Perestroika is a Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

 computer game released by a small software developer called Locis (Nikita Skripkin, Aleksander Okrug and Dmitry Chikin, currently - NIKITA software) in the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 in 1990/1991, and named after Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Gorbachev

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev is a former Soviet statesman, having served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 until 1991, and as the last head of state of the USSR, having served from 1988 until its dissolution in 1991...

's policy of Perestroika

Perestroika

Perestroika was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev...

. Its splash screen shows Gorbachev and the Kremlin

Kremlin

A kremlin , same root as in kremen is a major fortified central complex found in historic Russian cities. This word is often used to refer to the best-known one, the Moscow Kremlin, or metonymically to the government that is based there...

, 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.

The game consists of controlling a small frog-like creature which jumps from one lily pad

Nymphaeaceae

Nymphaeaceae is a family of flowering plants. Members of this family are commonly called water lilies and live in freshwater areas in temperate and tropical climates around the world. The family contains eight genera. There are about 70 species of water lilies around the world. The genus...

 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 "bureaucrat

Bureaucrat

A bureaucrat is a member of a bureaucracy and can comprise the administration of any organization of any size, though the term usually connotes someone within an institution of a government or corporation...

s" 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 MS-DOS

MS-DOS

MS-DOS is an operating system for x86-based personal computers. It was the most commonly used member of the DOS family of operating systems, and was the main operating system for IBM PC compatible personal computers during the 1980s to the mid 1990s, until it was gradually superseded by operating...

, and it was written in Borland C++

Borland C++

Borland C++ is a C and C++ programming environment for MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. It was the successor to Turbo C++, and included a better debugger, the Turbo Debugger, which was written in protected mode DOS....

 using the Borland Graphics Interface

Borland Graphics Interface

The Borland Graphics Interface, also known as BGI, is a graphics library bundled with several Borland compilers for the DOS operating systems. BGI was also used to provide graphics for many other Borland products including the Quattro spreadsheet. The library loaded graphic drivers and fonts from...

 and has a resolution of 640×350.

NIKITA software released a remake of this game for Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

—Toppler for Windows—and chose the frog from the game as its logo.

There is also a remake which supports DirectX

DirectX

Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay,...

, developed by René Puchinger.

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

Nebulus (computer game)

Nebulus is a computer game created by John M. Phillips and published by Hewson Consultants in the late 1980s for various home computer systems...

game.

External links

• Perestroika Revival for iPad & iPhone
• Toppler remake for iPhone
• Modern Toppler remake by René Puchinger
• Perestroika Flash Version by Matthias Ziehe
• Perestroika JavaScript Remake by Michal Biniek

Russian

• NIKITA Toppler for Windows