Dendy’s Dream Debased
The rise and fall of New Reality
Russia of the 90s felt like a misremembered dream that stumbled over lapses with hastily invented fictions, governed by the logic of the early hours. In its heightened unreality things like Dendy not only flourished, but even seemed to make sense.
Dendy was a Taiwanese NES clone that captured the minds of Russian children circa 1992. Distributed by a shady enterprise called “Steepler,” it took over the nation in two years, by mid-90s generating half a million ruble revenue (back when the ruble wasn’t quite the novelty currency it is today).
Dendy embodied total corruption of information, money, technology and language. The name itself, almost “Dandy” but not quite, perfectly fitted the grey box and its grey mascot, a teenage elephant with an expression torn between panic and euphoria. At the height of Dendy’s success, Steepler even commissioned a cartoon pilot detailing the elephant’s plans for a promotional tour across the globe.
The console came in a few perfunctory variations, followed by a deluge of Dendy knock-offs, stretching the concept of authenticity into a cozy loop. To protect and promote Dendy’s original products, Steepler launched New Reality, a midpoint between a halfhour ad and a proto-let’s-play.
Rewatching it now, the show’s bullshitry is exhaustingly blatant. And yet, with few alternative sources of information (the first dial-ups appeared in the middle of the decade), it was enough to leave a generation of Russians wallowing in mass nostalgia two decades later. Alexey Valer’evich sums it up in a Youtube comment: “Twofold feelings irritates and nostalgia))))”
Sergei Suponev, a cuddly little man who’d already charmed the nation’s children with “Call of the Jungle” and “Star Hour,” was chosen as the host of New Reality. His casual manner, largely informed by his unprofessionalism, was something of a novelty among the grumpy old men that dominated Russian television. He even made clumsy but well-meaning stabs at class and gender equality. In short, he was a maverick.
For all his qualities, Suponev was equally inadequate in English, German, Chinese and occasionally Russian, which didn’t prevent him from attempting to decipher the titles & the blurbs. Clearly unrehearsed, he’d accept hacked & pirated cartridges with disarming naivety. Here’s Somari, a bizarre port of Sonic 1 with the protagonist sprites swapped with Mario 3's.
A Joe & Mack ripoff, called “Mario 16,” fell into his hands before the original Joe & Mack, which he then accused of plagiarism. The most disturbing of these hacks was Chip & Dale 3, in which a sassy Chip infiltrates a military base, using his paw as a machine gun against an army of enemy Dales.
At other times Suponev’s language barrier would inspire sudden flights of fanfiction. He’d substitute the game’s plot with borrowings from Russian folklore, improvise a poem of sorts or bring up current events, usually of the darker variety (destitution, Chechen War). Despite the novelty of the onscreen action, the context would invariably be rewritten to remind us that it’s a mere distraction from a life that will remain bleak and without hope.
Early on, a self-proclaimed computer genius Denis Panov was brought in to share tips & tricks with the audience. The resourceful youth simply called Steepler and said that he’s good at video games, and that was it. Pairing the middle-aged host with a younger companion seemed like a decent idea, except that Panov soon proved to be wildly incompetent, bringing to the show nothing of any value.
Around 1994 Steepler signed a dubious contract with the actual Nintendo to sell SNES and Game Boy to the exclusion of all Sega products. This being Russia, the agreement was humored for about a month, and soon Sega’s affordable and easily pirated consoles continued to dominate the 16-bit market. Meanwhile, New Reality began whoring out the official Nintendo consoles in a manner so aggressive that even the hysterical TV ads of the time paled in comparison.
When there were no new games to show (which was often) Suponev would go outside and bother the general public. “What do you know about Game Boy?” Not much. His relentless questioning soon assumes a sadistic quality. Having harassed half a dozen children and “a woman with an attractive scarf” he wraps it up on an homeless Bukowski-lookalike who happily growls into the camera “Gambow? Is good!”
