Parkan: Chronicles of an Empire

Parkan was the most successful and ambitious release by the post-Soviet game company Locis (Perestroika, 1990), whose record-breaking sales (at least in Russia) marked a significant moment when a Russian game developer actively challenged the hegemony of Western games on Russian ludic media. The sci-fi space opera attempted several designs that would be considered implausibly ambitious at the time, and even today represent rare achievements. Parkan sought a true space simulation, covering everything from individual experience as a singular body represented through a first-person view, to massive battles between inhumanly large ships, to the colonization of whole alien worlds, all in a single game.

Although the game contained a central plot, it was largely optional and much of the game consisted in free flight across a simulated galaxy, where players set and worked towards their own objectives. It was possible to play as a pirate or a merchant, a smuggler or law-enforcer, changing roles depending on relations with a given local faction or state. It was even possible to land on, and possibly conquer and colonize planets, creating your own state, indeed this was an important part of the main plot. Aside from all this, Parkan featured an economic simulation to make trade dynamic and interesting.

Notably, there were no Western games that had attempted anything on the scale in the 1990s. Homeworld (1999) attempted the space empire representation, but with no direct embodiment as an individual, while Mass Effect, the iconic space opera by Bioware only came out in 2007, and included no colonization or economic simulation. Parkan is a direct influence on these big-budget games, while many small projects like Freelancer (2003), which developed their own cult following, are clearly indebted to Parkan too. Indeed, Parkan’s incredible ambition to represent all aspects of experience, effectively combining three games--a first-person shooter, a flying sim, and a strategy and colonization game-- was only matched by large budget projects maintained by permanent support staffs, such as Eve Online (2003), making Parkan an exceptional anomaly and setting a recurring trend within East European games for almost implausibly ambitious games designed with very limited means, whose representational and simulationist scope far outmatches their means to deliver, resulting in both flawed and fascinating artworks with stable fan-bases who appreciate them as cult objects and continue to mod and support them even today.