From the Rubik’s Cube to Ecco the Dolphin: meet the programmers from Hungary and former Comecon countries who helped shape a generation of video games
By now, there’s a library’s worth of writing on the history of video games and one could fill the Danube with documentaries made on the subject.
‘Dunát lehet vele rekeszteni’ – ‘one could dam the Danube with it’ – is a Hungarian expression, denoting the large quantity or availability of something. The author makes a play on it by adding the river Moldva, to underline this ubiquity: ‘Dunát-Moldvát lehetne rekeszteni’.
Yet, when it comes to digital histories, Central and Eastern Europe remains something of a blank spot on our mental maps. One might assume that games would hardly have been developed in a region cut off behind the Iron Curtain. But, in fact, the opposite is true: it was precisely this relative isolation that fostered a thriving and unique gaming culture in the former Comecon countries.The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance or COMECON was the Soviet-led economic organisation, comprising the Eastern Bloc as well as other communist regimes from around the world.
Perhaps only a few gamers today are aware that a genuine gaming industry developed in Hungary during the socialist and post-socialist 1980s and 1990s which produced – through unique, home-brewed methods – world-class software for export to the West.Home-brewed methods Sufni-tuning is Hungarian slang composed of tuning and sufni, a colloquial term for a shed or workshop.
Magical pixels
Beginning its world-conquering journey in 1979, the “magic cube” became a symbol of sorts. Its global triumph carried with it the implication that the desire to play knows no boundaries, that political isolation cannot stifle human creativity, and that not only was it possible to break through the Iron Curtain, but that significant commercial successes could come from doing so. Ernő Rubik’s cube was more than a success in terms of sales: it was a harbinger of freedom.
Ernő Rubik (born 1944) is a Hungarian architect and inventor, most famous for the Rubik’s Cube (1974).
This optimistic “attitude to life” still lingered a few years later. At the end of 1982, when the recently founded Novotrade, one of Hungary’s first joint stock companies, led by Gábor Rényi, announced a competition for computer game proposals, ideas immediately flooded in from all over the country.The first half of the 1980s was a heroic era in the history of video games. In Europe, it was marked by two computers: the British-made ZX Spectrum with its rubber keys and black colour – it looks rather like a toy today – and the American Commodore 64. The latter stood out primarily for its colour palette, scrolling capabilities, and an audio chip, unique for its synth-like sound. At the time the Novotrade competition was announced on state television, these machines were not officially available in Hungary due to the Western embargo imposed on Comecon countries (at least, not for anyone with only Hungarian forints – the national currency – to spend).
Nevertheless, more than a thousand ideas were submitted to the competition, both in text form, and as elaborate storyboards. The selection process was conducted in Hungary and abroad, with winning entries developed domestically on computers imported by Novotrade and loaned to budding developers. A unique agreement was reached between Novotrade and Andromeda, the company of a man named Robert Stein – a 1956 exile living in London – which had previously traded in chess computers and computer parts. Stein would distribute the games created by Hungarian programmers in the West, and the programmers would receive their salaries in foreign currency.
The 1956 revolt in Hungary was a popular movement that called for the communist regime to fulfil its democratic promise and for an end to Soviet interference. After its brutal repression, around 200,000 Hungarians fled abroad. A 56er remains an expression used to this day to designate those who fled or were forced into exile as a consequence of these events.
Small teams of freelancers, students, computer engineers and scientists dove headfirst into the development of their projects. They programmed games in their free time or as second jobs, often in the middle of the night, neglecting at times their own families. Most of these games were built on simple ideas and graphic solutions. They might appear naive today. But they often used deeply creative and ingenious approaches.The first Hungarian computer games appeared in Western stores in 1983. To mention a few: Caesar the Cat, with its eponymous, mouse-chasing cat in the pantry; or the Chinese Juggler, who balances increasingly fast spinning plates on long sticks while running back and forth on a podium. In Arctic Shipwreck, a mammoth – strikingly modelled in 3D – balances an ice sheet to prevent shipwrecked sailors from slipping into the water. Buffalo Roundup stars a cowboy on horseback herding buffalo into a corral. Dancing Monster is perhaps the most morbid amongst these games, featuring a jeans-wearing monster who dances to the music of Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg and whose body parts must be shot off one by one in order to be transformed into a beautiful princess.
One of the greatest Hungarian-made successes of this pioneering period was Eureka!, a text-based time-travel adventure game written by British author Ian Livingstone, who had become world famous for his fantasy books combining dice-based role play elements with “chose your own adventure” style narration. Eureka! was based on a concept developed by the British company Domark: the first player to complete the game and call a coded secret phone number would receive £25,000.
By the mid-to-late 1980s, the Novotrade-Andromeda collaboration had become such a success that permanent internal development teams were established within Novotrade. The game development department was headed by Donát Kiss, while the art director was Tamás Révbíró, who had previously worked for the Hungaroton record label and was known for his translations of novels by Gerald Durrell and P.G. Wodehouse, and the lyrics of John Lennon. In addition to outstanding mathematicians such as László Mérő, there were graphic designers, rock musicians, and songwriters who joined the company to work on individual projects. These included Tamás Waliczky, who would become world famous as a digital artist, Attila Horváth, known for his lyrics for bands Charlie, Korál, and Piramis, and László Kiss, one of the founders of the bands Európa Kiadó and URH.
