The credits screen

The main building of Kazan University holds its light late in August, and I sat on the granite edge of the flowerbed in front of it until four students in white university polos sat down beside me and asked whom I was photographing. Nobody, I said, which was almost true. I was photographing a building for a page about a program: МОДЕЛЬ РЕГИОНА, a teaching game from the middle eighties, found this summer on a disk side I had set aside as unreadable.

The game gives you a region and twenty five years. Each year you divide the profit between the economy, the environment, the standard of living and birth control, and the model answers. Above a pollution of fifty a term changes sign and the region starts to die quietly; the last warning comes at thirty five. The credits sit at line 1366, behind the one door players almost never open: finish the whole game, then decline to play again. Three names are on that screen, staff of the biology faculty and the technical teaching aids unit of Kazan State University. Two of them I could document. The third, Mamaeva L. A., the one who most likely wrote the BASIC, is the one no search returns. The game has a page now, and it runs in the browser, in Russian, the way it ran here.

The students turned out to be biologists, which is the faculty on the credits screen, though none of them had heard of the game. I showed them year one on my phone and they argued about the environment share as if it were 1985. The work survives whole even when the names wear down to initials.