The Philosophy of a Romanian Gamer Part II: Rise of The Balkans

[Adrian is a Romanian writer currently living in Galati. Over the next few weeks he'll be giving us an insight into just how different gaming is in Romania. A country that didn't see any form of video game until after their 1989 revolution against the ruling Communist regime.]

Things weren’t so bad for the Eastern Europeans in the early 90s. The Ottoman Empire stopped fighting with the Russians, Dostoyevsky was sent to Siberia for his low quality literary writings and Che Guevara overthrew the European communists.

The Balkan States were thriving, Romania became a flourishing economy and Kasparov ended his reign. You can see why the Romanian people were confronted with new problems which they didn’t even know existed. Such as having too much spare time or having to chose between two different products.

Although the Iron Curtain was lifted, the products that entered the Eastern European economies had to pass through another type of curtain. Not an iron, but rather a Pirate Curtain covering the Balkans. As I said before, the Eastern Europeans became democrats and started to have spare time. They needed something to do and there is nothing better than playing video games. The problem was, however, that they couldn’t afford to buy video games from foreign countries. And this is where the Terminator came in and saved the day.

Terminator was the pirated version of the 8-bit video game console, the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was very cheap and spread like a swine flu through the Eastern European markets. It was just like Descartes had told us: our senses deceive us. There is this God who takes pleasure in making us believe that we live, when actually we are all dreaming. The God’s name was Terminator in the Eastern European pop-culture. And just like Descartes, we played Super Mario, therefore we existed.

Super Mario was the pirated version (most games were pirated versions of something) of Mario, and everyone was playing it. But for a professional gamer, Mario wasn’t enough. Terminator used pirated NES/Famicom cartridges, which were not as expensive as the originals. As they only contained one game, gamers (who were mostly children) couldn’t afford too many of them. This is why we started to pirate the pirated cartridges.

Pirating the pirated cartridges was an easy job. The cartridge was only used to cover and protect the game-chip. One could open the cartridge, remove the chip with the game they wanted but couldn’t afford and replace it with another chip – which contained an older, not-wanted game. Then, one would return to the shop, explain to the seller that the cartridge he bought was not what he wanted, and that he would rather buy another one. The seller would usually allow him to buy another game. This was an easy and effective way to buy two games for the price of one.

If one wasn’t into stealing, one could always exchange games with his friends. Because if you had a friend in the early 90′s, he would own a Terminator.

Being a good player would make one popular during that period in Romania. At school, the bullies wouldn’t pick on you if you would beat them at video games. This is why my philosophy as a Romanian gamer changed once more. It would now be important to master the video games, to be the best player. Cool kids would invite good players to their home to play a double game of Robocop, Batman 2 or Clay Shooting. Being a gamer was not only a fun way to spend your time, but also a way of boosting your popularity.

Ironically, the Terminator, resembling the future technology which would take over the world, was no match for the Pentium 1.