Perestroika

Perestroika is a simple arcade game that was written by three Russian programmers just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. The product has a political subtext and directly refers to the system of economic reforms initiated in the late 1980s by Mikhail Gorbachev.

In Perestroika, the player takes control of a frog-like creature and tries to get a dry leg from one end of the screen to the other, collecting colored balls along the way. The biggest obstacle to reaching the destination is the unstable ground - the hero moves forward jumping on the flowers of the water lily, and the latter constantly immerse, to appear a moment later in a completely different place. In later stages, an additional difficulty are the so-called bureaucrats, i.e. bad monsters trying to get our charges. Each contact of the frog with water or the opponent ends in death. The struggle continues until all "live" are exhausted.

The game was written in Borland C+++ and surprises with an unusual for those times visual setting in high resolution (640 by 350 pixels). Outside the former USSR the product was known as Toppler.

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Last updated on August 14, 2015