Counterfeit Circuits: Decolonial Practices and the Rise of Video Games in Brazil

This paper examines how cloning and piracy practices shaped the emergence of Brazil's video game culture during the 1980s, focusing on the period of the Brazilian Market Reserve policy (1984–1992). Its central thesis is that these informal and often illicit practices were not merely economic responses to scarcity but constituted decolonial interventions in global technology and media circuits. Drawing on Walter Mignolo's concept of epistemic disobedience and Jacques Rancière's notion of reconfiguring the distribution of the sensible, the author argues that local firms producing functional clones of systems such as the Atari 2600, NES, Apple II, ZX Spectrum, and MSX computers demonstrated technological agency that challenged the assumption that legitimate innovation flows solely from the Global North.

The analysis situates Brazilian cloning within the framework of the coloniality of power, arguing that clones were adaptive rather than derivative. They frequently incorporated technical modifications, localized features, and hybrid solutions suited to local conditions such as power standards and component availability. The paper contends that the Market Reserve Policy produced paradoxical effects: although designed to protect domestic industry, it restricted access to foreign hardware and software and thereby encouraged reverse engineering, reproduction, and the rapid diffusion of consoles and computers across the country.

The study identifies several concrete outcomes of these practices. Brazilian players gained early access to titles such as Double Dragon and Metal Gear, often shortly after their original release, and were exposed to a broad range of genres and mechanics. Cloning and piracy also helped foster player communities through institutional tournaments, video game clubs modeled on rental stores, and informal cassette and diskette exchange networks, which were especially significant for programming communities. The author concludes that, without these practices, Brazil's engagement with the global video game ecosystem would likely have been delayed by roughly a decade. The work is primarily a qualitative historical and theoretical study; its evidence base rests on secondary scholarship and historical accounts rather than a quantitative survey or large dataset.