My Gaming In Soviet Union and Post Soviet Times!.

Hello, my name is ColdBeer and this time I want to talk about gaming in the last years of Soviet Union and also in the post Soviet years in my beautiful home country of Lithuania. All the experience is my own, so I think it may be interesting for you to hear.

The earliest gaming experience I can remember was spending some time in pretty much illegal playhouses where people smuggled various consoles from the West and then charged people dollars to play them. Nobody accepted rubles anymore. It was the year of 1988 I think, and Soviet Union was about to go down, everyone felt that, so if you wanted to play you had to show some Western money.

I’m pretty much sure that I only watched how others play back then, because my family wasn’t rich or anywhere near the government. As a kid I have never learned how to speak Russian, it was an impossible language for me to learn and I had a lot of problems because of it.

You can probably imagine what it is like to not speak Russian in Soviet fucking Union. Some of the russian kids were beating me because of that, and some, way less debil, were my friends, but we could communicate with each other only by sign language, because their knowledge of Lithuanian was the same as my knowledge of Russian.

And sign language is not an easy choice if you want to tell someone about your day and future plans. So when I was about six years old my parents somehow bought me a clone of Nintendo Entertainment System called “Ziliton”, and it became a new way of communication with my fellows.

My parents never let me invite friends, because my mom always said “all your friends are thieves, they will steal my silver spoons”. So I was a good kid and I invited all my friends when my parents weren't at home. We played a lot of super mario and after that all my mother's spoons were still in place.

You can’t focus on stealing when you have a great game to play. So games in Soviet Union stopped crimes and made different nationalities play in peace together. I’m not lying, I once had russian, lithuanian, polish and jewish kid playing “Ziliton” with me together when my parents at work were thinking that I’m at school.

Yeah, I wasn’t very good with school from the very beginning, otherwise instead of creating Youtube videos I would probably be sitting in some office and be yelled at by my angry boss. But alas, I was not interested in grades, I was interested in computer games and everything Andrzej Sapkowski and Tolkien wrote.

I literally was skipping highschool to go home and read some of the Witcher. But let’s go back to the gaming world - My Ziliton wasn’t the only way we could play. Immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union zillions of shady gaming places opened up.

One of those places was in Palanga, a touristy Lithuanian city near the Baltic sea - I was spending all my summers in Palanga because my grandparents lived there and all we did with my friends day after day was searching for money and playing games in gaming house.

By saying “searching for money” I mean that each day we went to the beach and under the dressing cabins there were often some coins, because people were changing to the beach outfits in there and coins were dripping out of their pockets in the process, sliding through the gaps in the planks.

So, after we collected about two litas - that was equivalent for playing about one hour, we went to the gaming house and played Mortal Kombat. For money. Yeah, I was like 9 years old and I played Mortal Kombat for money. I was very good and usually tripled my litas so later in the evening I could go buy some chips and coca cola.

That was a new thing in Lithuania by then - before you could only see those in movies. I literally had my first potato chips when I was 9 years old. Gaming houses weren’t the only way to play the games - back then you could go and play cheaper in some strangers house.

That sounds terrible now, but we as little kids tend to go in the distant city block, go up to floor five by the stairs, because elevator wasn’t working or was full of piss, then knock on the door and enter a flat of some dude who had several consoles and several TV’s in his tiny room and then we played the games half of the day.

Nothing ever happened to us, that was just business. Illegal of course and unimaginable nowadays, but that worked and those old dudes got rich from us. I remember that we were counting the income of those guys and it was a week's salary in one day. We were like “oh my, I know what to do when I grow up.

I’ll be a creepy flat gaming dude”. I was a happy kid back then, but one day my mother called and she said that burglars got into our flat and stole everything they could. Among stolen items was my Ziliton console and all the cartridges. I was devastated, that was probably the saddest day in my life, because as a 9 year old kid, you react to things way stronger than an adult would.

So, my life was ruined, every day I was praying to god that those thieves would die a horrible death, so the spiders came from their eyes and then they burned in acid and then drowned in their own pain tears. I don’t actually know if God listened, because police never found those burglars or any of our items, maybe they still had all our stuff with them when he struck them with all the furry I prayed for.

I don’t know, now I’m an atheist, it sounds kinda silly for me, but back then my prayers were very sincere. Anyway, a year later, it was almost 1994 my father bought me a Sega Master System console and two cartridges. Ecco the Dolphin and Sonic the Hedgehog.

The price of the console in Lithuania was about 4 or 5 month salary back then. That was a really expensive item to have. So, my playing with my friends resumed - back then I had even almost mastered my Russian language, ja gavaril ocen dazi charasho, because I was watching a lot of movies with Russian translation, but I couldn’t use it in real life anymore because all my Russian friends after the collapse of the Soviet Union left Lithuania and the only Russian friend I had was Igor from the fifth floor.

Later Igor also left. Anyway, a few years later I got my first personal computer and started to buy pirated CD’s of various games. Back then there was no possibility to buy anything original and if there was, the price was the same as now - about 60 dollars for a game.

And the monthly salary back then was about 100 dollars. Pirates were selling openly, nobody arrested them or anything, so there were huge markets full of pirates in the open. I remember how every Saturday me and my friends were going to some old theatre in the middle of Vilnius to buy Starcraft - because it was trending back in 1998.

I had a rich friend named Povilas, who had a computer way before any of us did. And his father was always playing Starcraft and he allowed us to watch. He acted like he wasn’t happy when we were watching his every move, but actually he had no choice but to let us be, because he liked to play basketball with us and wanted to be friendly.

So I watched how he is building all those little houses and turrets and that was a magical thing, I was in love with that game from the first sight. So I bought Russian version, English wasn’t available, and it was terrible, because all the voice acting was done by one dude with a cheap microphone.

He even tried to do creepy zerg voices all by his own. Sadly I lost that CD, probably I threw it out as trash when I got English version. Now it would be a gem to have. So that’s probably it. After some time piracy was banned, but salaries increased many times so I was able to buy games officially for the first time in my life.