Thank you! I also watched your videos not so long ago. Liked especially one about “PS1 launch experience!”. Thank you for your comment, I’ll continue making these, stay tuned)
Greetings from Finland. Around 2001, Vyborg main marketplace was place to go for PS1 bootlegs. They only cost around 10 finnish Markka (currency before Euro) per title, compared to Tallinn, Estonia, where the prices were about 50 Markkas per title. 😅
As a Brazilian, I am absolutely fascinated by the fact that the history of game consumption in Russia is extremely similar to what happened here in Brazil in the 90s and early 2000s. Clones and piracy were the law, and you only bought a Playstation 1 or 2 if it was unlocked. And all my friends had collections of pirated games, bought in small stores or street vendors. Being a third world country, it's obvious that children and teenagers didn't have much money, but they managed to get, even if by force, the game they wanted.
Your work is a goldmine! I was struck with the thought today that there are so many old games from countries I don't know about, in the same vein there's a few from my country. So I've been on a bit of a rabbit hole dive to learn more. This is important for the preservation of games history! Feels like you play a big part of that with this channel to bring awareness to these games. Thank you!!
Came from Twitter, thanks a lot for this video, really nice to know bootleg gaming history around the world! I'm from Brazil and bootleg gaming here was basically the only way for many of us to enjoy games. I'm subscribing now, thanks again for the video and looking forward for more :)
Just discovered your channel and love the history and message behind it. Working on a project for my company to find ways to bring in gaming devices into Russia as it is and still going to try. Thank you 🙏🏼.
I have been obsessed with bootleg gaming for years now, and I would love to hear more about the PlayStation 1 and 2 bootlegging scene sometime down the line.
This was very fascinating and informational. I love learning more about the history of gaming around the world - most of this information is not known in the United States.
meanwhile here in germany. everything had a good translation and was legally available. but i still didn't knew anyone with legit games D; ...aside from magazine demos. heck, even said magazines had pages to order mod chips :D
your presentation style is fantastic & i love info on how different my favorite things are outside my own country. definitely subscribing, hope you find the time to do more english stuff!
I only got my PSOne around mid 00's so all I saw were broken Russian bootlegs. The quality was just soo bad that sometimes I cried myself to sleep after spending all my monthly allowance on a broken game. Imagine like somebody taking a script from a decent game, putting it through Google Translate and then back and changing the font to the worst Captcha font you've ever seen in your life and replacing any recorded dialogues with the recordings of Stephen Hawking. What I did eventually was I started downloading and burning isos in the internet cafe that was nearby.
Always fascinating to take a peek behind the Iron Curtain. I grew up on a Scottish Island, and through the 80s into the 90s, we were visited every year by these huge Russian Fish Factory ships. They'd buy fish from the fish market, and process it all onboard the ship to take bake to the USSR (as it was then). And every day, the off-duty crew would come ashore, loaded with cash, and buy up as much cheap western goods as possible. Instant coffee, cheap pairs of jeans, sneakers, etc etc. And there was a steady trade in cheap portable TVs and ZX Spectrums, but even things like kettles, microwave ovens, portable radios, coffee machines - all for the black market. They must have made a fortune. Actually, my parents were driving a Lada (a cheap Russian clone of a Fiat). Lada's had a terrible reputation in the UK, because they were so cheap, but mechanically, they were extremely reliable. Their electrical systems were usually pretty terrible, but they worked. And because you could buy a 2nd hand Lada cheaper in the UK than you could in Russia, you'd see the fishermen buying the odd Lada, which they'd take home, strapped to the deck of the factory ship. My parents were offered about £200 for theirs - but they couldn't afford to sell it.
Bootlegs are super interesting! Back when the Half-Life 2 Beta Leak occurred, there were even physical bootleg copies of the beta leak being made and sold in Russia. I heard some of the bootleggers tried to pass it off as the full game being released early when it was a mess of unconnected levels that couldn't be played through like a normal game. I did a short informational video about one of these discs that I found that you might find interesting.
16:33 I don't know if anybody else would be interested but god I want to know everything about Russian Bootleg Who Wants To Be A Millionaire for the PlayerStyle
This is brilliant! I love collecting and playing Russian and other eastern european bootlegs and this video had alot of information I never knew about! Greetings from Finland!
gracias por compartir, veo tus videos con los subtítulos generados en automático por youtube, así tus videos parecen una traducción rusa pirata xD, pero igualmente gracias por compartir
I’m always fascinated by Russian video game history. As large of a country Russia is oddly enough we never hear much history on RU-vid about their exclusive stories.
Riggsy brought me here ✌️ Your channel is dope bro ❤️ Your content. I was born in England and live in Australia and I have mad ❤️ for the European retro game market. I've always been interested in the Russian gaming world since I first heard whispers of the Dendy 20 years ago. The Spectrum was my jam in the U.K and I'd love more information about your spectrum marketplace... I'd love to hear about the Arcade scene in Russia (if any?) Were U allowed pong in the u.s.s.r ?? 😂
Arcades in USSR were mostly clones of 70s electromechanical devices. There even were Pac-Man clone, based on "Snow Queen" fairy tale by H. C. Anderssen.
