Brazil Is An Alternate Video Game Universe Where Sega Beat Nintendo | Hacker News Reader

Brazil Is An Alternate Video Game Universe Where Sega Beat Nintendo

atlasobscura.com

157 pointsrshrsh72 comments

There are one other reason for its success in Brazil: taking full advantage of local culture when porting some games.

For instance, Turma da Monica em O Resgate [1], built up over Wonder Boy III [2] and not only localized but also retooled to use the belove Monica's Gang characters.

TecToy [3] really knew their local market modifying "some games to replace characters with local licenses; that way, Teddy Boy became Geraldinho of Glauco, certain Wonder Boy titles became Monica's Gang games and Ghost House also starred El Chapulín Colorado", all of them very known and well beloved characters of Brazilian youth at the time.

[1] http://www.emuparadise.me/Sega_Master_System_ROMs/Turma_da_M...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_Boy_III:_The_Dragon%27s...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tectoy

I'm pretty sure the Sega Genesis also beat the SNES by a large margin here in Argentina too. At least i grew up with a Genesis and knew a lot of people who had one, while i only knew of one person who owned a SNES[1].

One of the possible reasons for this is that there were cheap pirated Genesis games available[2], which, i think, SNES games were much more expensive, probably not pirated.

[1]: The graphics and fluidity of Donkey Kong Country on that console were mesmerizing for a Genesis player though :D. But for some reason i always preferred the Genesis sounds and music. And, of course, Sonic The Hedgehog!

[2]: I actually didn't know about this till not too long ago. I always thought my Sega games were original! But learning about this explained why "save slots" didn't work on any game (the pirated cartridges didn't have a persistent writable memory).

> the pirated cartridges didn't have a persistent writable memory

Wait so you had to beat every game in a single sitting?

Yes Sir :)

Yep, like on an arcade :). Or, you could also leave the Genesis plugged-in and take a break (or let other people watch TV) and then continue on. As long as the console was powered, the game state was preserved. But this prevented you from changing games, or other people form using the console, so it was seldom done.

Surprisingly few Genesis games had any kind of save game feature - off the top of my head, there was Sonic 3, RPGs (which were few and far between), and...that's about it?

Basically, yeah. A few sports games did as well, like some of the NHL Hockey games starting with NHL '95 I believe. (There was a "play a whole season" mode...)

Playing the 32X port of Doom with no save ability was a pain. The game inevitably crashed on level 16, but it took my brothers and I several entire Saturdays getting that far to realize it. I loved the game, it wasn't until years later that I realized how atrocious a port it was.

IIRC it was the same with many NES games, e.g. Super Mario Bros.

It was the same for arcade-oriented NES or SNES games, but not all games are such, both NES and SNES had numerous RPGs, or games with progress (SMB3, DKC) or unlockables (Mario Kart IIRC)

Some classic games would generate a "code" you could enter to resume the game, all codes would deterministically map to some game state.

Ghostbusters for Sega Master System did this. One day I had a typo in my code and ended up with obscene millions of dollars.

I always wanted to go back and RE that game's code generation algorithm...

Sega handed Nintendo its ass during the early 90s in the USA by positioning themselves as the modern video game company for the 90s, full of rebelliousness and attitude. This was reflected in their positioning of characters like Sonic and their admittance of games with blood and other violent content like Mortal Kombat.

The only problem is 'tude only gets you so far, and without a cohesive technology strategy to see them through into the next generations, Sega faltered big time, stretching themselves too thin and spending resources on wacky go-nowhere strategies like the 32X. The Saturn had weak 3D capability but more memory, allowing for impressive sprite-based games the PlayStation wasn't capable of; yet such a system was difficult to position in the American market and Sega never recovered from that.

Also Nintendo realized that gamers were getting older and starting in the late SNES era, loosened some of its content restrictions, negating Sega's edginess advantage.

Still, I think more Gennys were sold to Americans than SNESes, so Sega may have been able to say in some sense that they "won" the fourth console generation in that market. The true pain for them would come from trying to stand against Sony in the fifth and sixth generation eras.

I'm brazillian!

