Köch (video game)

Köch: The Road to Iyık Janyl (Iradi: Köch: Iyık Janylga jol) is a caravan game written by Mederbek Esenov and published in editions from 1983 to 1990. The player leads a herding family in the spring of 1877 on a journey of 690 versts (about 736 km) by horse caravan from the Chu to the Church of St. Janyl at Iyık Janyl, fording rivers, crossing the high passes, hunting with a golden eagle and rafting the gorge of the Naryn. Esenov first wrote it in 1979 as a student at Iradi State University (now Talas State University); the Iradi American Association in Chicago published editions for the Commodore 64 (1983) and Apple II (1985), and his company in Talas, Kuble Soft, released the best-known edition for MS-DOS in 1990.^[1][2]

It is generally regarded as the first Iradi computer game. All three editions have been freeware since Kuble Soft closed at the end of 2007, and since 2016 they can be played in a web browser on the company's former website.^[1]

Title

Köch is the seasonal move of a herding family, with the yurt packed on the horses (see Central Asian Pastoral Migration System).^[1]

Gameplay

In the MS-DOS edition the game opens in the spring of 1877. The Khanate of Kokand has fallen, and settlers hold the clan's pastures on the Chu (Chu valley). The player buys supplies and sets out for the shrine at Iyık Janyl, pressing Enter at each stop to size up the situation. Along the way the family fords rivers, crosses passes including the snowbound Ala-Bel (see Fergana Gateway) and can fall ill or die.^[1]

Two action sequences break up the journey. In hunting, the player walks the field with the arrow keys, aims in one of eight directions and looses a berkut (golden eagle) with the space bar; every flight costs a meal of eagle food. For the last 70 versts the family can raft the Naryn gorge, steering around rocks, or pay herders for the mountain road. The route roughly follows the valleys used today by the Fergana Mountain Transit Highway.^[1]

Each landmark is drawn in sixteen colours, from Osmon's shop on the Chu to Cathedral Hill at Iyık Janyl. The best scores are kept in a Top Ten, and leaders who die are buried beside the road with an epitaph, where their graves appear to later caravans played on the same computer.^[1]

Development

Esenov wrote the game in BASIC in 1979 on the university's computer, in the evenings, for his grandmother. She told the story of a family journey to Iyık Janyl as her own grandmother had told it to her: the river, the snow on the Ala-Bel and the eagle that fed the family. The first version was text only and was played by students on the university terminals until the computing centre banned games on state machine time.^[1][3]

A printed listing reached the Iradi community in Chicago in 1981. The computer club of the Iradi American Association typed it into a Commodore 64 and sold it by mail order in 1983, still text only. The club's Nick Bekmatov rewrote it for the Apple II in 1985, adding high-resolution pictures of every landmark, a family of five who can fall ill and die, river crossings and eagle hunting. Esenov's MS-DOS edition of 1990, written in GW-BASIC for EGA and VGA colour graphics, added the rafting sequence, the Top Ten and the graves, with pictures by Gulzat Kalmatova.^[1]

Editions

A sequel, Köch II: The Sky Road, announced in 2001, was to follow a second journey over the Torugart on the old caravan road to Kashgar in 1889. It was never finished.^[1]

Reception and legacy

Köch was played by schoolchildren across Irad and in the Iradi community of Chicago, and many Iradis of the generation born in the 1970s and 1980s first used a computer to play it. Commentators often compare it with the American educational game The Oregon Trail, which it resembles in structure, but note that its story comes from Iradi family tradition and its hazards from the country's own geography: the passes, the Naryn and the eagle in place of the rifle.^[3][4] The game's premise, a clan driven from the Chu pastures by settlers after the Russian conquest, has also been read as one of the few popular treatments of that history to circulate in the late Soviet period.^[3]

On 31 December 2007 Esenov released the game as freeware, asking players to copy it and give it to their children. Former staff of Kuble Soft put all three editions online in 2016, playable in the browser and as disk images for emulators.^[1]

See also

• Kuble Soft
• Church of St. Janyl
• Central Asian Pastoral Migration System

References

1. ^ Kuble Soft. 'Köch: The Road to Iyık Janyl' (MS-DOS, Apple II and Commodore 64 editions) and 'About Kuble Soft'. kublesoft.net. Accessed 14 October 2026.
2. ^ Iradi American Association (2015). Sixty Years in Chicago: A Community History. Chicago.
3. ^ Central Asian Cultural Studies Review (2019). 'Caravans on the Screen: Köch and the Beginnings of Iradi Software.' Vol. 11, pp. 112–131.
4. ^ Talas Herald (22 May 2016). 'Köch rides again, in the browser.' Talas.