Ah, the bizarreness of Russian gaming market, thy name is Dendy. For the curse of the grey elephant laid upon Russian gamers of the 90s, we should thank Steepler Co., the creators of Dendy trademark.
After all, it was their idea to bring famiclones from Taiwan to Russia and slap their own brand on them.
And I kid you not, they had a lot of success.
From their own stores...
...to their own magazine...
...and even a TV show hosted by the great late Sergei Suponev...
...they had everything.
But the truth is that while they created video gaming in Russia, they also screwed it. They screwed themselves by missing the PS1 bandwagon, screwed importing games by letting pirats loose - VG piracy is still rampant in Russia.
Also, they screwed Nintendo. Ask a Russian about 16-bit consoles, and he will think of Sega Mega Drive (Genesis for Americans) first. Then he will stutter. Why so? SNES did win the console war in long run, as you may know.
Well, thank Steepler.
And yes, they cranked the price way too high for a family earnimg their money in honest, legal ways to afford it.
For the same reason the original Game Boy never caught up as well. Why spending money on something so expensive...
...when you can buy this wonderful invention of engineers from world's most populated country for a much lesser price?
Really, only Game Boy Advance SP (SP only!) managed to get some traction. Even then, Noviy Disk, the company that sold Nintendo DS in Russia, failed enough to have PSP rock and rule instead. (In fact, I, a Russian, was very surprised when in TV Tropes article on console wars DS was named the winner.)
But here is at least one interesting part. Sega's partner Nisho Iwai was negotiating with Steepler. It did not work out. Nisho Iwai sold Sega's consoles through a compant named Forrus, and Steepler's SMDs were not exactly genuine.
Also, Sega Master System gets a mention in a Kommersant article written around that time. It even specifically gets pointed out that it is not, in fact, a Famicom variation.
Indeed, Steepler's reign was not really set in stone. The final question is: how different it all may have been? How much change would it take to have the history of gaming in Russia to go in different direction?
(This thread is really me making wild guesses. In fact, I'm not sure that a lot of people would take this all seriously. I tried to make it more interesting to read, with pictures and all, let's see if it helps.
Also, I thought about making a thread on fai.org.ru, but FAI is one, not interested in that kind of PODs and two, just plain boring.)