There was some Nintendo market over here. Another brazillian company named CCE built the NES and sold here. It was my first video game (I was about 9).

I've had both Sega/TecToy MasterSystem III and Mega Drive (the Genesis). Super Nintendos were popular as well at the time, but as the article suggests most of cartridges were pirated ones.

Playstation 1 was another crazy thing in Brazil. I have never seen an original PS1 CD. I've bought the console and the store gave me 15 pirated CDs of my choice by the time. For R$10,00 (roughly $20,00 USD by the time) it was possible to buy three Playstation 1 games. It was nearly impossible to find original Playstation games though.

> For R$10,00 (roughly $20,00 USD by the time)

I believe you meant roughly R$5,00. By 1998, the exchange rate was R$2,00 for each dollar.

Yep, you're absolutely right.

Actually Nintendo consoles were manufactured in Brazil by Gradiente, through a company called Playtronic. Gradiente's plant was part of the Free Economic Zone of Manaus, an industrial hub on the heart of the Amazon rainforest. This plant was said to be Nintendo's only plant outside Japan, though I never saw a reliable source confirming this.

It seems NES was made by multiple manufacturers in Brazil: http://www.atarihq.com/tsr/nes/brazil/brazil.html

Nintendo official manufacturer was Gradiente, but both NES and SNES had a crazy amount of non-licensed clones, and some clone manufacturers still exist (yes, you can buy a new NES and SNES in Brazil, along with new pirated cartridges)

Link?

I would love a link too for a SNES hardware clone in Brazil. I know lots of brazillian NES clones (including the infamous PolyStation), but I don't know any SNES clones in Brazil.

I see them sometimes on Santa Efigênia, some are shaped like an actual SNES, sort of a outright pirated console (ie: it is for most part an SNES, but not made by Nintendo).

Sometimes you see people selling them on Mercado Livre

>In an age where globalization permeates everything, Tectoy’s success—not just as a toy company, but as a local filter for that globalization—is actually kind of refreshing. Sega chose wisely all those years ago.

Kind of weird reading this. First because Nintendo also had a local partner during NES age with a company called Gradiente and launched a local version of NES called Phantom System. I owned one, and there was the traditional rivalry Sega vs Nintendo in the form of Master System vs Phantom System, with no clear winner as the article seems to assum.

The other weird part is that it look like a success Tec Toy still be selling Master System consoles and games for low income customers. But Tec Toy is a broke company, it filed for bankruptcy, and the shadow of a company that still exists today survives more from videoke machines and some local mobile gaming than from Master System current sales.

So my impression is that the article is more biased to corroborate its title than reality.

Edit: just learned that Gradiente's Phantom System was a clone of NES, not a Nintendo's local partner. So I retract that particular criticism. SEGA handled brazilian market better than Nintendo, but still Master System was not a clear winner versus Phantom System.

Edit2: Phanton System console for the curious: http://s382.photobucket.com/user/Sr-Ferraz/media/NES%20Syste...

What has happened to TecToy later is not refreshing in any sense.

Interesting — the Sega Master System controller was based on the NES controller, but this NES clone controller is a rip-off of the Genesis (to the point where they gave the select button the position and shape of the C button on the Genesis just so the controller would have the exact same layout).

The reason is that Sega had a local partner (Tec Toy) that understood the market and manufactured the consoles in Brazil.

SNES, on the other hand, where all imported, and importing anything into Brazil has always been hard (bureaucratic and expensive). When it first launched, your only chance of getting one was having a parent bring one from abroad.

This seems to be a general problem of Nintendo, I think.

Someone told me, you could release your game on Sony console and simply get a factory to produce your game discs. While if you wanted to get your game on a Nintendo console, you had to let Nintendo produce the discs for you in their factories, because of quality control reasons, which slowed down the release process and also filtered out many games of companies who didn't want to stick with Nintendos release rules.

But I don't know how much of this is true...

Nitpick: you probably mean "relative" ("parente"), instead of "parent" ("mãe/pai").

There's a crazy ass 'port' of Duke Nukem 3d for the Sega Genesis developed by TecToy. Every other vertical pixel column was rendered for perf reasons. Remarkable, really. Also, this was released in 1998, three years after the 16 bit era was winding down in the US.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9doqwl-U7jU

That gameplay looks more like Wolfenstein but with Duke sprites.

