Video games on the other side of the iron curtain

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Bregalad
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Video games on the other side of the iron curtain

Post by Bregalad »

It's a fact that the fall of the iron curtain happened in the middle of the lifetime of our favourite console, the NES.

I know that even before the iron curtain fell, they were already having clone computers and consoles (famiclones ?), of which the "Dendy" seems to be the most popular. Those computer clones were mostly made by sending industrial spies in the west and reverse engineering their computers. Tetris was developed on those kind of computers, a couple of years before the fall of the iron curtain.

Does anyone know how much time it took for official games to be released/localized in Eastern Europe ? Was the official PAL NES ever released there ? What about the SNES ? In which language were the games (which had significant amount of text) usually available ?
Drag
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Re: Video games on the other side of the iron curtain

Post by Drag »

I'm only guessing, but considering Russia only seems to know about the Dendy (if adverts from the time are anything to go by), they probably never got the official PAL Famicom. I don't know about any other consoles, but it's hard to believe that they had nothing until recently. I guess it comes down to figuring out when Russian started appearing on language select menus for PAL games.
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Bregalad
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Re: Video games on the other side of the iron curtain

Post by Bregalad »

I don't remember ever seeing Russian, or any other easter european lauguage, on any official PAL release language selection.

Usually it's limited to : English, German, French, Spanish. More rarely, Italian, Dutch and Swedish can be here, too. I guess the others are just out of luck.
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rainwarrior
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Re: Video games on the other side of the iron curtain

Post by rainwarrior »

The localization set that I have most often seen used by game developers was referred to as FIGS, for French, Italian, German and Spanish, after the English original. I'm not sure to what extent there is a standard set, but this is a common one.
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