The Locadora Tales: Gaming in Brazil’s hidden arcades
There is something mystic about Brazilian gaming culture and the amount of unique stories in the country. Many of those stories remain in the country, mainly due to the language barrier.
The way I see Brazil in the recent gaming landscape is rather odd. Two big games last year had their visuals shaped by Brazilians: Rafael Grassetti for God of War, and the duo Pedro Medeiros and Amora Bettany for Celeste. If you want to talk about esports games like League Of Legends or Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, you can’t forget players like Gabriel ‘FalleN’ Toledo, Marcelo ‘coldzera’ David and Felipe ‘brtt’ Gonçalves.
It’s kind of a success story to see our culture thrive, as our beginnings in the game industry were rough and we took a long way to get here. For many years, companies in Brazil struggled to compete with piracy because of the popular response to the lack of developer support.
In the mid 1970s, in the middle of a dictatorship, Brazil had a policy implemented by the military administration to create a local competitive industry in the computing business. Any product from outside of the country had huge taxes or was classified as contraband, forcing many companies to assemble their hardware inside the country. Some people had enough money to import a product, but for most, piracy was the only choice.
Video games were the new hot thing, and the country already had some familiarity with arcades. But the concept of a home console was attractive enough to encourage people to import and/or smuggle the Atari 2600 when it launched.
With enough consoles in the country, Brazilian technological entrepreneurs ripped the console apart, took the chip, copied it, created new shells, put the copied chips in them and re-sold the device with another name but with compatibility with Brazil’s analog TV system PAL-M encoding and localized manuals. The Dactar and Dynavision were born in that environment. Even after Atari officially came to Brazil in 1983, console clones remain shipping like the Supergame VG-2800, Onyx Junior and others.
Between Atari’s US launch in 1977 and Brazil’s 1983 launch, the local game industry consisted of Atari clones and bootleg cartridges, which were plentiful because software was more easy to copy than hardware. With so many games in the market, some people started create game rental shops same way that VHS rental shops flourished.
In São Paulo, Dactavision was one of the more famous shops, with more than 4000 cartridges of Atari, Coleco, Intellivision and Odyssey, to pick from. It was just like good ol’ Blockbuster, you chose what you wanted to take home, paid a fee, and then returned it when you were done.
While you browsed a giant wall of binders with small notes including the game name and a brief description, you would interact with other people in the same situation, also finding something to play at home. Often, friendships would begin in locadoras with people talking about the games, sharing info and strategies, and sometimes even forming small local tournaments.
It’s crucial to remember that many of these cartridges available to rent were illegal. Even with Brazilian companies licensing gaming brands, this type of deal became rare and even in those cases, everything was too expensive. Within that context, the rental business was a necessary evil and every major city had one.
With more accessible home consoles, some shops opened up their spaces to accommodate TVs to let people play. When people today say ‘locadora’, they refer to this modern iteration: places that let you play games by paying a small fee per hour. This included one owned by my uncle.
My uncle lives in my grandmother’s house, and used part of the house to build a locadora for extra income, and because there wasn’t one in the neighborhood. He started with NES titles and when the PlayStation came, legitimized the business.
Looking back, Sony’s console was perfect for piracy. Don’t get me wrong, piracy is bad and to waste some paragraphs explaining that is useless, but we are talking about Brazil. It take so long for our money to obtain value, and for small demographics to obtain access to the internet. Gaming in Brazil is a luxury now, but back in late 1990s and mid-2000s it was high luxury.
The majority of consoles came with contraband, or some games from that a rich parent bought overseas. In rare cases you could buy consoles cheap if they came in a shipment seized by the IRS. For the games themselves, the thing that helped PlayStation get into Brazil was the usage of CDs. It was the early days for the internet, but it was not hard to find someone with a decent connection to burn some games and sell them cheap.
My uncle’s locadora was small, filled with CRTs, consoles and a huge wall of CD cases of games. You enter, looked at this wall of games, picked one, paid, and enjoyed your day.
It’s hard to not let nostalgia creep into the corner of my brain while I write. So many people working in the gaming industry today, including the names that I mentioned earlier, cut their teeth playing in locadoras. Until their death in major cities (due mainly to the growth of the internet and consoles being more accessible to buy and use in home) it was your duty as a gaming enthusiast to visit and spent hours in locadoras. Locadoras were your homework, and the things you saw in game magazines were happening for real.
For Brazil, no matter where you lived a locadora was the first exposure to gaming communities: a weird place with countless stories and anecdotes of discovering simple things, each uniquely Brazilian.
My uncle’s neighborhood was tough, not only economically poor very close to gang territory. I did not know then, but gang members played all the time in his locadora and my family was safe because of that.
Even with that atmosphere, when you enter a locadora everything changes. Because Brazil was (and still is) a capital of soccer, most locadora patrons played Winning Eleven (Pro Evolution Soccer in the USA) every day. The shop opened at 8AM and closed at 6PM, and all day someone was playing soccer. When the shop was full, it was like being at a real match with screaming, cheering and occasional jeers.
The group of patrons not playing Winning Eleven often included me playing Crash Bandicoot 3, or Yu-Gi-Oh! Forbidden Memories, and an occasional random dude playing an oddball title like Tobal 2. For me, to have a huge collection to choose from was overwhelming, some titles I had read about somewhere, and others just from the cover I wanted to try. But I think that the true spirit of discovery, sharing experiences, and good ol’ fun, arrived when my uncle bought the first PlayStation 2 to the shop.
When the console came, only one game became a threat to Winning Eleven and was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Sure, the forerunner Vice City had some success, but San Andreas was monumental.
The setting of San Andreas, between the 1992 LA riots and constant gang rivalry, speaks directly to a harsh reality that many Brazilians lived in at the time and still live in now. In making a game that let you shoot people with a variety of guns and rob cars in a neighborhood not unlike Brazilian favelas, Rockstar accidentally made a game that somewhat tackled the feeling of living in poor areas in Brazil and trying to survive.
It felt real for people that watched local news, and to people who lived in that environment. They didn’t necessarily care much about what the game had to say (even if some gamers had fond memories of C.J and Big Smoke) but for Brazilian San Andreas fans, the freedom of doing whatever they wanted in a modern setting was everything.
To see people sharing tips, creating theories and interacting with each other through a common passion was the core of the locadora experience. With LAN houses and the Counter Strike 1.6 craze, this passion and community expanded, but today, a place like a locadora feels like a distant memory, a forgotten place to live and breathe Brazilian games culture.
Ives Aguiar is a Brazilian freelance writer who now thinks he needs to create a habit of writing in English on his Twitter, which is @ivesaguiar by the way.
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