Appeared in the early 90s, video game consoles revolutionized the minds of schoolchildren at the time. They wanted them all! Each of the potential owners of the coveted console went to different tricks. Someone promised to be the most obedient, someone – to study well and finish the year with “A”, and someone all of the above, if only to hurry. In those years, the cost of a game console was a significant part of the family budget, so these things were not bought at first request. But sooner or later almost everyone who dreamed of a console, became its happy owner, immediately forgetting about the previous promises.

The main problem was the screen’s integrity (since, according to the older generation, it always “sat down” somewhere) and the functionality of the power supply (since it was truly the weakest link in the “army of clones” that attacked the post-Soviet space in the early 90s). Yes, exactly clones of the popular consoles, the production of which was rolled out in Taiwan. In those years, to meet the original brand consoles was almost unreal, because they were disproportionately expensive, and the market for them in the former Soviet Union was simply closed.

The pioneer in this regard was the Dendy Junior, a complete hardware clone of the Japanese Famicom game console from the Japanese company Nintendo.

As soon as the Dendy hit the shelves, it immediately became incredibly popular. Some were fascinated by the idea of game cartridges, as many had already had a chance to “enjoy” the charm of loading games with a cassette recorder into the gaming PCs of those years, built on the ZX Spectrum processor.

Others were crazy about the revolutionary design of the crossbow joystick.

Others were fascinated by the total immersion in an 8-bit game world with subtitles in Japanese (at best in English) and an incomprehensible plot. One thing was clear – you had to run forward, crushing everything in your path, and at the end defeat the insidious and unpredictable level boss.

Somewhat later, around 1994, on the post-Soviet market “came” the company Sega with its popular all over the world console Sega Mega Drive. It was a kind of Rolls-Royce in the world of consoles of those years. 16-bit processor, ergonomic joysticks and a huge number of games in different genres, just doomed the console to be popular. True, and the price exceeded the competition almost three times.

The situation was almost immediately corrected by “pirates”, releasing clones of the original solution, the cost of which was comparable to the cost of Dendy.