Clear Prop! (Russian: От Винта! / Ot Vinta!) is a legendary Russian TV show about computer games that existed in period since May 20, 1995 and until October 25, 1998. It started as an experiment, but quickly became the most successful TV show about computer games. Russian gamers sure remember this one, but I think it's an interesting thing to show it for those, who don't speak Russian. It'll be a little hard to understand all that nonsense that you'll hear in this show, though, so let me explain. Back in 90s, there was almost no official software in Russia. The whole country was in a chaos and everybody tried to make easy money on pirate copies. Those were everywhere. When first CD games appeared, those were hard to find, but soon those appeared on every corner and it was easy to find like "100 games on 1 disk" collection for laughable price. Well, price wasn't the biggest problem, of course. The problem was - official software was impossible to find. I mean, there was no eBay back then. But the biggest problem was that in pirate copies there were no booklets. So, if plot of the game was written there, you were in a big trouble. So, when Clear Prop show appeared, they tried to talk about games without much knowledge about what they're talking about. They're used to made up stories just to say something about the game. And sometimes such stories had nothing in common with real ones. It's a strange thing to see, but that's how it was in Russia back then. It's a part of the history, like it, or not. And it shows how gaming culture was back then in Russia.
The structure of this show is the same with any typical comedy duo show. In this series we have Gamover (born Anton Zaytsev) as straight man and Bonus (Boris Repetur) as comic. Gamover, whose name is made from English "Game Over" (people in Russia used to say "Gamover" instead of "Game Over" a lot actually, it was a part of the slang), is acting smart and serious. He'll try to show a lot of knowledge and will act like he can speak English. Like he'll pronounce genres and games' titles in English (often in laughably wrong English, but he'll act like it's correct), while Bonus will often say stupid things and also will try to translate Gamover's English words. For example, when Gamover will say that genre of their next game is "action", he'll say the word "action" in English, while Bonus will try to explain that "action" means "run and shoot stuff". Same with the titles. Bonus will try to translate them, but usually his translations will be totally wrong. And that's the fun - Gamover will name the game in English, while Bonus will translate the title in weird, funny, or totally wrong way. Up to the point when meaning will change completely.
The title of this show is a play on words. In Russian, "Clear Prop!" command literally means "From the Prop!" ("Ot Vinta!"). While Prop (Vint) is also an informal term for hard disk drive (such term appeared thanks to IBM's "Winchester" hard disk drive, after which all hard disk drives started to be called "Winchesters" very often and called this way even today, and the fact that "Win" in "Winchester" and "Vin" in "Vint" sounds the same). So, the title of this show is "Clear Prop!" command, and that's why there's a plane in the opening, but it also means "from hard disk drive", and that's why there's also HDD.
So, here it is. A piece of Russian gaming history. Fully English subbed by me. Thanks for my dear friend, who prefers to stay anonymous, for corrections ~_^
Copyright notes: It's an officially free fansub. Not for sale, or rent. If you paid for it, get your money back. Original video was ripped from Russian magazine called Igromania, that restored most of the episodes (the work itself was done by FXA studio) and released them as a part of free extras. But since you can't buy those DVDs openly (if you've missed those magazines, there's no chance to buy DVDs anymore) and since this video means free English fansub, no copyrights were harmed.
There are 148 episodes in this series (a few of them officially lost, though). I can't promise to sub them all, I'm doing this just for fun, but if you want to help with proofreading, timing, or scripts, feel free to contact me. Also, feel free to throw buck, or two on letande@hotmail.com PayPal account. It'll sure help.
In this episode you'll see the following games: Wolfenstein 3D, Comanche: Maximum Overkill and Master of Orion.
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