Kefir and Arzamas released a video about the history of games — its production took more than a year

A new issue appeared on Arzamas channel yesterday. It is dedicated to the history of games — starting with the forgotten entertainment of antiquity and ending with modern console titles. The video was made in collaboration with Kefir Studio. Both companies told App2Top.ru about a project that has been in production for more than a year.

The idea of the video belongs to Kefir. “We have been waiting for many years for Arzamas to make a release about games, but we couldn’t stand it and came ourselves,” the studio says.

Together, the companies wanted to make a project that tells about games from both the historical and the entertainment side. However, during production, the team encountered a number of difficulties.

The main problem was related to the lockdown. At this time there was a period of active search for information, but many libraries and archives were unavailable. “We can only guess how much amazing material about games can be collected for far more than one cycle,” Arzamas notes.

Another challenge was the lack of sufficient academic materials about games in Russian. As an example of one of the few Russian researchers on this topic, the authors of the video cite Vyacheslav Shevtsov, Doctor of Historical Sciences, who wrote a dissertation about maps and nobles.

According to Arzamas, the main idea of the release was to tell about games as a phenomenon in the history of mankind: “Why did people play? How did they come up with the rules? How have games transformed over time? And damn, how great they transformed. Now the games are cooler than we are.”

As a result, Arzamas and Kefir got a 17-minute video. Most of it is devoted to the world history of games in different periods, but not much attention is paid directly to video games. The information in the video is provided with the help of voiced text and various graphs, text references, humorous dialogues and other visual techniques.