Perestroika (video game)

Perestroika (also known as Toppler) is a Russian computer game released by a small software developer called Locis in the Soviet Union in 1990/1991, and named after Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of Perestroika. Its welcoming screen shows Gorbachev and the Kremlin.

The game consists of controlling a small frog which jumps from one lily pad to another, trying to reach a certain pad in the right-top corner of the screen. The lilies 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 on which it is standing disappears, if the player moves it to a place where there is no lily, or if a bureaucrat eats it.

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

NIKITA software 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.

External links

• Modern Toppler remake by René Puchinger
• Perestroika Flash Version by Matthias Ziehe

Russian

• NIKITA Toppler for Windows