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In the late 1980s, when Czechoslovakia was in the grip of Communism, a few kids aged 10 to 19 wrote video games that mocked the Soviets. They released them clandestinely, copying them from one audio cassette to another. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/10/how-indiana-jones-fought-the-communists-and-led-an-era-of-activist-video-games/ (1/11)
In these games, the kids used Western heroes such as Indiana Jones and Rambo to fight Communists, sometimes with the goal of returning to America.(2/11)
It started with František Fuka, who created the Czechoslovak game Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. He couldn’t see the movie, so he based his adventure on a few “very short summaries” he read in magazines. “I got it completely wrong!”(3/11)
Soon, other teens discovered that building video games was cooler than just playing them. There were at least seven Indiana Jones titles, all unlicensed, including one featuring a so-called ‘Indiana Joe.’ (4/11)
Among them was also ‘Indiana Jones in Wenceslas Square, on January 16, 1989,’ a game released after the massive protests that took place in Prague on that day. Police officers were mobilized to silence the crowds, eventually beating people and putting them into jail. (5/11)
The unleashed brutality triggered the creation of the game. People who could not fight back in real life built a fictional universe in which they could take matters into their own hands. The author of the game is still anonymous. Play the game here: https://primitivedesigns.github.io/remakes89/indy/en/ (6/11)
Rambo also played a part. He fought with his Soviet Doppelganger, Major Shatokhin. “Games allowed us, through humor and satire, to exert some kind of control over something we didn’t have power over,” says game developer Michal Hlaváč. (7/11)
Hlaváč was 14 at that time. He built the game Shatokhin together with his brother Juraj (aged 10) and Stanley Hrda (15). (8/11)
Miroslav Fídler also created activist games: “I was so proud of my technical abilities that I thought: There are five people in this country who can do things at my level, so I must produce bad code so that the State Police does not catch me.” (9/11)
These are some of the first activist video games ever created, says computer games historian @raguklemenso: “It’s really interesting that these games exist, and that they were ahead of their time.” (10/11)
Read more about the Czechoslovak gaming scene in @raguklemenso’s award-winning book, Gaming the Iron Curtain @mitpress : https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/gaming-iron-curtain (11/11)
