Perestroika (Toppler) and LocIS (1990)
Late-Soviet MS-DOS Political Satire and the Cooperative Origins of Russian Commercial Game Development
Developed between 1989 and 1990 by the Soviet programming cooperative LocIS—founded by Nikita Skripkin, Aleksandr Okrug, and Dmitry Chikin—Perestroika (widely distributed internationally under its executable filename Toppler) is an MS-DOS arcade action satire of Mikhail Gorbachev's economic reforms. Casting the player as an agile "democrat" frog navigating vanishing legislative lily pads while evading predatory "bureaucrats," the title preceded LocIS's 1991 reorganization into Russian studio Nikita Ltd.
Cooperative Software Production and Borland EGA Engineering
Following the 1988 Soviet Law on Cooperatives, small groups of engineers and mathematicians around Moscow and the aerospace research city of Kaliningrad (present-day Korolyov) began forming semi-private software ventures to write utilities and games for institutional IBM PC compatibles. Among these collectives was LocIS, established by programmers Nikita Skripkin, Aleksandr Okrug, and Dmitry Chikin. Between 1989 and 1990, the team coded Perestroika in Borland C++ utilizing the Borland Graphics Interface (BGI) library to render crisp 640x350 16-color Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) visuals without requiring specialized gaming hardware. Because Soviet copyright enforcement and boxed retail channels barely existed for domestic PC games, the compiled binary circulated across ministries, research institutes, and European bulletin boards via floppy disks under its executable name, toppler.exe, leading Western shareware catalogs to index the title as Toppler. The opening screen immediately signaled the climate of glasnost: a detailed EGA portrait of General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev with his recognizable birthmark overlooks the Moscow Kremlin walls beside a broken iron chain, accompanied by a PC Speaker rendition of the traditional Russian laborers' song Dubinushka.
Allegorical Mechanics and Transition to Nikita Ltd.
Perestroika translates the legal and monetary volatility of the late Soviet transition into spatial arcade rules. The player controls a small green frog-like creature—explicitly labeled a "democrat" or nascent cooperative entrepreneur—stationed in a swamp filled with circular lily pads that continuously shrink, sink, and reappear elsewhere, representing ephemeral decrees, shifting regulations, and unstable legislative acts. To clear each stage, the protagonist must leap from pad to pad without drowning to reach a glowing gold coin in the upper-right corner symbolizing a higher standard of living. Colored bonus granules scattered across the pads mirror late-Soviet economic pressures: blue dots represent scarce consumer groceries, orange dots represent currency and commercial ventures, red dots impose progressive tax penalties, and yellow dots trigger unpredictable random score shifts. Starting from the second stage, long-legged red insectoid creatures named "bureaucrats" (byurokraty) stalk the frog across the pond and consume it on contact. In October 1991, two months before the dissolution of the USSR, Skripkin and his LocIS colleagues formally incorporated Nikita Ltd., turning their cooperative experience into one of post-Soviet Russia's earliest commercial game studios.