Contemporary culture owes a lot to an angry ape, a cheeky plumber and a very hungry circle. The iconic trio of Super Mario, Donkey Kong and Pac Man were the founding fathers not only of a huge global industry but also of a global culture. Thanks to their dominance, the world of gaming is now one of the most homogenous in the world, with the same heroes doing battle in Nagasaki, Nebraska and Novosibirsk.

But this global culture was born in a very specific milieu — the Coke-fuelled, hormone-addled world of the local arcade. True, the games that entertained the mulleted teens of middle America in the Eighties, and later took over the world a decade later, largely came out of Japan. But an alternative existed. All the while, in a galaxy not so far, far away, a subtly different palace of entertainments was keeping delinquents off the streets — the Soviet arcade.

“Substitute kopecks for quarters and many of these machines wouldn’t look out of place down the mall”

With little lasting legacy in the world of contemporary gaming, this culture could have slipped away into oblivion. Which is one reason why the enthusiastic nostalgists at the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines have carved out a cosy corner in the backstreets of leafy Baumanskaya in Moscow to preserve forever that youth-club-in-1986 feel. (A new branch is also imminent in St Petersburg.)

As so often when viewing the quasi-commercial cultural products of late socialism, it’s the sameness that hits you before the difference. Substitute kopecks for quarters and many of these machines wouldn’t look out of place down the mall. This convergence is, of course, more technological than ideological: there’s only so much cultural baggage you can inject into manoeuvring a car-shaped blob around a scrolling track. Games like Sea Battle are so infuriatingly obtuse in the gameplay that you don’t have time to wonder whether the battleship you’re sinking is an U-, an SS, or an HMS (You can play it online here).