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PC Gamer
PC Gamer
Joshua Wolens

I played communist Germany's only arcade cabinet and you can too, comrade

Germany VEB East Germany
The protagonist of Butterflies wielding his butterfly net.
Weird Weekend

Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.

If the German Democratic Republic (GDR)—that is, East Germany—is known for anything, it's an irrepressible sense of fun. And yet, somehow, the country only produced a single arcade cabinet across its entire 41-year existence: the Poly-Play—six feet of East German engineering in creamy wood-grain, manufactured by VEB (Volkseigener Betrieb, or publicly owned enterprise) Polytechnik Karl-Marx-Stadt, the city now called Chemnitz.

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