Who invented the Dendy console (10 photos + 2 videos)
In 1992, ParaGraph manager Viktor Savyuk learned that the world was going crazy over the eight-bit Nintendo console. He was fired up by the idea of supplying such a gadget, but the head of ParaGraph and future creator of Evernote Stepan Pachikov did not support the project. Then 30-year-old Savyuk left for the Stipler company, where he came up with and promoted the Dendy brand. 
In 1994, Stipler sold Taiwanese clones of the Nintendo console for $75 million, in 1995 - for $100 million. Let's find out the details of the creation of the legendary device and find out why the brand did not survive until the 2000s.
"The Brilliant World of Video Games" 
Young Viktor Savyuk (left) and Sergey Osenev
"I came up with the Dendy project," — Viktor Savyuk, a shareholder in New Cloud Technologies and several other companies, lights a cigar and reminisces. In the late 80s, he, a student at the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics at Moscow State University, held discos, then worked as a programmer and successfully sold video cassettes, in 1991 he got a job at Stepan Pachikov's ParaGraph, one of the first Soviet IT companies, where he discovered video games.
Back in the 1980s, Pachikov organized a children's computer club in Moscow. "Garry Kasparov helped us a lot in this matter: he gave us 50 Atari computers," he later recalled. "It was the largest concentration of personal computers in the USSR." In their free time, the club's employees wrote games for PCs, and Savyuk took up their distribution.
"Coming up with a box design, packaging floppy disks, putting them in stalls for foreign tourists... In 1991, this was something incredible, crazy," Savyuk says. "Sales were laughable, revenue was a pittance, but the image component - and Styopa Pachikov was interested in this - was cool. You could show boxes with games to important foreigners."
It was in a computer club that the future creator of Dendy learned that somewhere in the West there was a company called Nintendo, which produced TV consoles. He had never seen anything like it, he had only heard of the ZX Spectrum, but he decided that since the whole world was playing such games, it must be something extraordinary.
By 1990, 30% of American households owned the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) console (only 23% owned personal computers) and almost 40% of Japanese households (in Nintendo's native market, the console was sold under the Famicom brand). Worldwide sales had already exceeded 50 million units and were gradually declining (in 1992, for example, only 2.5 million were sold) under pressure from the newly released 16-bit Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) and Sega Mega Drive (Genesis in America).
When the era of eight-bit games began to decline, Taiwanese factories mastered the production of illegal NES clones - fortunately, the original device was not very complex and consisted of inexpensive components. Most likely, Viktor Savyuk's colleagues who told him about the consoles had dealt with something similar, although, as the founder of the Gameland company Dmitry Agarunov recalls, in those years in Moscow consignment shops you could get not only fake, but also real NES. One way or another, in the absence of the Internet, it was difficult to understand the nuances, but Savyuk was already fired up by the idea of selling consoles and turned to his employer for support.
At ParaGraph, the offer to get involved in video games was met coolly. Pachikov had enough other things to do: games and free computer courses were a hobby, and 3D modeling was his job (in 1997, he sold this business to the American Silicon Graphics for $ 81 million). Having failed to meet understanding, Savyuk decided to leave.
«New Reality» 
«Intuitively, I understood that if there is a huge flourishing business somewhere in the world, there is no reason why it cannot exist in the CIS», recalls Viktor Savyuk. In search of like-minded people in the fall of 1992, he went around several Moscow companies related to IT or trade in something technological.
First of all, Savyuk turned to acquaintances from the disco days who sold protective screens for computer monitors. Then, in 1992, it was not possible to come to an agreement with them, but in the 2000s, this company released a Chinese portable gaming console under its brand, on which nostalgic gamers could record games for the NES and other old consoles. The company still exists and does about the same thing it did in the 1990s: sells inexpensive gadgets and computer accessories of Chinese manufacture under the same brand - Defender.
Eventually, other members of the Moscow disco scene — the founders of the company Stipler, Maxim Selivanov and Vladislav Ulendeev — were interested in video games. This turned out to be a great success, because in 1992, the now forgotten Stipler was a prosperous and rich IT company that could afford a risky non-core project. The company developed software (for example, the Windows Russifier — Cyrwin), imported and sold office equipment, acting as an official HP dealer, and began to engage in system integration. With the arrival of Savyuk, another direction appeared. Vladislav Ulendeev, however, claims that Stipler was thinking about getting into video games even before Savyuk arrived.
The idea to order a batch of consoles from Asia was more burning than anyone else at Stipler, as Savyuk now recalls, not his old acquaintances, but their partner Andrey Cheglakov (in the 2000s, he would create another bright project, Marussia Motors), who was responsible for finances in the company. “I remember Andrey walking around the office on Prechistenka and repeating: “Guys, you’ll see, we’ll make a bomb out of this,” says the creator of Dendy. “Of course, I didn’t get any share in the business then, but they promised me financing and organizational help, called me “head of the video game department,” gave me a chair and a laptop. By the way, they didn’t give me a table — there was little space in the office.”
Viktor Savyuk began studying the thick telephone directories that the managers of Stipler brought back from their business trips to Taiwan, looking for factories that could make consoles. “I don’t know what people on the other end of the line thought about a person who doesn’t understand anything, tries to find out something and asks to send samples, but many responded well,” Savyuk recalls. “Those who responded best were very lucky. We placed our first orders with them, and then settled on them as our main suppliers.”
They looked for manufacturers in Taiwan because the technological boom in mainland China had just started 25 years ago, and it was believed that local factories had quality issues. The downside of Taiwan was the higher tariffs, but Stipler was able to get a paper from the Foreign Ministry stating that Taiwan is part of China, so it can pay the favorable tariff set for China.
