Toy Story: Field of Wonders — How a Game from a Secret Soviet City Spread Across the World

It happened in a city sealed off from spies, gypsies, and the miseries of a socialist economy. In the Soviet Union there were exactly ten such cities, all bound by the secret of the atom.

The path for a mathematically gifted boy growing up in one of those cities was predetermined: top marks in algebra and geometry, the mechanics-mathematics faculty of Moscow State University, a return to the system, an apartment, a PhD by fifty, a Zhiguli car, a dacha six meters by six. Endless contemplation of the mathematical modeling of nuclear explosions tore boys' minds apart.

Three distractions existed: alcohol, gambling, and sport.

Before the PC

There was no internet. No home computers. Two television channels. The mainframes BESM-6 and ELBRUS ran day and night computing the insane energies of hydrogen bombs — and, somewhere in their memory, stored a text adventure called CAVE.

The IBM PC/XT Arrives

TIME magazine named the IBM PC/XT its Machine of the Year for 1982. Six years later, two units reached our closed city. One was placed in a display hall for public admiration. The other — through some extraordinary circumstance — ended up in room 632A, the author's workspace at the All-Russian Research Institute of Experimental Physics (VNIIEF).

The machine ran MS-DOS, had a 20 MB hard drive, a 5-inch floppy drive, and a CGA monitor capable of displaying up to 3 colors at 320×200 resolution.

The effect on colleagues was immediate. Zuckerberg's success is nothing compared to mine, the author recalls. For ten minutes on the DIGGER game, girls offered eternal love or sex by the hour. Men offered motorcycles and apartment keys.

Learning to Program

Programming was not taught at the mechanics-mathematics faculty. The only place to learn it was the military department, where the instructors were PVO (air defense) officers. Monthly military training after the fourth year resembled a business trip to Santa Clara.

At the Pushkin Higher Radio-Electronics Military Academy, the author and a partner wrote code for integer addition on a NAIRI tabletop computer with 16 front-panel lights and commands like FE66.

All subsequent work was done in Turbo Pascal. The games followed one after another: Diving (a DIGGER clone), Cats, text adventures, Sea Battle, King.

Field of Wonders: One Week of Work

The game was created in approximately one week. One day for graphics. Two days writing code and filling the word database. Three days of testing by the women of the adjacent department 0816.

The splash screen was copied from the newspaper Pole Chudes. The image of host Leonid Yakubovich came from a black-and-white photo in SPID-INFO magazine. The television studio address was photographed off a television screen using Polaroid film. The background graphics were walls borrowed from Wolfenstein.

The word database was filled with names from the classified internal telephone directory of the Institute — mathematicians and theoretical physicists, about half with the Jewish surnames characteristic of Soviet science.

A Phone Number in the Code

The author embedded two email addresses (bashurov@vniief.su and bady@vniief.su) and his home telephone number (5-92-73) directly into the game code. The city was still called Arzamas-16. Long-distance calls to personal lines were monitored but permitted; calls to workplace numbers were forbidden.

Within months, calls started coming in from Israel. A host from a Tel Aviv radio station — Echo of Tel Aviv — asked permission to distribute the game over FIDO bulletin board networks. The phone rang without stop. The number had to be changed.

Letters arrived daily from the USA and Israel — from former Soviet emigrants and from Russian-language study groups who had discovered the game.

Three Games, Half the Computers in the Former USSR

Three titles from 1991 — Sea Battle, King, and Field of Wonders — ended up on roughly half the computers in the former Soviet Union that had a Russian-language keyboard. Success came not from design or gameplay but from a simple accident: there was almost no Russian-language software, and the field was wide open.

The Editorial Office and the October Events

By January–February 1993, the author's institutional salary had fallen to $15 a month. He traveled to Moscow and visited the editorial office of the Pole Chudes newspaper, leaving a diskette with the game. The chief editor, Schwarz, was pleasant. His deputy, Semanov, took the diskette with the source code.

The editorial office promised modest compensation and covered travel expenses for trips to Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Then October 1993 came. During the White House siege, the entire editorial staff vanished — they collected their passports, packed their bags, and hid in Spain for three months until the conflict was over. When they returned, they greeted the author with: Where have you been? Why is your game on every second computer with a Russian keyboard?

