I acquired and restored this Cold-War era game from Kyrgyzstan; it’s a video game version of Ulak-Tartysh, a game like polo, but played with a headless goat carcass instead of a ball.
I started out trying to import a Polski Fiat from Poland, and somehow ended up with this: an old, beaten Ulak-Tartysh video game.
Ulak-Tartysh, for those of you not familiar with carcass-based sports, is essentially polo played with the headless body of a dead goat. It’s popular in Central Asia, and especially in Kyrgyzstan, which is where this fascinating game hails from. This one appears to have been built in 1983, at some state-run electronics factory in the city of Mailuu-Suu. The coin slots say “15 Kopeks,” but I think at that time all the USSR satellite states used that denomination.
I got it here as a strange sort of compensation when a warehouse owner in Poland was unable to ship the Fiat like we had agreed; apparently, this machine was just sitting, forgotten, in a corner of the warehouse. To restore it, I cleaned up the case, and replaced the power supply system with a cobbled-together 110V unit, from the 220V it originally had. I’ve made repairs, and had to replace the screen/CRT, but beyond that it’s as I got it. I left the case in its battered state, but the marquee cleaned up surprisingly well.