I honestly feel bad for kids who thought they were getting a decent game or reading about games being released around the world and seeing images of them and thinking that Sega Master system could do it. At least it was cheap.

The Street Fighter II footage has sprites that look like it, but the gameplay isn't really anything like it.

(URL with "http://" included for actual link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9doqwl-U7jU )

This is completely insane. '98 was the year of games like Dune 2000, Thief, Half-life, Fallout 2, RE2, Starcraft, etc yet someone out there was making a 16-bit FPS for a console released nine years prior?

Brazil's tough import laws create weird outcomes I guess.

Brazil is also an alternate universe where Orkut was extremely popular: http://mashable.com/2012/01/17/facebook-beats-orkut-brazil/

I was using Orkut(here in Brazil) in 2004. Long before Zuckerberg was even thinking about building one, and before the MySpace fever in the US.

About the time Facebook was catching up here in Brazil(about 2009/2010), Orkut had years ahead of social networking history.. they lose to themselves, or to the social class system here, because too many people was using it, and the early adopters, and the "cool people" were abandoning the ship, because it loose the energy, and became too spammy

Stopped reading here: "its Master System (later called Genesis in America)".

The Genesis was the Mega Drive, not the Master System.

At the time Nintendo was not officially selling in Brazil, but there were several NES clones selling. Sega was popular, but not dominating the market entirely.

Hey there,

Author of the piece. This was an error added during the editing process—if you read later in the piece, the difference is sussed out a bit. The point about NES clones becoming popular in Brazil is also touched upon in the piece.

It's getting fixed now. Sorry about that.

It happens again throughout the story. The figure pictured here: https://i.imgur.com/M6YHU51.png misrepresents that also as a Genesis. No Master System in Brazil was a version of Genesis. The Master System revisions included the 6 button controllers but were still Master System consoles. Only played Master System games. Not Mega Drive games.

Every version of Genesis was called Mega Drive.

edit: Thanks for fixing it!

No problem! Just needed to ping my editor to ensure that the changes were made. :)

I'm still waiting for TurboGrafx-16 to take off somewhere so that I can buy new games for it.

Check out this homebrew team. They even make their own version of a HUCard.

http://www.aetherbyte.com/aetherbyte-software.html

Haha thanks man. I was really just venting some childhood bitterness from over 20 years ago when all my friends got Sega Genesis and I felt left out with my abandoned Turbografx-16. Appreciate it though.

Finally got to see the internals of a HUCard http://www.romhacking.net/forum/index.php?topic=14103.0

Brilliant form factor.

You're probably aware of this, but the PC-Engine (TurboGrafx's Japanese counterpart) actually did very well in Japan, beating the Mega Drive for second place in that market.

Can not confirm the facts quoted in the story.

By the way, most articles I read about Brazil extrapolate one or two pieces of information into a very biased view.

(Brazilian here)

Just for the curious, this is the current Master System they are selling http://www.tectoy.com.br/prod_interna.aspx?id=20

There is also the portable version which ressembles a controller and you plug directly to the TV http://www.tectoy.com.br/prod_interna.aspx?id=19

And the portable MDPlay which is a handheld genesis http://www.tectoy.com.br/prod_interna.aspx?id=18

;-)

I am Brazilian and SEEEEEEGGGGAAAAAAAAA will live forever!

So if they are still selling 150k units monthly and TechToy isn't making them anymore- where is this stock coming from?

After re-reading this paragraph:

"But with Sega having not built a new console in more than 15 years, Tectoy has shifted its strategy a bit. Instead of simply making video games, it now makes DVD players, Android tablets, and even baby monitors. They may not have Microsoft or Nintendo in their corner, but their licensing game is strong—with both Mickey Mouse and Spongebob Squarepants giving their DVD players a little extra snazz."

I guess its not explicitly saying that they dont make them, but I got that impression on first read.

