product of the good fraternity of socialist nations. In 2025, all of us stay in America. We share a language of Hanna Barbera cartoons and Simpsons gags—the USA workout routines a degree of cultural hegemony inconceivable in some other period.
It is the Pac-Man they’d make you play in hell.
In 1985, that wasn’t fairly as true, and a stable chunk of the globe lived underneath Soviet cultural hegemony as a substitute. Thus, Hare and Wolf—a recreation based mostly on the long-lasting Soviet cartoon Nu, Pogodi, aired by the GDR’s Deutscher Fernsehfunk state broadcaster underneath the German title Hase und Wolf. I feel this may make it East Germany’s first and solely licensed videogame.
It is also a nightmare. There’s the very fact you will get caught on partitions, certain, but additionally finishing a spherical makes your wolf enemies bear mitosis—growing in quantity till it is you towards a complete pack, desperately attempting to faucet the directional buttons simply flippantly sufficient to spherical a nook with out mashing your face into it. The one benefit is that your enemies endure from… one thing. Probably despair, given their relatable tendency to spend giant chunks of the sport occupying this or that nook of the map and simply form of vibrating barely. Give them time. They’re excited about stuff.
Unhealthy information all: My Bewertung is ausgeschieden
An in depth runner-up to Wasserrohrbruch is Abfahrtslauf, which is a recreation about snowboarding and dying. You’re a joyful purple man whose dream is to resolve a mountain, opposed solely by god and physics.
This isn’t Alpine Ski. For one factor, you are heading south as a substitute of north, For a second factor, the sport is virtually daring you to kill your self each second. The comparatively easy purpose is to navigate your skier between the piste markings and to the end line within the shortest time attainable. Should you do quite a lot of turning, you may keep a fairly smart velocity, get only a few factors on the finish, and convey disgrace on your self and your loved ones.
Much better is to level your skis firmly on the mountain’s base and pray. Heading straight down means you collect velocity alarmingly shortly, the sport’s jaunty soundtrack accelerating to the purpose that it turns into a high-pitched drone in your ears and the act of pulling off the required slaloms changing into an impossibility.
You will collide with a piste marker and be part of the ranks of the martyred lifeless, however proper as much as that time will probably be extremely entertaining to aim to take care of some degree of management over the runaway practice of your skis.
Poly-Performed Out
I feel, basically, what I discover fascinating in regards to the Poly-Play is which you could learn the socialist bloc’s hopes and failures in it. On the one hand, right here was the daring plan for the long run: new cadres of engineers, weaned on the flashing lights of the arcade, prepared to guide us right into a cybernetic communist future.
And on the opposite, effectively, the video games have been knock-offs working on a knock-off chip, already clearly outpaced by their friends in Japan and the US. That is not essentially down fully to some inherent inferiority—if something, it is a pretty outstanding adaptation to the circumstances of the CoCom commerce embargo that tried to cease many high-tech items reaching the USSR and its allies (and does not that ring a bell?)—however the info are what they’re, and it is exhausting to not see the Poly-Play as a testomony to the velocity at which the west and its allies have been outstripping their rivals on the daybreak of computing.
Then once more, the west did not have Wasserrohrbruch. Let’s name it a tie.
*A humorous side-note from the Poly-Play Wikipedia web page, which I am unable to confirm however very a lot take pleasure in, is that East German youngsters shortly discovered they might rip-off far more performs out of the machine by tricking it—insert a single pfennig in simply the fitting approach to idiot the machine into considering it had gotten a full 50. This was tolerated as a result of, hey, this ain’t no capitalist enterprise.
