Overthinking the apocalypse

Content warning: Old woman reminisces at rose-tinted nostalgia.

No First World country would sell us games, so we pirated everything, and took from both sources. I played Rockman, Bare Knuckle, Shiritsu Justice Gakuen and Biohazard before I knew them as Megaman, Streets of Rage, Rival Schools, or Resident Evil. Sometimes I still slip and use the Japanese names when talking to USA people. On the other hand I played Earthbound, Secret of Mana or Fatal Fury before trying Mother, Seiken Densetsu or Garō Densetsu. It seemed quite random which one we’d get first. I played Rockman 3 but Megaman 5.

The Dynavision 4 Radical, a Brazilian Famiclone—an alternative console to play Famicom/NES games. There were many such models. A common feature was to have dual connectors for both the narrower Japanese and wider USA cartridges, like here; both formats were widespread in the country. If your console didn’t have both slots, then you owned and adapter.

And like with our anime or tokusatsu, the selection of games we got was also random, so I missed out on many of the most famous Japanese classics; my childhood never had Goemon, Wonder Boy,¹ Star Ocean or Famicom Wars; yet I have burned-in memories of flotsam like the original (terrible) Hokuto no Ken FC (which I knew way before I learned about the anime), Captain Tsubasa, or PS1 Psychic Force. Along with multicart fodder like Nuts&Milk, Binary Land, or the excellent Battle City.

(1: Except the Turma da Mônica reskin of Wonder Boy for the Master System which I did play, along with official Sega releases such as the Alex Kidd games and Shinobi—an anomaly to the normal state of things, which is videogame companies never released anything in the country and we only had access to pirated copies. I first saw a non-pirated PS1 CD after I was an adult.)

I think I stumbled on the original Dragon Quest at some point in early childhood—vague memories of the battle screen’s blackness framing the menu options—but I hadn't learned to read Japanese yet, and the game was too unapproachable without the language. The same was true of my failure to play Might & Magic in English on the Mega Drive. That English is my second language and Japanese my third is a direct consequence of Brazilian videogame culture.

Every so often we were blessed by the piracy lottery with some true treasures that the gringos missed out on, like the aforementioned Justice Gakuen, or Super Bomberman 5, or the Ranma and Yuyu Hakusho fighting games. I am still very happy I got to play Akumajō Dracula-kun at an age where it would hit best.

And of course our arcade culture was way better, everyone knows by now of the prominence of SNK fighters in Latin American arcades and there was an era where every token dropped into a cabinet would attract challengers and epic duels on everything from Samsho to KOF—but the Capcom classics were popular too, not just SF2 but the great co-ops like Aliens vs. Predator or Dungeons & Dragons, and many other fighters less known internationally like Double Dragon: The Movie: The Game which like, even now, if I walk into a rundown pub I half expect to hear Rebecca's voice going “kohi ken! kohi ken! hichōzan!”. (It was disappointing to me that I never got to find Rebecca or Cheng-fu in some corner of River City Girls—RCG did a great job of patching together USA and Japan nostalgia; alas, that doesn't cover the rest of the world.) In the cooler America we got to experience the best of both USA and Japan arcade haunts, from Golden Axe down to DDR, from Cadillacs & Dinosaurs to Gals Panic.

I wonder how much of this experience was common to the Global South generally. Like, I know that Cadillacs & Dinosaurs Youtube videos are full of commenters from African countries, and that the multicart classics (Battle City, Yie Ar Kung Fu, Nuts & Milk etc.) were universal in the Famiclones of every poor country. Maybe other Latinoamerican countries didn't get as many Japanese games as us, I don't know if our large number of Japanese immigrants was a factor here—but I'm sure countries in Asia would have been exposed to them, and China had a piracy/romhack scene that rivalled ours. I bet it would be possible to make a Third World take on Retro Game Challenge and spoof the 80s-90s scenes in a way that would resonate for every gamer outside of the centres of power.