Russia’s Defense Ministry has spent over $1 million on creating its own computer games.
Originally, the idea was to design a Russian alternative to popular US and Japanese video games, where Russians are normally portrayed as the enemy. The game “Call of Duty”, for example, shows Russians invading the mainland of the US and even dropping nuclear bombs on Washington DC.
Officials believe that a game with a Russian spin on World War II would boost patriotism among youngsters.
However, instead of designing a sophisticated strategy or shooter game as everyone was expecting, the Ministry of Defense came up with a set of simplistic flash games placed on its website. Among them are such well-known applications as Minesweeper, Tetris and Battleship, which while hugely popular all over the world are surely no match for Call of Duty and the like.
IT specialists say this is just a new way for the Ministry of Defense to launder more cash.
“When I saw these games for the first time, I thought they had been developed by some freelancers from Belarus paid $500 at the most,” the editor-in-chief of “Hacker” magazine, Nikita Kislitsyn, told RT. “I was confused when I read that Russia had paid $1 million for them.”
The Defense Ministry claimed that the flash games are a very small part of a complete overhaul of its website, and much more multimedia content is to come.
“The new site includes dozens of various topical sections on different aspects of the armed forces’ activities,” said the ministry’s spokesman.
This is not the first time the ministry has been suspected of corruption. Throughout 2011, President Medvedev repeatedly expressed his dissatisfaction with the Defense Ministry’s failure to meet deadlines for very expensive state purchases.