Thank you for this! I'm from the Netherlands and have collection of ZX Spectrum clones from around the world, several from Russia (or USSR). Hoping you can touch on the subject of Spectrum clones in Russia some day!
@@RussianVideoGameComrade I have Дельта С-02, Арсенал Компаньон 2, Дубна-48К (famous for both the movie _Jason Bourne_ and the fact that it runs at only half speed), NTK Composite, Нафаня and 3 Ukrainian machines (Sintez 2, Робик and Орель БК-08) 😄
Greetings Victor. Spreading da vibe outta Russia internationally! Hope that you'll be good at this. It's so nice to see, that russian man who you are following for the years started his most ambicious project. Everything will be alright! Good luck!
Thank you for your fantastic videos, soon binged them all! It is interesting how close Sweden are Russia (geographical) and I don't know anything of this! Though I have been to the retro arcade museum in St Petersburg. Please make more! Tech tale videos too!
Yet another person who found this video thanks to John Riggs. :D Great video! And as a Finn, I can confirm the Finnish flea markets have a lot of bootlegged PS1 games there, I've seen so many of them! I also remember our mom getting a Harry Potter game for the PS1 from a co-worker and we had no idea why it wouldn't play on our PS1. :'D
i collect chinese bootlegs and come across a lot of russian bootleg roms on my searches. i see a lot of these weird famiclone educational computers with keyboard support, and id love to know more about them! did kids actually like them? anyway love the channel , good work :)
My friend had one back in early 00s, I got excited to find out that it had BASIC but it turned out to be almost nothing like Quick BASIC I was learning at school, lol. Other than that, it was a usual famiclone and he played same thing as others did, not touching the keyboard almost at all.
Great video bro love this. Being from Poland your Media Markt reference gave me a massive nostalgia rush. I remember when Witcher 1 just came out they had entire aisles filled with hundreds of copies of that game. Growing up we had family friends with bootleg Dendy games that were always just a little bit different, for example, Mario World with blood haha. Love the Gurren Lagann shirt too great taste. Cheers 🍻
When purchasing a game based solely on a bootleg sticker, wasn't it a very likely scenario that you sometimes ended up buying a game that you already had... just with a different sticker or title? This was a really interesting video. It's fascinating to hear the history of video games from a country where the whole gaming scene was so very different to the rest of us
Hello from fans of the channel! Looking forward for more content! Also, this is surprisingly rare content type on the RU-vid so I'm totally looking forward with it!
I have quite a few Russian Bootleg Mega Drive games! My fav is Second Samurai! Love the history on video games in other countries, as an American we never really saw bootlegs in the 80s and 90s unless video rental stores bought them directly from China or people immigrating from other countries bringing them with them! The very first bootleg I ever played was a bootleg of super Mario 3 back before the game was released in the states, a mom and pop video rental store had acquired a copy through one of their distribution outlets! Love the channel!
Fantastic video! I had no idea Russia was crazy with the bootlegs. I'm a bit of a bootleg aficionado myself. In nyc growing up I had chinatown, and in chinatown bootlegs reigned supreme. And they were affordable. I almost forgot about the famous Nintendo pii . The guy told me it was "two better" than the wii. I laughed my way out of the store.
Да, Седой... Твой разговорный английский требует практики. Эти не естественные паузы между словами звучат очень забавно. Может в дискорде собрать людей для регулярной практики? И возможно "редактуры" текста видео, который тоже выдаёт non native English speaker
О! вот такой английский я понимаю! этому меня учили )))) а то эти американцы совсем не грамотные, с их произношением, они бы точно год, без троек в четверти, не закончили )))))))
Great video! Bootleg games have interested me since I was a kid since, even in the US, I had plenty of Gameboy multicarts with Japanese games I couldn't understand. Most of what I understand about the markets these came from come from videos like the ones Kinamania has translated, so I appreciate you wanting to make videos to give English speakers more context. The things I know the least about from this video that I would be interested to learn more of are those fully translated and voice-acted Playstation and PC games. Were there specific groups that released most of these or that were known for making high-quality translations? Were there more of them that tried to make their translations official? And honestly the fact that they were voice-acted is interesting enough, since practically every Japanese to English fan translation I hear about usually leaves in the Japanese voice acting and adds subtitles.
Ever played (codemasters/bohemia-interactive) "Operation-Flashpoint-Resistance" on the PC _(circa 1GHz CPU with 128Megabyte-to-512MB RAM and a Nvidia TNT/RagePro or Geforce/Radeon GPU)?_ I have played as Russians or USA or the resistance side, usually with extra harmless humour added such as modding it to have terminator-t800 robots in it and comedic giant mech-bots. It is meant to be a serious game but it is too much fun to play it in a jokey way. Great for multiplayer. Surely there are Russian gamers (especially with the retro-PC scene) who also have had a lighthearted play of that game. My comment has no hate in it and I do no harm. I am not appalled or afraid, boasting or envying or complaining... Just saying. Psalms23: Giving thanks and praise to the Lord and peace and love.
What I want to know is what PS1 games you played besides Final Fantasy 8 as a kid? And have you been able to go back and play the classics that you never got to play when you were younger? Like Metal Gear Solid or Symphony of the Night.
