Perestroika (video game)
1989 video game
Perestroika (also known as Toppler) is a Soviet video game released in 1990 by a small software developer called Locis (Nikita Skripkin, Aleksander Okrug and Dmitry Chikin, currently - Nikita online) in 1990, and named after Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of Perestroika. The music playing on the title screen is a Russian folk song "Dubinushka" from the 19th century.
Gameplay
The splash screen features a stylized Gorbachev, whose presence causes the Kremlin—the seat of Soviet government—to break apart. The game consists of controlling a small frog-like creature which jumps from one lily pad to another, trying to reach a coin, symbolizing a higher standard of living.
The frog symbolizes a democrat and the lilies, symbolizing the ever-changing laws and acts, constantly shrink and disappear only to appear in other places. The player can collect dots in four colours, blue symbolizing grocery goods; red, currency transactions; yellow, taxes; and brown, business ventures. A currency transaction can sometimes add extra life, a tax reduces the score, and a company can sometimes sink the figure. From the seventh level, the game also features one or more evil creatures called "bureaucrats" which follow the frog and try to eat it. The frog dies if the lily pad on which it is standing disappears, if the player moves it to a place where there is no lily pad, or if it is caught by a bureaucrat.
Perestroika runs under MS-DOS, it was written in Borland C++ using the Borland Graphics Interface and has a resolution of 640×350.
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