Recently, the streaming service Okko released a documentary series titled The History of Russian Computer Games, about how the video game industry developed across the post-Soviet space—starting with the USSR era.
Anton Vert recommended it to me, immediately pointing out a few downsides. But it’s one thing to listen to smart people, and another to watch it yourself and then share your own opinion that nobody asked for.
In 30–40 minute episodes, the series talks about different milestones in the industry’s formation—first in the USSR, and then across the entire territory of this former Soviet empire. At least, that’s how the series is sometimes positioned (I’ll come back to this in more detail later).
The series is built around two components. On the one hand, the main “narrator” is Alexander Kuzmenko, the former editor-in-chief of Igromania magazine (from 2004 to 2010) and now a video game expert. He’s in every episode: he talks about all the games mentioned in the series, and he’s also the voice-over who occasionally explains bits of industry jargon. On the other hand, the creators give the floor to veterans, who tell the story of their own products that made it into this chronicle.
The first five or six episodes lay out events from those years in a fairly chronological way—and the authors don’t even start with games, but with Soviet arcade machines and the Elektronika handheld games, which were essentially stolen clones of similar foreign devices. But the first game they mention—and historically, really the first “Russian” game—is, of course, Tetris. Yes, those of us in the industry have known for ages that Tetris was made by a Soviet programmer, but outside the industry plenty of people still don’t realize that, even though a biopic about its creator came out last year.
And then we get the legendary Perestroika, Lines, the arrival of the Dendy consoles in Russia, a brief history of pirate localizations, Corsairs, Vangers, and so on and so on… There have already been several books about the key games in this history, including Time of Games! by Andrey Podshibyakin, which I read back in 2019.
But in the later episodes the creators start rushing at a full gallop, making some pretty specific choices about what to cover and how.
There’s no point in going into each episode in detail—it’s better to describe what I liked and didn’t like about the series overall.
Let’s start with the positives:
- Alexander Kuzmenko, the main “voice” of the entire series, is a very good storyteller. He’s genuinely someone who’s deep in the subject. And he tells it in an engaging, emotional way. Yes, at times it’s a bit subjective, but his narration doesn’t get tiring.
- Thank God the industry isn’t that old yet, so most of the people mentioned are still alive and, most importantly, were able to talk about their games, successes, and failures themselves.
- A lot of key events in the industry’s development are shown or at least mentioned.
- In episode 8 they show a photo with me for a few seconds—that’s a 100% plus for the series 😉
And now for the downsides:
- Even though Kuzmenko is an excellent narrator, in this format we’re essentially getting one person’s interpretation of events. The interviewees add details, but the interpretation—the descriptive framing of everything—mostly comes from Alexander alone. There’s no second viewpoint (and on some topics there easily could have been).
- The early episodes still handle the material pretty well, but later the storytelling becomes pretty fragmented.
- Episode five is about the boom of “Russian” quest games. Yes, both Petka and Vasily Ivanovich and The Pilot Brothers really are masterpieces. But back then Gag became just as iconic—everyone knew about it and talked about it. The series doesn’t mention it at all.
- Some games get a lot of attention, while other masterpieces aren’t mentioned, or are only touched on in passing—like Space Rangers (which, in many circles, also became a cult classic).
- And in the episode about casual games, they barely talk about casual games themselves. Alawar company is mentioned, but more in the context of “not making it onto the mobile market.” They only say a couple of words about Farm Frenzy by the Belarusian studio Melesta—basically just that such a game existed. They say nothing about Zombie Farm by another Belarusian company, Vizor, which conquered the entire Russian-speaking market. And they don’t talk at all about the excellent hidden-object games, of which an enormous number were made in our region—almost setting the quality bar.
- The most infamous embarrassment of our game dev scene—Lada Racing Club—gets almost half an episode, while the genuinely good Truckers, which was playing on the very same field, isn’t mentioned again.
- Entire chunks of truly key games and events aren’t there at all—as if they never existed. I can imagine that, in the current climate, some studios and creators didn’t want to give interviews to a Russian series, but they still could have been mentioned, and the story could still have been told. So that I’m not just making empty claims, I’ll simply list what, in my view, absolutely had to be included—if the creators were going to swing for a full-on HISTORY:
- Across the entire series, there isn’t A SINGLE WORD about Nival in any of its incarnations, or about Sergey Orlovskiy. And Sergey is an interesting storyteller in his own right—his talks at KRI (the Russian Game Developers Conference) drew crowds again and again. I’m not asking them to cover every game, but Blitzkrieg and Allods would easily outclass many of the other games they did mention.
- In the episode about Wargaming’s games—World of Tanks and World of Warships—they tell the story very well, with both Sergey Burkatovsky and Malik Khatazhaev. But they didn’t give the floor to anyone from the Belarusian team—only to those who are in Russia now. And about Caliber from that same orbit they basically said one sentence—“Wargaming joined the project”—and then forgot it entirely (yes, later they parted ways with 1C, but then don’t mention it like that in the first place). And they really should have talked about World of Warplanes, too. Sure, the project never reached the heights of ships and especially tanks, but if you’re telling the story of how the franchise was created, I’d at least mention it.
- And in general, the entire Ukrainian game dev scene—something that for decades had been lumped into “Russian game dev,” something people were proud to claim—has now been completely erased from the story. Yes, formally the series is called The History of Russian Computer Games. But they talked about Belarusian Wargaming and its Tanks, and they mentioned Farm Frenzy by the Belarusian studio Melesta. Ukraine, on the other hand, simply didn’t exist. Just like that, they threw out S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the Metro trilogy, the legendary Cossacks, the Sherlock Holmes game series, and many, many others. That’s a massive minus for the whole team behind the series.
4. The final episode is just sad and embarrassing. It reeks of a commissioned promo piece—the kind that makes you suspect the whole series may have been made for this very purpose. Because this still isn’t history. It’s three games that haven’t even been released yet, but they do come with “Russian flavor”: traditional folk shirts and that supposedly “authentic Russian spirit.” It looks especially cynical against the backdrop of the very real masterpieces from Ukraine that the series “forgot.”
So I have very mixed feelings about the show. I can see the blatant bias, but at least the first half is interesting and pretty solid. And the Wargaming episode was clearly made with real affection for the project, even though I’m sad they didn’t give Viktor Kisly a voice—he can tell a story incredibly well. Especially since it’s his brainchild.
It’s worth watching—but keep in mind that at some point the creators’ censorship kicks in, and they stop mentioning certain facts altogether.
