Parkan: Chronicles of an Empire

Parkan was the most successful and ambitious release by the post-Soviet game company Locis (Perestroika, 1990). In 1991, Locis became NIKITA, a company whose record-breaking sales—at least, in the post-Soviet world—marked the moment when a Russian game developer actively challenged the hegemony of Western games within Russian ludic media. A sci-fi space opera, Parkan attempted several designs that were implausibly ambitious for its time, and, even today, represent rare achievements when successful. Parkan sought to create 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 within a single game. 

 

Although Parkan contained a central plot, engagement with it was largely optional. Instead, much of the game consisted in free flight across a simulated galaxy, where players landed and worked toward 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, planets, creating your own state—indeed, this colonization formed an important part of the main plot. In addition, Parkan featured an economic simulation that made trade dynamic and interesting. 

 

In the 1990s, there were no Western games that created anything on this scale. Homeworld (1999) would attempt the space empire representation, but with no direct embodiment as an individual. Mass Effect, the iconic space opera by Bioware, only came out in 2007, and included no colonization or economic simulation. Parkan had the same ambition and reach of these big-budget games, but on a much smaller budget and with significant technological limitations.  Parkan’s incredible ambition was to combine three games: a first-person shooter, a flying sim, and a trading game. This scale was only matched by big-budget projects maintained by permanent support staffs, such as Eve Online (2003). 

 

Parkan was thus an anomaly that established a recurring trend within East European games, in which pioneering concepts were enacted with very limited resources, producing a representational and simulationist scope that far outmatched their means to deliver. The results were flawed but fascinating artworks with stable fanbases that appreciate them as cult objects and continue to mod and support them even today.