Arthur sent me a link to an article in Wired discussing Soviet arcade games, which included a photo gallery. He was asking which of those I played.

Here is a selection of games I remember:

Most of those aren’t computer games – I think they used rather trivial electronics and were mostly mechanical. The display used lights behind painted glass, rather than a monitor. Some of the games shown in the articles are somewhat more advanced, but those came after I was already getting older.

The article is also not right about how much 15 kopecks were worth. It was slightly less than a price of a loaf of bread. And no, you couldn’t buy “a small meal” for that amount. I would say it felt to us at the time roughly how a buck would feel to an American kid today. So, those games were relatively expensive (you couldn’t play them for hours and hours), but not ridiculously so. Being university professors, my parents were making between 400 and 500 roubles a month (together) at the time, so playing once a day would cost about 1% of family budget. A few other prices for comparison: a movie ticket cost 10-20 k, a portion of ice-cream was 15-20, a loaf of bread – 16-20, a bus ride was 5k. On the other hand, I believe that Soviet cars sold for 3-10,000 roubles at the time, so one would have to save for quite a few years to buy one.

In the later part of my childhood 15 k was worth quite little, the trick was finding the coins.