TechnoLive: The History of the Gaming Industry, Alexander Kuzmenko

We recently announced a month of broadcasts about game development on our Tekhnostrim channel. On them you can listen to our employees and chat with them live on YouTube. And today we want to present you a video and decoding of the first stream, watch and read them under the cut.

Schedule streams, see our post on Habré. The next broadcast will be today at 19.00 ! The presentation will be made by Ivan Fedyanin, head of the Fast Forward studio. Let us tell you about the choice of genre and niche when creating a mobile game. Waiting for you!


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Good evening, my name is Nikita Fedotov, and you are watching TechnoLive. This month we have a wide range of topics - game development. And today our guest is Alexander Kuzmenko - the project manager of the game portal Mail.Ru. Sash, tell me about yourself.

I was incredibly lucky because I was born in a typical family of a Soviet engineer, who was also passionate about the latest technologies. Therefore, the first personal computer called “Microsha” appeared in 1986. At that time there was no culture of games in the country, it was limited to slot machines. They were non-electronic, there was no culture of arcades - we'll talk about this later.

As I remember, Dad dragged a computer in the morning from a regular business trip, and when I returned from kindergarten in the evening (I was five), Dad showed me a clone of the game Arkanoid (as I understood many years later). Miracle of technology: tsiferki on the screen jump, and you can still manage it interactively with buttons. There was an absolute demolition of the head. You see, 1986 is when children took a TV program and emphasized cartoons at 17:30. Because there were no iPads. I look at today's children and understand how much information they have.

And then I saw video games for the first time, and it started ... All this mutated through the computers of the older generation, then it mutated into the IBM PC, as it was then called, modern personal computers. Then it all mutated in the console of the first, second and further generation. So I came to the fact that already since the end of the 90s, computer games were a serious article of my earnings in my student years. I understood them very well, for many years I played continuously all the most important things and at some point I started writing about them in various game and technical publications.

And here I am with you later all these years.

At what point did the demand for such articles about games appear?

The market was absolutely wild in the 90s in Russia. In reality, a huge amount of video games of the most varied quality suddenly poured into the market, starting from these Tetris, a cheap Chinese clone of BrickGames.



Yes, there was tetris itself, races and a snake.

Classic set. Starting with this, ending Dendy, the first PC, which began to appear back in the USSR. There is a brilliant novel by the writer Victor Pelevin, which is called the "Prince of the Gos-Plan", the early one. It is about how, in the late Soviet gosplan, instead of planning the life of a socialist society, all employees played different games of the late 80s. There was the "Prince of Persia", "Brahms." Culture then began to emerge, and this culture had to somehow be secured.

The gaming press in Russia began with gaming books. And this, first of all, books with tips. You were stuck somewhere in the game, and everything was still in English, and I was learning German at school ... You buy advice - the top 30 games for the IBM PC. Yeah, there is a Monkey Island passage, zashib. And you go through all these games. Then it somehow turned into the first game magazines. Everything began very simply: there were people who traded in disks, games, it was not always a legal product, but they understood that it was necessary to promote the products somehow. Tell people what is cool and what is not cool. They came to them, bought an unsuccessful game, and will not come again. Where is GTA, and where is some kind of garbage - you need to tell. So the first gaming magazines appeared, on the principle of buyers guide, as it is called abroad. The first gaming magazines appeared in the late 90s, 1997–1999, first “Toy Shop”, then “Country of Games”, “Navigator of the Game World”, “Gambling” - some of them even live to this day.



Have you collaborated with all of them?

With many. I stayed for a long time in “Gambling”, I worked with her somewhere since 1999, and ended up with the fact that I worked in it until 2010, first I was deputy editor-in-chief, then editor-in-chief, then publisher. And then it turned out to be in the Mail.Ru Group, because, unfortunately, the printed press is no longer the channel nowadays.

The first gaming magazines were buyers guide, telling the person which game was good and which was bad. Then, after a couple of years, their appointment changed, and this joke sounded like this in the early 2000s ... Magazines ceased to be a source of information about games, and became some kind of community, a unifying force of people, a lifestyle. If you are an athlete - you buy sports magazines. If you're a teenage girl, you buy teenage magazines. And if you are a gamer - you buy a game magazine, just to be in the subject, the Internet was not much developed.