$400 and a New Computer

In Moscow the author ran into a classmate, Slava Ulendeev. Over drinks, he recounted the Field of Wonders story. Ulendeev said nothing — then silently produced $400 and a new computer from storage.

Back then $200 could take four people on a two-week vacation in Crimea in Rockefeller style. A good hotel room near Alushta cost one million rubles — or $1 a day.

In exchange, Ulendeev asked the author to learn Forth programming and write a Sea Battle game for the NES (the Dendy console). The author learned Forth and wrote the program — but time destroyed the opportunity. Game monetization had become impossible; hyperinflation consumed everything. Real money was being made in trade: timber for export, computers imported. Profits measured in thousands of percent.

Intel, 3DR, and the E3 Show

By 1995 the author had forgotten Field of Wonders. He remained a VNIIEF employee but earned his living through Intel contracts. Intel was generous — quarterly OpReview conferences at expensive resorts, golf at Nakhabino with Alla Pugacheva.

As a known game developer, the author worked on 3D Realms projects, building applications and geometric engines. The 3DR engine was beating DirectX competitors and approaching OpenGL-level performance.

In 1996, Intel flew the development team to California. The author dug out his old list of email addresses from game players abroad and sent friendly notes. Nearly all of them wrote back after three years of silence, remembering the game and inviting him to visit.

He chose the California residents. Every week he joined their football games in Cupertino. The players were employees of NVIDIA, Apple, and Sun — former Soviet citizens, every one of them.

Intel's Jim Hurley brought him to E3 in Los Angeles, gaming's largest trade show. Their Falcon game ran 25% faster on the 3DR engine than on any competitor. As a game developer and Intel contractor, the author visited almost every gaming company in Silicon Valley: UbiSoft, Parallax, MicroProse, Electronic Arts, Spectrum Holobytes — all nearby, all generous with boxes of games. He spent a month on Descent from Parallax Software, a game that occupied four 3.5-inch floppy disks.

Meeting Yakubovich

During the 1996 presidential election campaign, pop stars toured the country by private aircraft. In Nizhny Novgorod, coming out of the Volga Hotel on the Volga embankment, the author ran into Leonid Yakubovich. His friend Fyodor Pletenev made the introduction: Leonid Arkadyevich, this is Vadim, who made the Field of Wonders game.

Yakubovich frowned. Are you aware that we almost sued you?

The television editors had been buried in letters from game players demanding prizes. Two rooms at the editorial address were packed with sacks of mail. The publication had suffered real financial damage.

Despite the frown, Yakubovich shook his hand on parting. A normal guy, the author concluded — though a bastard.

(Richard Gere stepped out of the adjacent hotel room at that moment. No one in Nizhny Novgorod saw him again. He had come for three days, then left immediately for a monastery with a local girl. It had nothing to do with Field of Wonders.)

A London Conference, 2005

Sometimes Field of Wonders would resurface. In 2005, an invitation arrived for a conference in London. Among the attendees were game developers from Sarov (formerly Arzamas-16), Snezhinsk (formerly Chelyabinsk-70), and Zheleznogorsk (formerly Krasnoyarsk-26).

Today, officials in any regional Russian city recognize the author as the creator of Field of Wonders — all the bureaucrats are former drum-spinners from the TV show. But he is no bureaucrat, no businessman, no con artist.

I am Russian, which means I am an engineer and a programmer. Programming for Russian guys is not a profession — it's a pleasure.

A Technical Note: Direct Video Memory Access in Pascal and Assembly

The only Russian-language book about the IBM PC, written by David Bradley, was essential reading. Without it, the drum on screen could never have spun so fast. Turbo Pascal allowed inline assembly functions.

Drawing a pixel in Pascal using direct video memory access:

var scr: array[] of byte absolute $A000:0000; // video memory start address
scr[0 + 320*47] := $FF; // lights up two white pixels on screen line 47

The same operation in assembly — about twice as fast:

mov bx, 00FFh       ; white color
mov ax, 0A000h      ; video buffer segment start
mov es, ax
mov ax, 0012Fh      ; line 47
mov si, ax
mov [es:si], bx     ; illuminate

The author apologizes for any typos — this was written entirely from memory, twenty years after last touching Pascal or assembly.