TecToy actually still manufacture Sega consoles, they sell new MasterSystem, new Mega Drive, and has a product named "MDPlay" that is a portable Mega Drive (actually it is seemly some arm console with a Mega Drive emulator, it runs games better than their real Mega Drive that use crappy cheap chips, and people found out you can hack it to put any Genesis rom you want and it will run, Tec Toy briefly yanked it out of the market when that information started to spread on Orkut)

Can confirm. I had a Master System II when I was a kid. Spent hours of my young life playing Alex Kidd in Miracle World. Most of my friends at the time had Mega Drive consoles (Genesis = Mega Drive, not Master System).

I thought for a long time that Mario was some sort of Alex Kidd rip-off.

I'm astonished no one talked about MSX (which architecture is virtually the same as the Master System).

MSX was a 8-bit computer launched in 1985 that had a great user base (selling 300k units on launch). Its open architecture which originated in Microsoft Japan and ASCII Corp. It had great success also in Europe, Japan, South Korea and others, just like Master System.

This gave companies like Konami, SEGA, Namco, Activision, Taito, ASCII and others a great incentive to develop its famous games for this platform which became predominantly gaming oriented, most units coming already with bundled cartridges and game controllers, particularly MSX Gradiente 1.0.

To port MSX games to Master System was very trivial, given the similarities between both platforms, as follows: Zilog Z80 processor, at 4Mhz, 64kb RAM, 8kb ROM, the only big difference being the video chip.

There are plenty of resources on the Internet and dozens of emulators available and being maintaned. One of the most interesting projects is the recent Alan Cox's Fuzix OS which goal is to "provide a complete System V experience, without the bloat" (https://github.com/EtchedPixels/FUZIX).

Oh yeah, my beloved MSX (sniff).

Small correction: it wasn't launched in 1985 - I bought mine (A Philips VG-8000) in 1983.

I know, but Brazil back then had import barriers on computers, cars and most of technological products in favor of national industry.

The first MSX was manufacured and commercialized only after 1985, although we had an Apple II clone (TK 2000, my first computer), ZX and TRS national clones. The first IBM PC/XT clone was lauched in 1985 as well, by Itautec.

ah... MSX...

The best arrow keys every created on personal computers.

http://www.msx.org/wiki/images/5/52/Sony_MSX1_HB-75P.png

Have fond memories of myself playing Goonies on MSX

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9R3p1L6HGQ

Wow, first time I'm hearing this in 30 years!

Wuldn't a Raspberry Pi 1 (with emulators) work much better? It's just $25, runs 1-4th generation console games as well as MAME games.

Raspberry Pi 2 can do even more for $35 http://blog.petrockblock.com/retropie/

A Raspberry Pi costs about R$200 in Brazil, or US$60.

And the majority of these consoles are bought by poor people (income of equal or less than a minimum wage in Brazil, that is R$788 or about US$235), that in the majority of cases don't have too many familiarity with technology.

So imagine that you have a low income like I said above, you have a teenage child that wants to play games. You probably don't even know that Raspberry Pi exists, so you go to a local store and see these kind of video-games selling, that are much less expensive than current-gen consoles. To make your kid happy, you buy this old console, so this is why there is still a market for them.

> A Raspberry Pi costs about R$200 in Brazil, or US$60.

Even if you order it online? It's hard to believe that shipping to Brazil costs 35USD, more than the device itself (25USD).

There is also C.H.I.P., a 9 USD computer, which is comparable to Raspberry Pi 1.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1598272670/chip-the-wor... I hope you won't tell me that it costs more than 50 USD in Brazil.

If I remember right you can't buy a Raspberry Pi from the traditional online stores that sell them (they don't send to Brazil), so you need to buy from a reseller. I ordered a Raspberry Pi online from eBay, had to pay US$50,00 that wasn't exactly so bad (and it was a kit instead of only the RPi, including memory heatsinks, USB charger and a case). So yeah, it is possible to save a bit of money, yeah.

However, this is counting that you don't pay the abusive taxes that the brazillian government asks for imported goods. If I had to pay those taxes for my RPi I would pay 60% of the price of the product in taxes, more 12% for IOF.

I didn't buy CHIP because I would need to pay US$15 for the delivery cost.