László Mérő is a mathematician and widely known popular science author; Tamás Walickzy is a visual artist and animator, who notably represented Hungary at the 2019 Venice Biennial; Charlie, Korál, Piramis, Európa Kiadó, and URH are all rock bands – mostly belonging to the underground – that had their heyday in the 1980s.Legendary Commodore games were developed in Hungary during this period, such as the Indiana Jones-inspired Scarabaeus, Impossible Mission 2 (a logic platform game about a secret agent), and The Last Ninja, which was developed by a team independent of Novotrade, only to become one of the most spectacular Commodore 64 games of all time. As recounted in Pixelhősök (Pixel Heroes) and Vakondok 4: Végigjátszás (Moleman 4: the Playthrough), a documentary which presents Hungary’s gaming history, Novotrade’s studio in Lipótváros was more than a gaming development centre – it was something of an intellectual workshop.
Platform games are built around the objective to move the player character between points in an environment.
Interestingly, it was Hungary’s nascent gaming industry – a sector only very loosely overseen by an already sclerotic state apparatus – that really opened a window (or, if you will, a door!) to the Western world. Foreign and domestic newspapers regularly referred to the Rubik’s Cube as a kind of “creative herald” of the burgeoning Hungarian digital game industry. They attributed the sector’s success to the visual world of the renowned Hungarian animation industry and the isolation-induced creativity of Hungarian programmers. This gradually shifted in the second half of the 1980s, with foreign newspaper articles about Novotrade tending to praise rather the company's free spirit, exemplary of Hungary’s model of “hybrid capitalism”.By the end of the decade, Novotrade International (later renamed Appaloosa) had developed such famous games as the 1992 Ecco the Dolphin. One of the most beautiful games of its time, it became a global hit on the Sega Genesis, Sega CD, and Game Gear consoles. Featuring a bottlenose dolphin as its protagonist, this “dolphin simulator” has players swim through a vast world, and through time, to find their lost companions, a theme that chimes well with other pacifist, animal-themed Hungarian video games of the time.
Alongside this official game development, more amateur (in today’s parlance, “indie”) game development also flourished in Hungary, partly on the more affordable Commodore Plus/4 and Commodore 16 devices. By the mid-1990s, these independent development teams, specialising mainly in Amiga and PC machines, were becoming increasingly professional. By the end of the decade highly successful games, such as Digital Reality’s space-themed strategy series Imperium Galactica had emerged from these developers.
“If I ever talk of this at the club…”
In Hungary, this period also saw the rise of a distinctive subculture that developed alongside the formal games industry, rooted primarily in the “illegal” circulation of software.
If I ever talk... The main character in the West German series Es muß nicht immer Kaviar sein (It can’t always be Caviar), ends every episode with this quip. It became a catchphrase in Hungary after it was aired on Hungarian TV in the early 80s.
The term “illegal” is used cautiously, as there was no actual software law in Hungary at the time. Since Western games were not available through official channels, they were mostly smuggled in through Germany, Austria, and Yugoslavia in the form of pirated copies, and were then exchanged in various clubs.Almost every major city had a computer club, where the geeks of the era met weekly, returning home with floppy disks and cassette tapes full of games. The disks and tapes often corrupted or became demagnetised on the subway or tram.
The most famous of these clubs was led by Lajos Tóth and convened at the Csokonai Cultural Centre in Budapest (nicknamed “Csoki”, or “Chocolate”). Closed “elite” meetings were held for gamers on Fridays, while on Saturdays anyone could participate in a public gathering of software exchange.
The most significant event organised by Csoki was the annual Computer Karácsony (“Computer Christmas”) held at the Budapest Technical University. Thousands of attendees from all over the country would gather for a two-day-long frenzy of public copying that seems unimaginable today. Apart from written correspondence, such events provided the only opportunity for many to meet like-minded people, play games, and exchange ideas in the pre-internet era.
Almost every major city had a computer club, where the geeks of the era met weekly, returning home with floppy disks and cassette tapes full of games.
But these clubs’ significance was greater still: they nurtured the first Hungarian circles of the so-called “demoscene” subculture, considered today as a precursor to multimedia art. These groups created spectacular technical demos. Often inserted before the computer games themselves, they were exchanged and sent abroad to compete with similar teams. Several pioneering Hungarian magazines dedicated to computer games also started out in these clubs.
Similar teams The Vakondok 5: Stamps Back (Moleman 5: Stamps back) documentary provides a wonderful overview of this subculture.
There is life behind the Iron Curtain too!
Although Hungary had the most developed gaming industry in Eastern Europe, similar developments started taking place in other Comecon countries. In Czechoslovakia, where the ZX Spectrum computer held sway, amateur-made, text-based adventure games were initially the most popular. The situation was similar in Yugoslavia. As in Hungary, broadcasting programmes via radio and television became widespread for a time: since cassette tapes were used to store computer programmes – in the form of data encoded as audio frequencies – a user only had to record a few minutes of broadcasted audio to copy a game to a cassette (these were generally very simple, homemade programmes).
In Poland, the story began with mostly sci-fi-themed amateur adventure games. But by the end of the 1980s, professional companies specialising in software exports had been established, including California Dreams, which developed the internationally successful racing game Street Rod. In the German Democratic Republic, computer clubs were heavily monitored by the Stasi – the secret police. While the situation was no better in the Soviet Union, a brilliant game nevertheless emerged there in 1985: Tetris. Developed by computer engineer Alexey Pajitnov, the game made its way to the West via Hungary after the above-mentioned Robert Stein noticed it at the SZTAKI computer research institute.
But that’s another story, which could be the subject of another article, book, or film…
Subject of another article... Tetris' adventurous history was adapted in John S. Baird's 2023 thriller Tetris, distributed by Apple TV.
