Why videogame mods were (and still are) the greatest feat in Brazil’s gaming history
Flamengo jerseys and funk bangers in the best amateur creations of the aughts
Brazilian representation in video games works very much like in hollywood movies. In the 90s, when movies were obsessed with the Amazon rainforest and Anaconda snakes, videogames followed suit, with characters like Blanka from the Street Fighter series — probably the most well-known brazilian character — a kid who fell from a plane and inexplicably became a green creature from contact with chlorophyll and electric eels; or Rikuo, from Darkstalkers, another amazonian creature inspired by horror movies, in this case 1954’s Creature from the Black Lagoon.
With the rise of favela movies like City of God and Elite Squad, Hollywood had to adapt again, giving birth to bastardizations like Incredible Hulk and Fast Five — which despite Toretto’s “This is Brazil” shout, was actually filmed in Puerto Rico. This change from jungle to slums also occurred in games, in Call of Duty maps, or in Assassin’s Creed 3, the most ignorant example, which takes place in a version of São Paulo where everything is covered in litter, illegal MMA competitions are the main form of entertainment and people ride the subway in bathing suits whilst drinking from enormous bottles and speaking with american accents. A recreation so oblivious and absurd that even Ubisoft had to later apologize.
Those representations come from an idea of a certain otherness, based in the same dualities that permeate colonial thinking: Normal and exotic. Safe and dangerous. Civilization and barbarism. There’s a need to retake the narratives and create our own gaming history, but how can you do that without the necessary knowledge, funds and tech? That’s where mods come in.
For many years Brazil wasn’t really a part of the gaming industry. Companies didn’t have offices here, or any interest really, so we were left to our devices. As shown in the documentary Paralelos, what this meant was a great freedom to explore outside of legal boundaries. In the late 80s and 90s, like in most of the global south, our most popular consoles were Famiclones — alternative versions of the NES — since the original one was scarcely available and very expensive. Some games popular at the time were localizations that included popular characters in our culture, like Turma da Mônica no Castelo do Dragão, a Wonderboy reskin, or Chapolim x Drácula: Um duelo assustador. Other massively popular game was Futebol Brasileiro (sometimes known as Ronaldinho Soccer), a Peruvian bootleg that swapped the teams in International Superstar Soccer for local ones.
In the aughts everything grew in proportion, due to a multitude of factors. Games were now in CDs, which meant it was easier and cheaper to pirate, broadband internet was beginning to be available in major cities and a left-leaning Workers’ Party government meant people had more money to expend on non-essentials. While the rest of the world already had Playstation 3s, here it was a age of cheap PS2 games sold in street markets and LAN Houses — makeshift internet cafés located at small garages where you could play for a couple reais an hour. That’s when some mostly anonymous heroes began modding every possible game, with the help of just some online tutorials and the shared knowledge that circulated within the scene. It might seem a small feat, but to us they were the most faithful reinterpretations of our daily scenery we ever had.
An omnipresent game in this period was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The street stalls were flooded with versions that promised virtual recreations of almost every Brazilian city, adaptations from films like the aforementioned Elite Squad, and anime characters. Those versions almost never delivered what they promised, as PS2 modding is way harder, but sold thousands of copies nonetheless. On the PC though, the GTA modding scene was booming.
It started with translations. Then, came the cars and the soccer jerseys. After, the possibilities were endless, from paredões (walls of speakers mounted on automobiles) that look like Transformers, to an extremely popular (and slightly questionable) multiplayer mod based on football hooliganism, to even some recent attempts at total conversions. In a way, GTA SA was the perfect game for this kind of reappropriation, with it’s humorous and sunny setting in a LA riddled with structural racism, gang violence and police brutality. All it needed to become Brazil was a little effort, which still keeps the game’s mod scene alive and pulsing here.
Another mod that portrays this kind of everyday violence — and probably the most popular internationally — is “cs_rio”, a Counter Strike map that takes place in the aforementioned city. At first glance, it might seem similar to other maps that share the same scenario in later games, but it precedes them by at least half a decade. It is in the small details that you can see the authenticity. From the makeshift soccer field, to the fact that you could get hit by stray bullets, to the soundtrack, a probidão funk similar to the ones you would actually hear in this place. Counter Strike may have started as a mod, but this was the one that really made the game for us.
“cs_rio” was ubiquitous in the lan houses. Kids used to miss school to play CS, and it’s hard to measure, but “cs_rio” was probably more popular than even maps like dust2 or aztec. The mod was so impactful that it actually motivated a nationwide ban on Counter Strike sales, with the allegation that it incentivized violence against cops and induced kids to banditism, failing to realize that the game reflected society, not the other way around.
Even more than violence, football is probably our most well-known feature to outsiders. Despite this, the sport is an increasingly neoliberal and uneven entity, with giant billion-dollar European businesses disguised as football teams targeting markets and players all over the world, creating an insurmountable disparity over local clubs. Sport games, made by behemoths like EA and Take-Two follow this logic too. That’s why Bomba Patch was such a revolutionary mod. It took the existing platform, Konami’s Winning Eleven (later known as Pro Evolution Soccer), and recreated it in our own style: with Brazilian teams, announcers, ultras (fanatical football fans) and of course, a funk soundtrack.
Last year, I had the chance to chat with the developer for a story on Vice Brasil. He told me it started as an amateur project between friends in a small countryside town, only meant to have the most up to date version possible of the game for their weekend tournaments. The group disbanded after some time, but soon after, he saw that his creation was sold by street vendors everywhere and decided to resume its production. It was a phenomenon. Soon, dozens of other patches appeared, each with increasingly raunchy cover arts and more absurd features, competing for the buyer’s attention. To this day, Bomba Patch is still being updated, true to its motto, and its name is still a term used as a synonym for soccer games.
Currently, Brazil’s gaming market is mostly the same as in the rest of the world, due to the globalizing power of platforms like Steam and Playstation Store. As Marx said in his Communist Manifesto, “the bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world marke,t given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country”. That’s true even when what’s being consumed are videogames. This means that now there’s a proper scene, with some devs even trying their hand in Brazilian-themed games, like 2018 platformer Dandara, which takes its name from a 1600s historical figure that fought against slavery.
Even so, outside the middle classes, where computers are slower and the PS2 is the king, mods are the main staple of the gaming diet, still updated and sold for a couple reals in the streets, just like they were in the 00s. On the internet, new modifications come up everyday, for those games, and for newer ones, like Euro Truck Simulator 2 and the Farming Simulator franchise. If today we have a gaming culture here, it’s mostly due to those semi-anonymous pioneers, whose history is mostly undocumented and whose praises are still unsung.
Matheus Fernandes is a brazilian journalist who writes mostly about weird videogame mods. You can read his other work about games and culture here (in Portuguese). You can also find him discussing Marxism and Sonic the Hedgehog on twitter @_marginal_alado.
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