Köch rides again, in the browser

TALAS — The former staff of Kuble Soft, who have kept the closed company's website running since 2008, put all three editions of Köch online yesterday in a form that plays in a web browser, along with disk images for collectors who prefer emulators.

Köch was played by schoolchildren across Irad and in the Iradi community of Chicago, and for many Iradis born in the 1970s and 1980s it was the first thing they did on a computer. The player leads a family driven from the Chu pastures by settlers after the Russian conquest across the mountains to new grazing, losing sheep at the river crossings and hoping the eagle brings back a hare.

By last night the site's visitor counter, running since 1996, had passed a figure several of its former programmers said they had never seen. "People are writing to say they lost the whole herd at the Naryn again," one said. "Thirty years later, and they still cannot cross the Naryn."

Teachers in Talas said they would show the game to their pupils. One, at School No. 6, said it remained "the best history lesson about the 1916 years that nobody ever approved".