I’ve Been Playing Homebrew Video Games Made By Soviet Teens In The 1980s
How Czechoslovak students smuggled dissident ideas in amongst the pixels
How do I get into this bathroom?
I’m playing “P.R.E.S.T.A.V.B.A.”, a text-adventure game from 1988 that has me crawling around inside a dingy abandoned warehouse somewhere in Czechoslovakia. I’m trying to get into a bathroom, which is locked with a four-digit code. I eventually guess the number — it’s a reference to the original Soviet invasion of the country.
I open the door and find a filthy, stinking toilet … and a bowl.
What’s inside the bowl? A copy of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.
“Ať žije Vítězný únor!” the game jeers. That translates as, roughly, “Long live Victorious February!” — a faux-patriotic cheer about the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948.
This game is not patriotic. On the contrary, it’s a black, mordant attack on Soviet-era life and Communist icons. Before I’m finished with it, the game will require me to burn the copy of Das Kapital with a lighter — the fire of which “emits the light of progress”, as the game quips. I’ll also have to deface other symbols of the USSR, and in the final scene, destroy a statue of Lenin with dynamite.
