Alexander Stakhanov (left) and Alexander Vucman stand with the digital host of Magistral, one of the first games they repaired.

Photo: Alexander Zaitchik View Slideshow MOSCOW – If American teenagers during the Cold War ever stopped to consider how their Eastern bloc counterparts spent the weekend, they probably imagined dreary groups of Red Youth robotically singing hymns to Soviet wheat production and discussing the glories of socialist brotherhood from Hanoi to Havana.

They likely would have been surprised to know that in movie theaters, train stations and recreation centers across the U.S.S.R., packs of Soviet youth huddled around upright video games with coins lined up along the edge of the screen, same as at any mall in Jersey.

GALLERY:

The Lost Arcade Games of the Soviet Union

From the late '70s to the early '90s, Soviet military factories produced some 70 different video game models. Based largely (and crudely) on early Japanese designs, the games were distributed – in the words of one military manual – for the purposes of "entertainment and active leisure, as well as the development of visual-estimation abilities."

Production of the games ceased with the collapse of communism, and as Nintendo consoles and PCs flooded the former Soviet states, the old arcade games were either destroyed or disappeared into warehouses and basements.

It was mostly out of nostalgia that four friends at Moscow State Technical University began scouring the country to rescue these old games. So far they have located 32 of them and are doing their best to bring them back to life.

Last month, the four officially opened the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines in a Stalin-era bomb shelter under a university dormitory. Packed into two rooms are dozens of Soviet-made video game carcasses in various states of repair. Some work perfectly; others last for a few minutes, then fade. One common feature among them all is a lack of a high-score list.

"That kind of competition wasn't encouraged," explains Alexander Stakhanov, one of the museum's founders and engineers. "If you got enough points you won a free game, but there was no 'high score' culture as in the West."

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