Perestroika (video game)

Perestroika (also known as Toppler) is a Russian video game released in 1989 by a small software developer called Locis (Nikita Skripkin, Aleksander Okrug and Dmitry Chikin, currently - Nikita online) in the Soviet Union in 1990, and named after Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of Perestroika. Its splash screen shows Gorbachev and the Kremlin, the seat of Soviet government. The splash screen includes imagery suggestive of crumbling masonry, perhaps symbolizing the deterioration of public infrastructure in the twilight years of the Soviet Union.

Contents

• Sinclair ZX Spectrum
• Webbased
• Mobile based
• References

The game consists of controlling a small frog-like creature which jumps from one lily pad to another, trying to collect dots in four colours symbolizing grocery goods, currency transactions, progressive taxes and adventures and to reach a certain pad in the right-top corner of the screen. The lilies, symbolizing the ever-changing laws and acts in the USSR, constantly shrink and disappear only to appear in other places. Higher levels also feature one or more evil creatures called "bureaucrats" which follow the frog and try to eat it. The frog dies if the lily pad on which it is standing disappears, if the player moves it to a place where there is no lily pad, or if it is caught by a bureaucrat.

Perestroika runs under DOS, and it was written in Borland C++ using the Borland Graphics Interface and has a resolution of 640×350.

Nikita Online released a remake of this game for Windows—Toppler for Windows—and chose the frog from the game as its logo.

The frog itself and the second game name (which is mentioned in the file name toppler.exe) may be inspired by the Tower Toppler game.