Museum of Soviet arcade machines

Let's compare it using market tools. The black market exchange rate was about 5 roubles for one US dollar in late USSR (official rate was about 60 cents for one rouble, but you had to be an elite to use it, and even then, in very small amounts) - you get up to death toll if they catch you with dollars, but that's another story.

So 1 kopeyks in USSR was about 0.2 cents, and inflation calculator will tell you that would be about 0.6 cents in current value.

1 kop. was a small amount of money kids would often play with (you could buy a matchbox with it -- was its standard price!).

My uncle even made one up with his friends. They went fishing, got drunk and decided to tell everyone they saw aliens land. They had noticed an area by woods that was burnt by a lightning strike and some fire had started. So that became the landing site. And so on. He made us kids and a few women from the village believe him.

There were national ones of course. My favorite was about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole. The rumor was that the scientists had reached hell (temperature increased dramatically, which it did in reality, see! every legends needs a tiny bit of truth there), and there was, of course, a red monster which crawled out from the whole. I really loved that story as a kid.

There were countless others which I already forgot.

Some computer based arcades started to appear in late 1980s, but more like Pong clones and similarly simple "racing" games with 2600-like sprites. At this point the "coops" started popping up, offering pay per minute experience on Atari 800 and ZX Spectrum.

There was no Soviet 6502 or Z80 clone; there were however 8080A clones and DEC LSI-11 inspired designs. There were a bunch of creative programmers sure, although there hardly was a real "school" and CS remained largely backwaters to the West.