The dominance of the market is absolutely pirated. Why do people buy gaming magazines abroad? To read which game is good, which is bad, then go to the store, buy a good game, and not buy a bad one. Why do people buy gaming magazines in Russia? To read it, and then go to the site (because you all played good games and so played, bought 60 rubles each in the transition), and write what a fool the author is.

This was the first community of players in Russia, from which the gaming culture began to emerge, from gaming magazines.

The essence has not changed since then. They still play the game, then read the reviews, and say that everything is not so.

What a fool author. Of course, if the stars are lit, it means someone needs it. If all people have already passed this game, and the text on Mafia 3 is conditional, our last review, about 150 thousand views, half of which say that the author is a fool, probably, it’s not for nothing that we work. Joke.

Since we have a theme - the history of the gaming industry, maybe you can describe how the development proceeded from those times when you started playing.

If we go completely into history, then the first official video game is the mid-50s.

I think, in your memory, from the same 80s, while there was one platform plus Tetris, then a PC, then a console. And what we have come to. How do we come to what is now.

As for the slot machines with more or less exemplary game mechanics, they began to appear in the USSR with the beginning of perestroika. In addition to the standard mechanical shooting galleries and mechanical sea combat, some similarities began to appear in the first video games in the Soviet machine guns. There were electronic gonochki, and so on. In principle, the gaming industry from now on is worth counting.



Plus, another defining moment is the time of the invention of Tetris, the end of the 80s. This is Alexey Pajitnov, an employee of the then closed research institute, some AccountStroyMashNeftSbytHim. In general, the engineer who sat down and made the electronic version, his variation on the Pentamino puzzle, and two years later Nintendo earned a few billion dollars on this, and Alexey Pajitnov about horseradish without salt. Well, this is normal, some part of the money went to this research institute, Aleksey went to the USA, where he still does not live in misery. For a long time he worked at Microsoft, designed the puzzles, now he owns the Tetris Company, which owns all the rights to Tetris. Even today it is a cool brand. And it was then, since the appearance of Tetris, that what is called a game culture began in Russia.

By that time, they were already distributed throughout Russia, especially among the technical intelligentsia, engineers, technicians, personal computers. There were “Microshops” or more complicated, ZX Spectrum'y, or some kind of exotic type of computer “Vector 06C”, we had one time, a wonderful computer, I started to program on it then. And then the PCU, as it was then called, the household personal electronic computer (nobody used the word computer properly), provided opportunities for you, as an engineer, to engineer. Here's your programming languages, databases, rudimentary tables, and more.

What did an engineer start to learn a programming language? Of course, compose games. And so it slowly began. Then the iron curtain cracked more and more, then the IBM PC was brought down from there, which bought all sorts of Soviet offices for themselves. There were huge deposits of the coolest games that were ahead of all Soviet computers by 10 years. People began to rush to learn English, all departments to undergo some complex text DND RPG. Then came the late Soviet Internet in the 80s, and these were the first multi-use dungeons, textual MMOs, absolute prototypes. And our, by the way, Russians there felt very good there then at the then European protoservers.

And then it all started, in such broth boiled. When the curtain finally collapsed, the market saw that there is a country Russia, 150 million people live in it - do what you want with them. First of all, game consoles rushed to us - Dendy. What is Dendy? In general, this is a pirated Chinese clone of the console Nintedo Entertainment System from the company Nintendo, which about five years before that caused a sensation in the USA. There has been a long history. The industry before the Nintedo Entertainment System was in a fairly deep pit. At some point there was a crisis of overproduction in the West ... But this is all a Western theme. What did we discover in the 90s? 8-bit world. Lagged, of course, a little. In the form of a Chinese console, an illegal clone, which was officially distributed in Russia.



Moreover, there was such a telecast, the company Steepler, which dealt with Dendy, was very poor, because at some point in the half of the households of the USSR, these yellow prefixes appeared. Steepler even bought TV time for itself, and made a wonderful program called “Dendy: New Reality”, which was led by the great man Sergey Suponev. He was the inventor of all children's television in late Russia: the programs “Star Hour”, “Dendy: New Reality”, “Jungle Name” - dofiga children's shows. How he died, and children's television in Russia ceased to exist.

