How the Bootleg Nintendo System ‘Dendy’ Took Over 1990s Russia

Victor Savyuk had never seen a home video game system, much less played a console game, but he knew a good idea when he heard one. In 1992, Savyuk was working as a programmer in Russia when he began to wonder why none of the major gaming brands had made its way to the country. The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), he believed, would be a big hit, as would Sega’s competing system. Yet, for a variety of reasons, neither company had ventured forth.

So Savyuk decided to take the initiative. If the video game giants wanted to ignore Russia, he’d simply begin manufacturing bootleg systems—and instead of being enraged, Nintendo wound up making Savyuk an offer he couldn’t refuse.

The (Russian) Nintendo Entertainment System

At the time Savyuk plotted his unconventional entrance into the gaming market, the rest of the world had already upgraded. The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)—which had revived the ailing industry in 1985—was already seven years old. The company was on its second-generation console, the Super Nintendo (SNES), which offered superior 16-bit graphics as well as improved sound and storage capacity. Sega, meanwhile, was making the market competitive with the Genesis console and its more mature games. (When Mortal Kombat was released on both systems in 1993, Nintendo scrubbed out the bloody “fatalities”; Sega boasted they had the fighting game in all its spine-ripping glory.)

But in Russia, even the more primitive first-generation systems would be a novelty. While video games weren’t entirely a foreign concept—Russia was, after all, the birthplace of Tetris—the idea of plugging in a system to a television for console play was. It hadn’t been seen in the country since the days of knock-off Pong games and Atari systems in the late 1970s and early 1980s. (The faux Atari 2600 was bizarrely renamed “Rambo TV” for the Russian market.) But the comparatively newer 8-bit systems were likely to be off-limits to most consumers in the country, who simply would not have been able to afford it.

Instead, Russian gamers were probably more familiar with the Game & Watch, an early Nintendo handheld device that was re-imagined in 1984 as the Elektronika 24-01 Igra Na Ekrane, or “Game on Screen,” in which an illicit Mickey Mouse collects eggs for points.

Savyuk knew the market could be bigger, but he didn’t bother trying to negotiate a license with Nintendo or Sega; in Russia, he didn’t have to. For decades, the onetime USSR was largely apathetic to intellectual property rights. One of the most infamous examples was Vinni Pukh, a Russia-produced version of the popular A.A. Milne (and Disney) character Winnie the Pooh that debuted in 1969 without any authorization from rights holders. Russia later produced It’s Always Sunny in Moscow, a nearly scene-for-scene plagiarizing of the popular American sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Piracy of software had also traditionally been tolerated by Russian courts, and even practiced by the government. What was considered unauthorized elsewhere was perfectly acceptable in Russia.

While this lackadaisical approach to IP protections grew more vigilant as the years went on, in the early 1990s there was virtually no safe harbor for copyright holders and no real means of remedy, a fact Savyuk was well aware of. If Nintendo opted to raise the issue, they’d have to prove their product was a recognizable trademark in Russia, among other seemingly futile legal attacks.

Savyuk also knew it was hopeless to even attempt to distribute genuine Nintendo product. It would cost too much, and Nintendo would likely dismiss cash-poor Russians as an undesirable market.

“We understood from the start that we were selling counterfeit products, but the first thing you have to understand is that in that time in Russia, intellectual property was not protected,” Savyuk told Eurogamer.net in 2017. “The law didn’t protect IP like games, consoles in Russia. There, our business was absolutely legal. But of course, in America and Europe it was completely illegal.”

Savyuk first approached his employer, an IT firm named Paragraph (or ParaGraf), with the idea. When Paragraph failed to show any interest, Savyuk turned to a tech company named Steepler, which held interests as varied as computer software and office furniture. The company made him their first video game division employee; Savyuk then turned to Taiwan to manufacture the game consoles, which would be assembled to emulate (but not directly copy) the guts of the NES.

