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Post by psychof0x on Jan 19, 2017 17:27:16 GMT
Just wondering if anybody knew of any stores in Gdansk, Poland that sells Master System games? I'm on holiday there at the moment. A long shot I know...
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Post by ryanretro on Jan 19, 2017 18:09:58 GMT
I think Poland was still part of the old USSR for much of the sms life span , Both Sega and Nintendo would have had little access to these markets . I guess their would be little or no sms in Poland .
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Post by psychof0x on Jan 19, 2017 20:37:13 GMT
I think Poland was still part of the old USSR for much of the sms life span , Both Sega and Nintendo would have had little access to these markets . I guess their would be little or no sms in Poland . I think that you're right. Just visited a video games bar and the only console that they had was one of these: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(console)It was terrible. Ha ha! |
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Post by ryanretro on Jan 19, 2017 20:54:47 GMT
I think Poland was still part of the old USSR for much of the sms life span , Both Sega and Nintendo would have had little access to these markets . I guess their would be little or no sms in Poland . I think that you're right. Just visited a video games bar and the only console that they had was one of these: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pegasus_(console)It was terrible. Ha ha! Yeah that's grim , capitalism isn't always perfect but it beats getting the Pegasus for your birthday . |
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Post by soup on Jan 21, 2017 18:33:48 GMT
Yeah that's grim , capitalism isn't always perfect but it beats getting the Pegasus for your birthday . Maybe there's something wrong with me, but I'd love a Pegasus for my birthday. I love random obscure stuff like that and surely it's just a famicom clone, albeit maybe not a very good one. My first computer game system was a binatone, now that was grim but I still loved it. (For a week or so!) |
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Post by bkk on Jan 23, 2017 20:46:05 GMT
Mostly German SMS stuff in Poland, if you're lucky you might find hardware with Hungarian/Polish/Russian instructions;  Here's a Czech SMSII manual (I have a Casino Games with Czech manual, so some software got Czech manuals too)  Czech catalogue;   Hungarian SMSII manual;  Russia even got it's own SMS model. Russian SMSII catalogue;  Slovakian SMS release (1992);  So whilst not massively popular, SMS did get released in the major former Warsaw Pact countries (Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. |
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Post by Stan on Jan 24, 2017 18:11:19 GMT
I was in Russia and saw nothing when I was there so chances are probably quite slim. Most Sega system at the time were simply multi-game units with all the games built in, and I didn't see anything of the SMS. The NES (Dendy) was more popular there.
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Post by cccmar on Jan 26, 2017 21:39:24 GMT
Being Polish/Russian myself, I can answer that question - the only popular 3rd generation console in Poland was the above-mentioned Pegasus (and some other Famiclones, like "Terminator" etc. - it was the same in Russia, naturally). You could play Japanese carts on them though, they weren't region-locked at all. I think it was launched around 1993-1994 more or less. Mind you, there was even a TV commercial for it. Games were dirt cheap, you could buy really expensive carts, like Flintstones 2 for 2-3 bucks at most, and the console itself could be bought for 10-20 bucks easily. I've never seen a single SMS in Poland, to be honest. All of my friends had either a Famiclone growing up or just plain nothing. However, pirated Sega Genesis was still more popular than SNES, because it was apparently cheaper to make. Sadly, most of us experienced only NES/FC from the entire 3rd generation of consoles, and the 4th generation was pretty much an enigma. There were some lucky people who owned a pirated Sega Genesis, but that really was a rarity. Heck, most of the games couldn't be bought legally either - instead, you'd go to the local marketplace and buy them exclusively from Ukrainian peddlers (no joke, lots of people made a living like that back in the day).
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Post by ryanretro on Jan 26, 2017 22:48:27 GMT
Being Polish/Russian myself, I can answer that question - the only popular 3rd generation console in Poland was the above-mentioned Pegasus (and some other Famiclones, like "Terminator" etc. - it was the same in Russia, naturally). You could play Japanese carts on them though, they weren't region-locked at all. I think it was launched around 1993-1994 more or less. Mind you, there was even a TV commercial for it. Games were dirt cheap, you could buy really expensive carts, like Flintstones 2 for 2-3 bucks at most, and the console itself could be bought for 10-20 bucks easily. I've never seen a single SMS in Poland, to be honest. All of my friends had either a Famiclone growing up or just plain nothing. However, pirated Sega Genesis was still more popular than SNES, because it was apparently cheaper to make. Sadly, most of us experienced only NES/FC from the entire 3rd generation of consoles, and the 4th generation was pretty much an enigma. There were some lucky people who owned a pirated Sega Genesis, but that really was a rarity. Heck, most of the games couldn't be bought legally either - instead, you'd go to the local marketplace and buy them exclusively from Ukrainian peddlers (no joke, lots of people made a living like that back in the day). Very interesting , So you guys got the Pegasus around 1993 - 1994 , by that time the 3rd generation was ending . Also you did not have any kind of 4th generation consoles . What was the first officially licensed console to arrive in Poland ? It is weird to think how huge gaming was at that time but also almost non existent in your region |
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Post by cccmar on Jan 27, 2017 7:47:09 GMT
Prior to 1990 gaming was almost non-existent in Poland - barely anyone could afford the consoles/PCs anyway. All you could find were some old arcade machines, almost exclusively the Soviet ones - so, no Final Fight for ya, sorry (that came much later). 1990 was the year when a huge shift occurred. People started importing (oft illegally) consoles like crazy, and hacking the hell out of them. A good chunk of these hacked games/consoles came either from Russia or from China. Poland belongs to the "PAL" region, whereas Russia is the largest "SECAM" country (although it's a French invention) - so, display issues were not uncommon. I mentioned the TV ads for Pegasus - they were aired between '95-'97. As I said, SEGA had almost no presence on the market whatsoever, apart from some Sega Genesis systems here and there. It was largely similar everywhere in the region to my knowledge - so, unlike in the Western Europe, barely anyone knows what SMS is in Poland; I myself learned of its existence only thanks to the Internet (what a marvelous invention!).  A funny fact - hackers would often remove ANY copyrights/credits from NES games, so people initially didn't even realize that Konami made games like Contra etc. On a side note, one good thing is that there was no censorship - so, Contra was Contra, and not Gryzor.  This applies to pretty much every other company/publisher. I bet it was similar with SMS, although I've never seen even a single system for sale myself. The first really popular, officially released console must have been the Playstation. This is also why the newer Playstation models generally sell like hot cakes in Eastern Europe. I'd say that console gaming in the region really only took off in the XXIst century. Even that is not the case in every communist/post-communist state though - China for instance is pretty impenetrable to this very day. |
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This applies to pretty much every other company/publisher. I bet it was similar with SMS, although I've never seen even a single system for sale myself.