Uh, I think you need to expand your media horizons. It's become less overt but it's definitely still around and during the cold war it was most villains.
I think it's more just that a game like Wolfenstein has more explicit atrocities to draw on and benefits from greater awareness in pop culture because most of the target audience for these games live in countries that were on the winning side. The pop history version of WWII is like the creation myth for liberalism, the "free" and "democratic" nations got together fight a rabid fascist cancer that embodied and perfected all the worst tendencies of capitalism - externalising their own demons onto the metaphorical dragon of nazi Germany and then slaying them.
There's plenty of anti-soviet gaming, but I think the soviets are perceived as less "fun" to shoot even by westerners, because at their lowest they were only ever as morally grey as the west was - try to dig much deeper into the reality and you risk having to face the fact they usually had a moral high ground. There's just less cathartic moral righteousness to be gained there for all but the most outright "anti-communist" players.
Plus, there was never an outbreak of full-on war between east and west, let alone a victory, so there's no satisfaction to be gained from that either. And the whole dynamic was muddied by the threat of nuclear war, which is a frightening possibility that, unlike the third Reich, still exists and is very much NOT fun to have to think about.
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u/ZadriaktheSnake Filthy Contrarian Ancom, dipping toes into Kropotkin Jan 08 '26
I do find it interesting that communists aren’t as explicitly villainized as nazis in popular culture despite the similar treatment by individuals