OK, so even with terrible delivery cost, CHIP makes sense for the general public in Brazil: 24USD for lots of systems & games.

Makes sense if you know how to configure one, but not everyone knows technology very well, and this is especially true with poor people. This kind of console is popular to this public.

Brazillian here:

The article is VERY wrong about something: When TecToy started to dominate the market, the import taxes for videogames were not crazy high, this came later (because of lobbying by the biggest local videogame manufacturer, of course I can't tell you who, but I am sure you can guess).

I think you'll also find that Pepsi won the Cola War in Brazil. Must be an interesting place, where so many counterfactuals came true.

False. (Brazilian here)

With that username, I can confirm you are Brazilian :)

Actually, those are initials for my name (repeat 4*).

But I know what you mean.

I've been to Brazil many times and I've never even seen a Pepsi bottle, whereas Coca-Cola seems to be part of the culture there even moreso than in the States.

It varies drastically depending on the state. In São Paulo it is pretty common to see PepsiCo's presence in both sodas and snacks (Elma Chips), but people often prefer Coca Cola.

Mountain Dew isn't here, but Pepsi Twist (some hybrid in between Pepsi and Montain Dew) is sold regularly.

Also, it is fun to notice that I've had both Pepsi and Coca Cola with very different flavors depending on the state.

AmBev is also pretty popular with Guaraná Antarctica. Coca cola tried to introduce its own Guarana soda two times (Taí and Kuat) and mostly failed.

If you consider their parent companies, you can say Pepsi is larger than Coca-Cola in Brazil, since the Pepsi brand here is owned by AB-InBev. But Pepsi definitely did not win the Cola War.

I have the impression that Pepsi is much more popular in US than in Brazil.

My understanding is that Quebec is the only place Pepsi outsells Coke.

The Master System was so great. Wonder Boy in Monster Land is one of my all time favorite games.

I know zero people that had a Sega Genesis and didn't love it as a kid.

Brazillian here. Thanks to this article I remembered the many bootleg games we had here in Brazil.

For example, we had this hack called "Futebol Brasileiro 96" (something like "Brazillian Soccer 96") that was a modification of "International Superstar Soccer Deluxe" for SNES. It had brazillian teams and translated menus and narration to Portuguese, however the translation was so broken that it was funny. A clip of this game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b82MzyafDzg. I still play this game sometimes, because the narration is unique (it is more of a Spanish them Portuguese).

Another one is a hack called "Ayrton Senna Racing", modification of "Nigel Mansell F1 Challenge". This seems to be a much better hack, however I didn't play it when I had a SNES. The translation seems fine, except for the lack of accents in the words. Clip here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKeB1AXsUqY

Or this one, called "Omega Brazil '97", hack of my favorite racing game of all time: Top Gear 2. I had the original game, not this pirated version. But it is still funny (anyway, Omega was considered a luxuous car in 1997, this is why this hack used it). Clip here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJQkjHhc99M

The hacks are not limited to SNES however (the article even shows some "official" hacks made by TecToy for Sega Master System/Mega Drive (Genesis)). I remember various hacks for "Winning Eleven/Pro Evolution Soccer" (a game that was much more popular here in Brazil them "Fifa", at least until the PS3/Xbox 360 era). The majority updated team formations, translated menus to Portuguese, changed the music, etc. Some even included Portuguese narration, in some cases the sound was just ripped from live TV soccer games. An example can be found here (and it seems to be a recent patch, from this year): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Fpv4nhcAfY.

The gaming industry is much better nowadays. You can find current generation consoles in local stores, with official imports instead of going to the grey market. There is even popular series (like FIFA/Pro Evolution Soccer, Assassins Creed and GTA) that has official translations to Brazillian Portuguese, including in some cases dubbing (the last Mortal Kombat is an interesting example since some people criticized the performance of one of the artists that dubbed Cassie Cage). The games are still expensive though, but Steam helps in this case. However I sometimes miss the old times.

Can confirm. I had a Master System II when I was a kid. Spent hours of my young life playing Alex Kidd in Miracle World. Most of my friends at the time had Mega Drive consoles (Genesis == Mega Drive, not Master System).

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