It gets worse: children on the street are asked which game resembles the breaks at school. Each one names Mortal Kombat, citing beatings and “rivers of blood.” The sequence is uncomfortably long, twelve increasingly solemn youths, each answering without a hint of irony: “Mortal Kombat.”
Back to the studio. A fitting metaphor is sent in by a young fan of the show: a replica of Sonya (Russified Sony) TV with a Dendy attached to it, both crafted out of matchboxes. The console even has two miniature gamepads and a cartridge slot. Examining the present, Suponev exclaims “It’s so well-made, I keep thinking it might actually work!”
With time Suponev becomes inventive in his ways to fill up an episode. He raves about Dendy plastic bags that the firmenny Dendy shops carry. They come in two sizes, the larger one fit “to carry your younger brother to school and back.” It looks like he’d had a few drinks before the filming. He later knocks over a box, stammers incomprehensibly and assaults the genius Panov, who, having disappointed everyone yet again, backs away with “I think I should leave,” never to be seen again.
After this low point the season ends on a pleading, pathetic note (“I have a feeling we might see each other again… very soon”), and after a pause New Reality gets recommissioned by ORT, the country’s central channel.
The second season moves to a swanky new studio, its spaciousness quadrupled by inept camerawork, showing Suponev’s lonely form swallowed by the black void of the unfinished backdrop.
In this dark and haunting place he drifts between giant replicas of Genesis/SNES/Dendy controllers and an even larger Gameboy in the back. Suponev presses its buttons with exaggerated effort at the beginning of the corresponding section, pretending to operate an oversize replica of a handheld device played through an adapter of a concealed console, approximating the nonexistant colors of Donkey Kong, demoted from Country to Land, reduced from 16 to 8-bits, himself a 3D model of a gorilla, stripped into sprites and rendered flat.
To make up for the banished genius of Denis Panov, you the audience is encouraged to send VHS Let’s-Plays to have a few seconds of it shown on national television. One of these tapes included a vloggy sequence of the let’s-player talking of his aspirations to become a game developer. He asks if there’s “a special kind of computer” he needs to buy for that and promises to send his first game to New Reality. Suponev vows to look into it and in two weeks time he breaks our hearts: “I’m sorry, but in Russia that will hardly ever be a possibility, so why don’t you try to do well in school and help your parents, and maybe you’ll even get a real job at some point.”
All this misery did not prevent the resurgence of Dendy-themed retrogaming, which is even briefly mentioned on Wikipedia. Despite everything, Dendy remains synonymous with delicious foreignness, a brand of naivety that’s completely impossible today, when everything can be looked up and tracked down.
Well, almost everything. The episodes of New Reality were never archived, and even the ones uploaded on Youtube by the show’s most ardent fans are often corrupted, missing sound or whole sections.
Meanwhile, the lost episodes are routinely reenacted in the darkened rooms of the Jerry Rubin Club on Leninsky prospekt in Moscow, where dedicated 30-somethings fish disjointed fragments out of their collective memory and reconstruct the missing shows.
The group adamantly refuses to have an internet presence, adhering to the constraints of the New Reality. Are they inadvertently engaged in folk performance art, or is it our absence as spectators that lends the gatherings a higher artistic purpose? Their unrecorded work can be seen as a reaction against the commodification of shared nostalgia. Memories are no longer allowed to rot and ferment, all the flavors of childhood are readily available, drowned in sobbing comments from likeminded mourners of an innocence that remains lost despite its clear projection.
On Youtube the second season ends abruptly on episode 29. The final words are optimistic, as usual. Somewhere higher up things happen, New Reality is killed, a substitute World of Dendy stays for a few weeks sans Suponev, but no-one wants that. Steepler vanishes, eventually we find out about the NES, and Dendy starts to feel like a dream. Suponev drafts a Survivor clone and dies in a mysterious snowmobile accident. Twelve years later his son commits suicide. Six tributes are aired between 2001 and 2013.
Like a great deal of imported culture of the time, Dendy came dead on arrival and had its corpse idly prodded through a decade that was dead itself, an interzone between decline and more decline, which in its wake left room for happiness of a strange and desperate kind.