In Southeast Asia in the early 90s there were already more or less promoted brands of NES replicas. For example, the first console that the Taipei TXC factory sent to Stipler as a sample was called Micro Genius. Another would not have bothered, but Savyuk wanted to come up with, register and promote his own brand. In the 2000s, many businessmen adopted the habit of giving beautiful names to Chinese equipment. One after another, the Bork, Polaris, Vitek and other brands appeared. But for us in 1992, this was a bold marketing move.
The name of the console came by chance. As a result of brainstorming, several nice word forms appeared, Savyuk was hooked by the word "pinty" - having twisted it this way and that, he got "Dandy". To make the work of the advertising departments of the media easier, the font was the simplest - Cooper, the corporate color was made red. All that remained was to come up with a logo and plan the promotion.
"Characters were popular then, everyone wanted to draw a dog, a cat, a raccoon - even the devil himself," Savyuk recalls. Animator Ivan Maksimov took on the order for $10. The anthropomorphic elephant Dendy was born on the second try and Savyuk really liked it, although he suspected that the trunk was an obvious hint at the shape of his own nose.
The advertising jingle was recorded by "Neschastny Sluchai" (Accident) by Alexey Kortnev, the slogan "Everybody Plays" was invented by the band's bassist Andrey Guvakov. The expression "the brilliant world of video games", which was widely used in the advertising campaign, was helped to be coined by one of the first Soviet NLP specialists, Alexey Sitnikov. The videos, which soon flooded the airwaves, were filmed by Video International.
Viktor Savyuk
Viktor Savyuk received the laptop and chair in the office of "Stipler" in October, and the start of sales was scheduled for the end of the year. Surprisingly, everything worked out. "A good gift for children for Christmas has been prepared by the trading house "Stipler": last week, Dendy television game consoles arrived at the company's warehouses, which are offered for sale in batches of 100 pieces for $80 (at the Taiwanese factory they cost $15 per piece. - Note from "Secret"). If the batch is increased by another 50 pieces, the discount will be 12%,” the Kommersant newspaper reported on December 21, 1992.
By that time, the "head of the video game department" had only one subordinate, so he himself went around Moscow stores, trying to sell the consoles from the first batch, 10,000 units. He managed to come to an agreement with the branch of the Central Department Store on Petrovka. "It was an ordinary second-hand store, but we quickly and efficiently repaired it, put the consoles on display, and they brought in 10 thousand dollars on the very first day," Savyuk recalls. "The sellers were shocked - their picture of the world had changed: monthly revenue - in just one day."
"Everybody Plays"
December and January sales of Dendy confirmed the hypothesis: there is, in principle, demand for consoles. But there was no explosive growth. Only a few thousand devices were sold wholesale and retail each month.
“Little elephants ran across TV screens, shouting: “Dandy, Dandy,” but the consoles sold poorly in the first few months and irritation was brewing at Stipler,” Savyuk recalls. “One day they told me: “We have a serious business, serious people come, and here you are with your toys, why don’t you move somewhere.” We left the wholesale department on Prechistenka, and we ourselves — there were already about 20 of us — went to a small room on Petrovka.”
The main reason for the low sales turned out to be trivial. Savyuk worked hard on the brand, but not on the product. The first NES clones worked on three chips, the following ones on one (and this made production much cheaper). The cunning Taiwanese sold the "Stipler" consoles of an outdated design. Meanwhile, the shuttle traders were already bringing cheap analogues and skimming the cream off the hungry market, heated up by a powerful advertising campaign. Everyone who was even a little in the know laughed at the "Stipler", recalls Dmitry Agarunov. However, very soon he himself stopped laughing, became a major Dendy dealer and began earning $200,000 a month.
Having realized the problem, Viktor Savyuk quickly expanded his business. The new cheap console was called Dendy Junior and set a minimum wholesale price for it. Sellers were offered to take away any number of consoles from a warehouse in the very center of Moscow, instead of dragging small batches from China. They did not abandon the first version of the device. It was called Dendy Classic and was promoted as a premium device for more solid gamers. Sales immediately went up. In the future, Savyuk will have only one strong competitor on the wholesale market - the Chinese company Subor. In 1995, he will become its dealer.
“By the fall of 1993, the team has grown to 70-80 people, and I remember how in August we celebrated the first million dollars in revenue with champagne,” Savyuk recalls. “In the fall, they began to change the structure of the dealer network - according to the principle of “one dealer per region”. A couple of years ago in Vietnam, the guys from that time recognized me, kissed me and said: “Vitya, do you even understand that you made us dollar millionaires?” Yes, they made good money then.”
To consolidate their success, Savyuk's team began publishing their own magazine, "Video-Ass Dendy" (later "The Great Dragon"), together with the editorial staff of the weekly "Stolitsa", which occupied premises in the same building on Petrovka. At first, the publication was black and white, then it became glossy, and the printing, following the spirit of the times, was moved to Finland. The magazine turned out to be very successful, with a circulation of 30,000 copies and outlived Dendy by many years.
Another powerful marketing blow was the TV show “New Reality”, which was first broadcast on the cable channel 2×2, and then on ORT, the main channel of the country (Savyuk was friends with the founder of “Video International” Yuri Zapol, and he helped get good airtime). The host was Sergey Suponev, the author of “Call of the Jungle” and other popular children's shows of those years. “I don’t remember who invited him, but it was just a gift of fate,” Savyuk recalls. “Sergey didn’t understand the topic at all, but he behaved so easily and naturally that later, when we tried other people in his place, we realized: Suponev is a genius. He was a fantastic guy.”
