Curse of the Gray Elephant (2011)

Weren't the 90's great? With Sega and Nintendo battling away to provide us with the latest in video game entertainment, home computers offering an equally enticing experience and even portable game systems on the loose, we never really stopped to think about how lucky we were. A little more so than the Russians apparently...

While we have all listened to the Angry Video Game Nerd belittle countless horrific retro games, one Russian gamer has stepped forward to speak of the true gaming hell we never experienced. What if Sega or Nintendo never existed in our country? What if the closest you could get to a video game console was a black market product? What if these products had no customer support? Well, these are some of the many dilemmas which Russians had to face.

According to the creator of The Grey Elephant's Curse, a documentary about Russia's lack of a video game industry in the 90's, the closest the snowy country could get to owning an original Nintendo NES was via a somewhat questionable company's cloned hardware known as the Dendy. While this did open up the country to the wonderful world of 8-bit gaming, it brought a whole host of game glitches and malfunctioning hardware, which fell rather short of the enjoyment gamers were enjoying elsewhere.

So without further spoiling the saddening history of being a Russian gamer, find a spare hour and sit down with the incredibly interesting The Grey Elephant's Curse and step back in time to the darkest era in gaming history. Be sure to turn the subtitles/closed captions on.