Master System / Gaming in Brazil

master of darkness is a really shitty and amusing castlevania ripoff, check it out

tectoy kept the thing alive until the mid '90s there, some of their games are ok but the best ones were game gear crossplats

It was a weird time for sure.
Basically, Brazil had a big culture of what we called "location houses" (locadoras), which were places were you paid by the hour to play a console of choice. I think you have them in the US too, but they're very rare, and only very small children go in there. Anyway, those were big in Brazil because most people didn't have money to buy videogames (we still have 80% tax on game imports), and they were also sort of a "game place" of sorts, where everyone liked to hang out.

During the 80s, we mostly had NES clones, like the ubiquitous Phantom System or the Dynavision. Some people had Ataris, but they weren't as widespread as NES clones. We had so many NES clones that most people never even saw an original NES back then.

When we reached the 90s, like 93-95, we started to have a shift towards the SNES and Mega Drive (Sega Genesis) in those game places. They were mostly the same, although now people with more money used them to rent cartridges to play at home instead of just playing by the hour. That's where the name "locadora" (locar = rent) comes from. You had most of the classic games like Megaman, Mario, Sonic and so on, but stuff like Chrono Trigger and Earthbound never found its place there. The most obscure game I remember from that time was YS IV, I think. It was known as "the japanese game", because it was in japanese and no one knew how to play it.

From 1996 to 2000, the country got a much needed economic stabilization (google "Plano Real" for a quick rundown), and we also started having more Playstations in game places. The Saturn never caught on here, and I think I only saw a 3DO once. Now this is when piracy exploded, because even game places didn't have money to buy original games. If you were going to compare back then, an original game back then cost as much as 120% of your minimum wage. So people just modchipped the console and played pirated CDs. A pirated copy cost less than 1% of your minimum wage, by the way.
(Cont.)

So, once the Playstation wave started, some of the game culture also changed to accomodate for this. There were more magazines dedicated to people who played at home instead of locadoras, and those places started to be invaded by "normies" (pardon the name, you'll understand why soon). Normies were people who only played football (soccer) games, and nothing else. If you go to a small city nowadays, you can most surely find the whole place is tinted green, because everyone is playing a football game. The games that started this were mostly International Super Star Soccer (back in the SNES), but since getting multiple copies of a cartridge wasn't that feasible, it was confined to 1 or 2 of the gaming stations. Once the PSX rolled over, everyone started playing Winning Eleven 3 and 4. We didn't even care if it was in japanese. Anyway, because of that, the PES/FIFA mod scene is still very alive today in Brazil. There's a mod for PES called "Bomba Patch" that is still released for the PS2 nowadays.

The transition to the PS2 and Dreamcast was kind of weird. Since the PS2 didn't allow piracy, most game places only had 1 or 2 games they brought from Japan. I remember my usual place only had Ridge Racer 4 and Street Fighter EX 3. Because the Dreamcast had easy access to piracy, almost everyone played on that. Still, we had plenty of PSX and N64 machines too. The N64 scene was completely dominated by Goldeneye.

For localized releases, they were mostly confined to the Master System, althought I think there were still some Tectoy translations up to the Sega Genesis. They stopped altogether on the Saturn.

>>3837145
>>3837165
CRINGEEE

>>3837165
>>3837145

That was a very interesting read. Thank you.

It seems curious that video games were so highly taxed over there. I wonder if other forms of media were subjected to similar degrees of taxation.

Here in the States, taxes are much more uniform. There are some disparities with "non-essential" items like cigarettes and possibly alcohol, but one tends to pay a modest sales tax on most anything else. In some states, food isn't taxed at all.

What about Internet sales tax? If you imported games and consoles from say eBay, would that be much more affordable?

>>3837189
It's because of an old law that categorizes "console games" as "gambling and entertainment". Yeah, like slot machines.

We have a small loop on this law for PC games, because they're treated as software. Because of that, PC games were always very affordable here. For example, I bought both Resident Evil 5 and Street Fighter 4 for PC, back in 2010, and they cost 1/4 of their console counterparts.

That's not how internet sales work here. It's just as if you bought the thing from a physical store. You can get a very good deal on digital platforms like Steam, but physical stuff is all treated the same.

Also, our government is very tax-hungry, so they're always making taxes for new stuff that just barely came out. We're going to have a "Netflix tax" soon, and another videogame tax on top of the one we already have.

>>3837090
Why was it popular there

>>3837984
Hue knows?

>>3837090
I knew one kid with an SMS, and he always let me borrow his second controller for my 7800.

>>3837189
In Brazil there is a law that prohibits importing used products.
The import tax is 60%.

>>3838086
Does it work just like the 7800 gamepad for PAL systems, or are the fire buttons reversed?

File: Console-TecToy-Master-System-Evolution-c-132-Jogos-–-Blue-416589[1].jpg (170KB, 1000x1000px) Image search: [Google]

170KB, 1000x1000px

>>3837984
Because of a company that still exists to this day called Tectoy. They were the official representatives of Sega in the country. So, while still expensive, they had way more popularity around here than Nintendo or any other company.
Then the Super Nintendo arrived, and after a while, a joint effort by some companies and Nintendo created Playtronic, which worked in the same way as Tectoy. They both had the rights to produce and sell their stuff locally.
But when that happened, and everybody shifted to the Snes and eventually Playstation later on, there was already some sort of nostalgia or gaming culture where the Master System and Genesis were always the consoles from the "good old days".
Tectoy still lives to this day. Every now and then they try to push a master system or genesis emulator into the market. No idea if it still works.