Cold war power play: how the Stasi got into computer games

A new exhibition in Berlin shows how the notoriously paranoid East German state greeted the dawn of video gaming with surprising enthusiasm

In 2019 researchers at Berlin's Computer Games Museum made an extraordinary discovery: a rudimentary Pong console, made from salvaged electronics and plastic soap-box enclosures for joysticks. The beige rectangular tupperware that contained its wires would, when connected to a TV by the aerial, bring a serviceable Pong copy to the screen.

At the time, they thought the home-brewed device was a singular example of ingenuity behind the iron curtain. But earlier this year they found another Seifendosen-Pong (soap-box Pong"), along with a copy of a state-produced magazine called FunkAmateur containing schematics for a DIY variety of Atari's 1970s gaming sensation.