Because Nintendo was a non-entity in Russia, the name Nintendo didn’t carry any resonance with the public. Nor was the phrase video game in widespread use. So Savyuk took the opportunity to give it a brand facelift. He settled on the name Dendy, which was taken from a favorite English word of his: dandy, or “distinguished gentleman.” (He changed the a to an e to make it easier for Russians to read.) Dendy was also the name of the company’s cheerful elephant mascot. (There was no deep meaning: illustrator Ivan Maximov simply liked elephants.)

Dendy was released by Steepler in December 1992 with a price tag of roughly $80 to $94.  There was even an advertising campaign, complete with a catchy jingle. (“Dendy, Dendy! We all love Dendy!”) But for a time, no one appeared to be listening. The Dendy simply sat on shelves.

Dendy-Mania

Steepler had made a couple of miscalculations. For one, the Dendy was pricey, with many Russian consumers of modest means frozen out of the market. (The average monthly salary in Russia in 1992 was 2500 to 3500 rubles, or around $19 to $27, just a fraction of Dendy’s cost.) For another, the Taiwan supplier used the PAL video interface for televisions, not the more common SECAM format. This led to problems with sound; on some TVs, the games showed up in black and white.

Savyuk switched to SECAM and lowered the price to 4550 rubles (around $35) for a system he dubbed the Dendy Junior. Released in 1993, it was a runaway hit, eventually selling between 1.5 million to 2 million units.

Like the console itself, Dendy’s games were a bit of an uncanny valley. While it could play conventional (and legitimate) NES titles, Steepler also had a library of home-brewed games that were crudely and incongruously assembled from different properties. Somari, their version of Sonic, for example, featured Mario wearing the sneakers of Sonic’s sidekick, Tails. Others were non-existent sequels like Robocop 4 or Street Fighter V.

Such non-canonical “sequels” didn’t seem to bother Dendy’s consumer base. The brand became ubiquitous with gaming in Russia, to the point where it began to adopt some of Nintendo’s authoritative brand expansion. Stateside, Nintendo had Nintendo Power magazine; in Russia, Dendy had its own publication, Velikiy Drakon, also known as Video Ace Dendy. Some U.S. department stores were set up with Nintendo kiosks or displays; Dendy had its own Dendy-branded stores. There was even a Dendy television show, The New Reality, though host Sergei Supenov had little knowledge of pop culture in general or games in particular: He sometimes confused Darth Vader with Robocop.

In 1994, Savyuk was summoned to the United States: Nintendo heads Howard Lincoln and Minoru Arakawa wanted to meet him. While Nintendo was fiercely protective of its intellectual property rights and kept a tight grip on third-party partners—it allocated chips to make sure no developer flooded the market with bad games—the company recognized there was little legally it could do about the faux-NES. Instead, they offered to let Steepler distribute the SNES and Game Boy in Russia—provided they imported the real thing and pulled Sega knock-offs from Dendy retail store shelves.

Oddly enough, the official relationship between Dendy and Nintendo was more strained than the unofficial one. Savyuk found that he couldn’t get enough SNES inventory to meet demand and that his profit margins were lower. An SNES cost hundreds of dollars, far more than many Russian families could consider spending.

There was also the matter of bootlegged bootlegs. Dendy copycat consoles were sourced from China, where it was cheaper to manufacture, and wound up undercutting the “authentic” Dendy consoles.

Despite the early runaway success of the Dendy—revenue reached $100 million in 1995—Steepler as a whole later ran into financial problems. By the late 1990s, it was out of business entirely. But Savyuk’s audacious move helped open up the Russian market to game distributors who could now capitalize on a hungry consumer base that understood console gaming. (Nintendo was distributing their wares there as recently as 2022, until Russia’s invasion of Ukraine prompted the company to cease activity.) For millions of Russian kids, it was a friendly elephant, not Mario, that got them hooked on gaming.

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