Let's play Turnip Strength Tester! (Image by A Dangerous Business.)

When I was a child, I once got to go to a basement-level arcade game parlor at the McGraw-Hill Building (though I always wrongly remember it at the General Motors Plaza). There was a cute long-running slide-show called The New York Experience playing upstairs and an essentially deserted arcade downstairs. It was full of insane ganes from days gone by (many of them made of wood) that I have never seen again. I have no idea what happened to it.

The folks at A Dangerous Business blog went much further afield to have a similar experience when they headed to a small technical university outside of Moscow to visit the fun and dingy Museum of Soviet Arcade Games. Games that have “turnip” in their name just aren’t as popular since the Soviet Empire’s demise. (Thanks to boing boing for pointing me toward the post.) The following is an excerpt from the piece about the trip:

“Alexander Stakhanov, the guy who met us at the door and one of the four people that started this museum, gave us a quick rundown about which machines work and which don’t, how to put coins in (some are finnicky) and the general lay of the land. We actually understood most of it, though he was speaking rapidly and entirely in Russian. It wasn’t until after he was done and I said to Anjel ‘maybe we can leave our coats here’ that he realized that we were American.

He apologized for being able to speak so little English and we apologized for not being able to speak any Russian. He ran through a few of the key points again, handed us each a small plastic cup of 15-Kopek coins and excused himself to duck into the other room. At this point it was just a little after 7:30 and we were the only ones there. I took as many photos as I could before I just had to put down the camera and start playing.

This was one of the first games we tried. It’s called ‘Репка Силомер’ (Repka Silomer) or ‘Turnip Strength Tester.’ Later that night, we showed the photos to our homestay host, hoping for some sort of explanation. She had never played the game but told us that the concept was based on an old Russian children’s story.”