2000s Gaming in Eastern Europe Was Different

While the 2000s saw certain franchises and platforms become popular in the West, gamers in Eastern Europe had to invent other ways of playing games.

Different Systems Created Different Gaming Environments

People who are now in their 20s and 30s are the first generation that grew up with video games as a constant companion throughout their lives. While the first home TV-based electronic games hit the market in the 60s and 70s, it took some years before video games, in all formats, became mainstream. The 90s and 2000s were definitely the time when video games became ubiquitous and many children born in that time period have fond memories of what today could be considered retro games.

However, while North America and Western Europe saw a certain development of games and platforms, things in Eastern Europe evolved in a rather different direction. Some games were more popular in the West, while others were so in the East due to various factors we will explain.

While today both sides play games together, 20 or so years ago things were not as equalized. However, you can often see this discrepancy evident even today. For example, Counter-Strike was extremely popular in Eastern Europe and it is so today. This has resulted in Russian, Serbian, and Polish kids who played CS1.6 in the 2000s now being among the best esports players in CS2.

This also extends to other games that were extremely popular in Eastern Europe. However, even casual players who grew up at the beginning of the century usually have a very different gaming experience from their Western counterparts. And this is despite the games played here being developed in Western countries.

Let’s see why gamers from different parts of the world have such different gaming experiences.

Why Was Eastern European Gaming So Different?

To understand why Eastern European kids in the 2000s we have to start with a bit of 20th-century history. While the electronic revolution of the 70s and 80s brought videogames into Western homes, through consoles and PCs, the East did not have the same luck.

Instead, most Eastern European countries fell under the influence of the Soviet block up until the late 80s and early 90s. There simply was almost no market for home electronics as seen in the West. Personal computers were very rare, often relegated to families linked directly with the party elite. Consoles were even rarer. You also had a limited selection of games to play, most of which were often clones of Western titles. A key exception is Tetris, which was first made in the Soviet Union and remains one of the most popular games of all time today, with over 200 million copies sold across multiple versions and platforms.

However, by the ’90s and early 2000s, this era ended as the East rejoined the capitalist world and people were finally able to get access to western products. Unfortunately, this did not mean everyone could afford the best gaming hardware and the newest games out there. Instead, many families could only get secondhand PCs from Western countries.

Consoles were also extremely rare because if you could afford only one of two things – a computer, which you could also use for other things besides gaming, and a console, then you would most likely choose the former. There was the occasional friend who had a PS2 or a Chinese plug-and-play TV game that came with a load of knockoff Nintendo titles, but that was about it.

Of course, the hardware people could afford had a direct impact on the games they played.

What Games Were Popular in Eastern Europe?

While the games played in Eastern Europe often originated in the West, certain titles were far more popular than others. Firstly, games popular here tended to be somewhat older and clunkier, as a direct result of the generally older PCs that gamers had.

It was not uncommon to see massive lobbies of players playing Quake and CS1.6 while in the West, franchises like CoD or Battlefield were breaking new ground in gaming. Speaking of shooters, you would basically not find a Halo ecosystem, as almost no one owned an Xbox. You might see someone playing the Halo: CE or Halo 2 campaigns on the PC ports, but multiplayer was virtually nonexistent because there were no servers.

The 2000s were also a golden time for strategy games but once again, Eastern European gamers played things a bit more differently. Things like Age of Empires 2, Age of Mythology, and Starcraft were huge here, arguably more than in the West. These games were also longer living, still being very popular by the early 2010s when they didn’t seem to be as famous in the West anymore.

On the console front, some lucky kids got a secondhand PS2 that could run things like Prince of Persia, by far one of the most modern games at that time. However, a more popular console choice was the huge variety of brandless plug-and-play consoles that came preloaded with either pirated Nintendo titles, or blatant knockoffs.

Of course, there are dozens more games that were popular in the former Soc-block countries, which we do not have the time and space to talk about, However, the general trend is that they were mostly older PC titles, as crappy desktops were the only thing most gamers could afford.

How Did Games Get Around in Eastern Europe?

While we talked about the software and hardware that Eastern European gamers had at their disposal, we still need to explain how games were actually acquired. One might think people simply went to an electronics store, like GameStop, and bought physical copies of the games. However, more often than not, software was simply pirated.

It was not uncommon to go to the local PC repair shop, owned by the electronics nerd and get pirated disks for dirt cheap prices. Another popular method was to just buy a CD with a game at home. Many older PCs had CD burners so if your friend gave you a game, you could copy it on your own and then return their disk. Of course, flash drives with cracked copies of games were also making their way into schools until half the kids in town had Counter-Strike 1.6 copied from one stick.

However, as more people connected to the internet, online piracy grew. It was not uncommon to spend hours on sketchy websites trying to find a cracked copy of a game that actually worked, hoping it did not contain a virus. You could also send games directly to your friends using the Internet, I distinctly remember my friend sending me a copy of Need for Speed 2 over Skype in about 2007-08. It took a few hours, but it worked perfectly well after that!

We must also talk about servers. Since most games were pirated, gamers could not play on official servers. Fortunately, there always seemed to be a PC nerd or internet café that ran cracked servers in their garage or basements. These often were somewhat laggy and didn’t have anti-cheat systems, but kids in the 2000s made do with what they had.

Conclusion

While today’s Eastern European gamers are more or less fully integrated with the global gaming scene, things 15+ years ago were not the same. 2000s kids often did not have the means to procure good gaming platforms and original games. Therefore, most gamers had to suffice with older PCs and titles, which were often downloaded from sketchy websites.

For these reasons, certain games that were not that big in the West absolutely exploded in Eastern Europe. Now, the kids that once had limited choices playing games in the struggling post-soviet economies, have become some of the best players and esports professionals in games such as Counter-Strike and Dota 2.

While the gaming landscapes in the East and West looked different back then, at least kids in Eastern Europe have still created a unique shared experience that they can recollect even to this day.