He personally led, told everyone what a cool game came out for Dendy. And in what a twist of fate, he explained which cartridges for a fake Chinese unlicensed system are actually real and which are pirated. The pirates fought with the pirates, it was an amazing time.

Meanwhile, in all the courtyards of our immense country, even the last Losers appeared Dendy, and the game culture began to appear. Everybody played Mario, "Prince of Persia", not to mention "Duck stories" and all the other great cartoons.

All this was superimposed on the ideological dolbeb when Disney cartoons began to show on TV, cable channels opened, where cartoons are spinning - pinned? Literally three years ago, you emphasized cartoons in the program, then you turned on at 5:30 pm - there is a puppet show. And after three years, Disney rolls in 24/7. That's when the gaming culture, along with this originated in the country.

And then IBM PC went. Naturally, mother bought you to study, and you, fool, instead you play Doom. And it went rolling. Then, when we started to get quite started, this is the beginning of the 2000s, the consoles appeared, initially pirated, the Playstation 1, which was cracked dashingly, and it became almost a popular console after Dendy, then the Xbox 360 appeared. As I remember, I went somewhere In 2005 or at the beginning of 2006, according to the Savyolovsky market, people stood there in down-padded coats, they say - take the XBox, any disks are twisted at 200 rubles. Through it passed literally 10 years ago.

In principle, in the 90s we quickly digested the entire history of the gaming industry, which they took there for 25 years, and in the 2000s we reached the world level. It was also PC coverage, with the advent of Steam, they slowly managed to cope with the piracy, again, the IMOs have gone, the revolution is worse than in the West. When in 2000 we started Warcraft, two months later the Russian Warsong server, which was not meant for Russians, was simply created in English, people who do not speak Russian began to leave this server. Because the Russians have become the main strongest clans, players. This culture began to shove and shove.

Why are we often the coolest in MMOs, shooters, and so on? Now, if the Russian man surrendered to catch up with a certain topic, he would do it to a frenzy, just the very first person in the world will pump the coolest character. Therefore, we now have such a big MMO culture and so on. This we have already come to the present.

Why did Mail.Ru start making games?

Mail.Ru started making games a long time ago. There was such a project Mail.ru Beetles, made 150 years ago.





Speaking from a business point of view, Mail.Ru didn't really start making games. In 2010 there were two huge corporations. One united a bunch of corporations, developers, game publishers, called Astrum. The second was called Mail.Ru. These corporations merged together, became one company, the Astrum brand was abandoned. And in the then Astrum there were almost all employees of Nival, Astrum, IT-Territory, which is still a separate part of the game direction, and so on.

Astrum and all the people who were part of this holding, and some of them, like Nival, have been developing games since 1996, in fact, they always made games, even before Mail.ru was organized. Therefore, Mail.Ru Group, as a technology company, saw a very promising direction, and games that in 2010, that now, to put it mildly, the most promising direction in IT, and decided to acquire such an asset. I think it was a great purchase.

Why stopped the development of gameplay?

Most likely, why the evolution of video games, all game mechanics slowed down. The 90s and especially the 80s were a time of discovery. Each new game is a new genre. Today you thought about how a round dude, like a kolobok, eats points and runs away from ghosts, and everything, you invented a new genre, you invented Pacman. In the 90s it became a bit more difficult, the genres took shape a little: this is an action, this is an action with a third-person view, this is an adventure, this is a role-playing game, and so on. Now, in fact, it is very difficult to invent something in game mechanics. We in games experienced about the same technological revolution that the movie experienced in 50 years, but we survived it in 10.

Conventionally, we take the end of the 80s - what is it? Pixel graphics, EGA, 6 or 8 colors, at best, SVGA, but only rare photos show, there are no such games. We take the end of the 90s - the period of the total technological revolution: 3D accelerators, FX, helmets, and so on. Games have become all 3D, beautiful. Another 10 years ahead we take, the end of the 00's - what do we see? Flourish consoles, indirect gaming, total domination of MMO online games and so on. The IMO phenomenon in the modern sense began to appear in the late 90s, but since World of Warcraft in 2004, it has become global. Now the Russian games market is about 80% made up of online games where they play with other people. Please, another revolution.

