So back in the day, when the Supreme Soviet issued its Five-Year Plan, was there a line item in the Plan allocating so much sheet metal and paint to People’s Video-Game Console Factory Number One? Or did some factory that produced military hardware make a few “Snaiper-2” machines on the side, so that young comrades on the home front could develop their skills and boost morale? Did the workers in the video-game factories struggle with shortages, or did they get bonuses under the table so that members of the nomenklatura could have the prestige of video games in their dachas?
According to a Wired article whose accuracy I can't vouch for, but which seems plausible, it appears to be your second option, military factories producing them on the side for entertainment/morale, perhaps with a secondary goal of motorvisual-skills training (http://www.wired.com/gaming/hardware/news/2007/06/soviet_gam...):
"From the late '70s to the early '90s, Soviet military factories produced some 70 different video game models. Based largely (and crudely) on early Japanese designs, the games were distributed -- in the words of one military manual -- for the purposes of 'entertainment and active leisure, as well as the development of visual-estimation abilities.'"
It's interesting how time has changed. I'm 25 now and I have never had much experience with such arcade games in my youth.
In my youth, when I started playing computer games (with 8 years or so, don't remember exactly), it was already our own computer (of the whole family; a 486 with 33MHz). But I had the feeling that the games I could play there were much better than what I could play on arcade game machines (which were also not that popular; at least I have never really seen much of them). When I had seen one, I always thought that I could play better games for free at home.
Games back then which I played and kept deep into my memories were: Commander Keen 1 - 6, Crime Fighter, Stunts, Sim City 1 / 2000. Well and you probably know the history of games. When I grow older, the PC games developed very fast.
Most of my friends handled this very similar. We met somewhere at home and played some of those games together (preferable some which could be played turn based or with split screen). A few years later (when we were around 15 or so), we met and organized small LAN-parties.
I'm almost the same age, I had a PC, a console (first my older bother's NES, then a SNES, a GameBoy, a Saturn, a PlayStation and a GameBoy Advance) and I played with Arcades as well, each one was good for some genres of games, PCs hardly received Japanese games in 90s, including fighting, shot 'em ups, some cool puzzle games, platform (although you cited Commander Keen) and some JRPGs that were absurdly good.
The PC had it genres as well, strategy, the nascent FPS genre and adventures were far better in the PC. I tried to play as many as I could in every platform, turn out that I never played much attention to quality if I had fun playing them (this partly explain why angband is one of my favorites). Maybe I'm an oddity to have played them all.
I do not think Angband is a low quality game, although after reading the text this is what I understood as well, the sentence was poorly written, sorry. I intended to address the situation that some people perceive it is a "low game" and that even the worst game for Atari 2600 is better just because it does not have graphics (I play it without tiles).
As I've played all these arcade games in soviet times I can say with confidence that the emulators on their website are very high quality. While playing them I was transfered to my youth.
