I’m talking about the most famous games that could be played on the first Soviet school computer, “Agat”. 
Many of us associate computer games with the 1990s. But in the USSR, personal computers, albeit in small quantities, have been produced since the mid-80s - and, of course, games for them appeared almost immediately. 
These were not only variations of the hit of all time - Tetris. Soviet programmers, students, and even schoolchildren wrote several hundred computer games, both based on foreign models and on original ideas.
Anacephalus (chess) 
Author - Mikhail Levin, 1984
One of the first games for Agat, a very strong chess program for its time. The interface is reminiscent of the Apple II game Sargon, but the algorithm is its own, developed with the assistance of Vladimir Chikul, a Soviet expert in the field of artificial intelligence. It is known that enthusiasts held competitions between Anacephalus and other chess programs for 8- and even 16-bit computers. “Anacephalus” won all the games, despite the fact that he always played as black.
Xonix 
Author of the adaptation: Alexander Golov, 1986
A very simple and yet incredibly addictive arcade game. The player must capture pieces of territory by moving the cursor. In the classical interpretation, this is the reconquest of land from the sea. At the same time, opponents are moving both on “land” and “sea”, a collision with which does not bode well. The version of the game for "Agate" works not in graphical mode, but in text mode. The captured territory consists of the letters Ш, and the opponents look like the letters O and an empty cell. By the way, the creator of Tetris, Alexey Pajitnov, was fond of the Xonix game.
Fighter 
Author - Igor Novoselov, 1988
A dynamic game, created under the impression of foreign “flying shooters”, but not repeating any of them. The player needs, using as few charges as possible, to shoot down enemy flying saucers, which from level to level move along increasingly whimsical trajectories. In fact, Fighter migrated to the computer from a notebook sheet. The author first drew the spaceship cell by cell, then transferred it to the memory of “Agatha” and added various phases of animation. And his friend Vladimir Vykhodtsev came up with an algorithm for random generation of mountain slopes. According to the plot, the time required for the calculation is supposedly spent on “refueling” the ship.
Machine 
Authors: ShPaNa team (Sergei Sharapov, Sergei Pavlov, Sergei Navrotsky), late 1980s
An original program that can be classified as both gaming and educational. You work on a lathe, and you have four cutters at your disposal. With their help, you need to make parts according to the sample. Everything is done with great attention to detail: for example, if you cut off part of the workpiece, it will fall down with animation. Like reality, the game does not forgive mistakes: if you grind even a little more than necessary, nothing can be corrected - the part will be scrapped, and the bungling turner will have to start work again.
Bolo 
Author of the adaptation: Alexander Petrov, 1988
An arcade game based on the sci-fi series of the same name by Keith Laumer, a port of the game for the Apple II. The player must, while driving a tank, destroy six enemy bases. They are scattered throughout the labyrinth, which is generated anew every time you start it. At the same time, it is important not to come under fire from enemy tanks, not to run into obstacles and not to use up all the fuel. Bolo was a lot of fun to play with two people, especially if you had remote controls with rotary handles: one controlled the movement of the tank, and the other shot at enemies. The players, brought up on Soviet patriotic films, imagined themselves as machine gunners in a cart. 
Game consoles for "Agatha"
Rocker 
Authors: Alexey Telitsyn, Sergey Kolobov, 1989
An original game based on Boulder Dash. The hero must “dig” level after level to get to the precious stones, but not to overwhelm them or himself with ordinary cobblestones. The game has bright color graphics in a resolution of 128 × 128 pixels. At startup, a fragment of the cult composition “The Final Countdown” by the Swedish rock band Europe, very popular in the late 1980s, is played. Players of slightly more recent times may know similar mechanics from the example of the game Supaplex about the adventures of a red bun inside a computer.
Pusher (Sokoban, Kurtan) 
Author - Roman Bader, 1990/1993
An exciting logic game that was originally invented by the Japanese Hiroyuki Imabayashi in 1981. You play as a storekeeper who must move boxes placed throughout the labyrinth to their designated places. The task is complicated by the fact that the hero does not know how to pull boxes - only push, and only strictly one at a time. Pusher immediately gained enormous popularity, and its analogues were written for all common platforms, including Agat. Also in 1990, a modification of the game called Kurtan was created for IBM PC-compatible computers. Through the efforts of its author Revaz Mesarkishvili, it acquired a Georgian flavor, and the storekeeper was accompanied by several new characters.
Bow-wow 
Authors - I. Zyabrev, A. Bolshakov, I. Bolshakova, 1993
A program for teaching counting in a game form. Players complete addition, subtraction, multiplication and division tasks, and animated dogs become happy or sad depending on whether the example was solved correctly.
If you complete ten tasks in a row, they will show a cartoon! And this is not a legend, as in the case of the Elektronika game console, where the wolf catches eggs. There will really be a small cartoon - with a plot, plot development and a climax.
Quintet (Colored Lines) 
Authors: Andrey Kobozev, Sergey Gromov, 1995
A rather late game shows that “Agates” did not leave the stage in the mid-1990s. This is a variation of the “Colored Lines”, which were very popular in those years, where you had to line up rows of five or more balls of the same color. Since not all “Agates” were equipped with color monitors, and only four high-resolution colors were available, the authors replaced the balls with figures of different shapes. For control, you could use the arrows on the keyboard or the mouse, or more precisely, as it was called then, a “coordinate input device” - UVK. 
Many more games were written for Agates. Some of them are very similar to the ones we play today. Of course, they looked much simpler. An 8-bit processor with a frequency of 1 MHz and several hundred kilobytes of memory do not provide detailed graphics, complex visual effects and multi-channel audio. However, even such a modest hardware was enough to create truly exciting games, from which our parents - and perhaps even our grandparents - could not tear ourselves away at one time. Very often, the opportunity to play became a reward for successfully completing tasks. And for many this was an incentive to study better.
What computer games did you like? Share in the comments!
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