Now we are taking another 6 years, including some, conditionally, Uncharted 4 on PS4, and we see a movie that costs 40 million dollars, like five Bondarchuk films ... And we say yes ... And I remember two pixels that flew up and knocked down some dots, and I controlled the trampoline with the buttons, from which these pixels were supposed to fly off. And it was just nothing, 25 years.

In fact, we approached the limit when we copied everything in real life in games and even more?

Not. To the limit we get closer then. It will look like this: you sit down, open the cover of your universal connector on the back of your head, stick it in - and that’s all, saliva only flows. Then five hours later I got up - wow, gameplay!

I believe in neural networks, in all this garbage. I think that 20-30 years and our current reality can be offered an alternative no worse, and often better. And there will be a big question, but this is to the futurologists, what our humanity will turn into. And the games help this.

And why? What moves?

Very simple. Games are the cutting edge of technology. Why develop all these video cards, processors and so on? To Excel quickly cheated? By golly, to make a movie spin faster? Yes, she is fine and the player of 2001 was spinning, she was also a movie. This is so that you can see that the games are cool, so that the grafon is such that it cannot be distinguished from the present, so that you get close enough to the calculation of this neural network so that later ... well, you remember. So the games are the cutting edge of technology without any irony.

They ask us: Is the igrostroi alive in Russia? We can raise the question in a different way: what are they developing now, what is good for Russia, why are there more online games? What famous Russian things now? Online and mobile games. But the role-playing game like The Elder Scrolls - we almost never do that.

The market dictates its own conditions. Until 2008, before the beginning of the second major crisis, the market was so overheated that the rules of the game looked like this: you take, you make any garbage, you just pack it, you buy a license for the movie “Shadow Boxing”, it doesn't matter, in two weeks I was collecting a detachment of 20 people, you sell, you beat off in the first week, with the second start the profits. The market looked so trash that there could take any garbage.

After 2008, at first, thrash fell from the market. Trash began to be purchased, published and give up much less. And then the market began to simply follow where the money was. It became clear that you would not make much money on Jewels and disks for 100-300 rubles. Where to go? To the place where the money suddenly appeared. It turned out that the last five years had been growing very cool in Russia online, and the Russian game industry besides some companies, like the same ITT, which produced Legend: Legacy of Dragons, the same Nival, which made Allods Online, the first Russian killer of Warcraft , still lively and not weakly popular game. The first purchase of serious projects like Perfect World - and all this turned out now in Mail.Ru, ironically. The market just began to rebuild on the online rails. Therefore, young developers who began to appear, it was difficult for them to draw a large online project, they went into a new niche - this is either a browser, which eventually spilled over into mobile games and so on. The threshold of entry into the Russian gaming industry is now 10 thousand dollars. Conditionally. If you go to the bank, take a loan for 10 thousand dollars, we can make a mobile game in six months. It is clear that there will not be a huge office and super-booths of game industry developers, but if you and five friends set out to make your own video game and make money from it, the entry threshold is minimal. There are a lot of stories from a series of two yesterday's students selling a car that dad presented to them in honor of graduating from the university, making a super hit and waking up the next day by millionaires. There are billions of such stories.

Why in Russia now do not do The Elder Scrolls? There are several reasons for this. The first is no such expertise. It is clear that there are developers who are good at doing some strategies, well doing flight simulators - the same IL-2, still the number one simulator in a certain environment - there are developers who have learned MMO well to do, the same “Allods ". But we have no expertise in the offline role-playing game of this level. And expertise, and that kind of money. It’s not a fact that even if you invest 40 million dollars in the development, people who have never done this will suddenly make cool.



Initially, "Allods" were just RPGs. Examination remained somewhere blurry.

There were other times. Moreover, I will say on my own market insight, soon the Russian market will surprise with several very interesting non-online projects, but this is still a matter of one or two years.

What are the chances that we need and how real our viewers can move the industry towards the return of those genres that have dropped out of the Russian market?

Of course. Now the market provides all the possibilities for voting with a ruble. We saw the Kickstarter boom when people raised millions in genres that everyone considered dead. There is such a developer Chris Roberts ...

Still collecting money.

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Thank you Sasha for coming to visit. You will see him again. That's all for today.

See you again!

Bye everyone!