View Full Version : Poly Play - East German gaming goodness
o2william
07-14-2004, 02:47 PM
Just saw this on rec.games.video.classic:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/features/polyplay.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/features/images/polyplay_180_6.jpg http://www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/features/images/polyplay_203.jpg
Communist-era East German styling at its best. Wouldn't this be great to see supported in MAME someday?
sniperCCJVQ
07-14-2004, 02:50 PM
Just saw this on rec.games.video.classic:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/features/polyplay.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/features/images/polyplay_180_6.jpg http://www.bbc.co.uk/wiltshire/features/images/polyplay_203.jpg
Communist-era East German styling at its best. Wouldn't this be great to see supported in MAME someday?
Mame support it.
Pantechnicon
07-14-2004, 05:05 PM
Golly. :eek 2: . That's really cool in a Cold War way.
You gotta hand it to the old European socialist states. They knew their culture sucked and they tried so hard to throw these little bones of Western culture imitations at the proletariat: Russian blue jeans, Elton John concerts and now look here Poly Play! Is better than decadent Pac-Man, yes? LOL
My brother-in-law's wife actually grew up in East Germany back in the GDR days. I sent her the link to the the story to see if she (or her brother, who is a big computer geek) has any recollection of seeing or playing one of these. Hopefully I can have a first-hand account to share with us all here. Stand by, comrades...
I read something about that about the at the time when it was first supported by MAME, very few units were produced, but the game was REALLY popular, like Space Invaders with the blocked Coin-Slot :)
Makes sense though as it was the ONLY Arcade game produced in the GDR ever
robotriot
07-14-2004, 06:03 PM
There was also one East-German console, called the BSS 01 (Bildschirmspiel 01), which translates to "Screengame", or RFT TV-Spiel. It's a Pong-console and it wasn't produced for a very long time, my sources say they soon decided that producing clock radios would be more important :)
o2william
07-14-2004, 06:47 PM
There has been more talk about this in Usenet:
Link to Google Groups thread (http://groups.google.com/groups?dq=&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&threadm=FD2Jc.203%244d.1897%40newscontent-01.sprint.ca&prev=/groups%3Fhl%3Den%26group%3Drec.games.video.classic )
This page has lots more info and photos, including MAME screenshots and ROM links:
http://www.andys-arcade.net/personal/polyplay/polyplay.htm
I'm gonna have to fire this up in MAME when I get home from work tonight...