I remember the moment vividly — the first time I launched the original Civilization. It was a late evening sometime around 1994 or 1995. After finishing my homework, I sat down at my PC. Wanting to play a little, I inserted a disc from one of those legendary Russian pirate collections like “100 (200, 500,
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Have you ever noticed how many international celebrities, when visiting Red Square, tend to pose not in front of the Spasskaya Tower — but in front of Saint Basil’s Cathedral? Oddly enough, it was a video game that helped me understand what might be behind this choice: one of the entries in Sid Meier’s Civilization
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Disclaimer: This post includes references to events that echo the current war in Ukraine. If that is something you’re not comfortable with, please consider stopping here.I remember it almost like it was yesterday. It was 1993 or 1994. I had just come home from school, eaten lunch, sat down at my 486 (a personal computer
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Content warning: This post contains references to events that resonate with the current war in Ukraine. If this is distressing to you, please consider skipping it. Friendly Fire, or Not So Friendly After All Back in 1995, the flight simulator Su-27 Flanker, developed by Russian studio Eagle Dynamics and published by Strategic Simulations, caused controversy
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As someone who rarely buys games at launch, I decided to “play Smuta on YouTube” — that is, to watch playthroughs by other gamers via video streams. And while doing so, I became particularly interested in how players reacted to the now-infamous scene in Smuta where Kuzma Minin proposes that the citizens of Nizhny Novgorod
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On April 4, 2024, the video game Smuta (“The Time of Troubles”) was released exclusively for the Russian market. Funded by the Russian government through the Internet Development Institute (IRI) to the tune of more than 500 million rubles, the game was designed to promote state-approved content among young people and to strengthen “civic identity”
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Dear friends! Today on Video Games with History, we’re excited to share both an exclusive and a brand-new format for our channel: a podcast interview with the developers of the upcoming video game In the Name of the Party! — Mikhail (game design, code) and Evgeny (visual design). Together with our guide Larisa, we delve
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We continue our exploration of catastrophic memory tied to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In previous posts, I’ve discussed games such as Defending the White House (1992), Siege of the White House (1993), and Civil War (1992), all of which directly engage with the historical events of the early 1990s. But today’s game is
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A Simulator of the 1993 Constitutional Crisis
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One day, Frosya the cat had a terrible dream: the neighbor’s dog, Uzor, had kidnapped her kitten. When she woke up, she realized it hadn’t just been a dream. To rescue her child, she would have to enter a UFO, find Nessie, and even cross into the world of the dead — all of it
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