East Meets South: The Creative Appropriation of Nintendo and Sega Videogames in Brazil

This paper, presented at DiGRA 2020 by Mariana Amaro and Suely Fragoso of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, examines how Brazilian companies creatively appropriated Japanese and American videogames during the country's protectionist period, roughly 1984 to 1992, and in the years that followed. Its central argument is that these localized games illustrate several forms of appropriation that scholars have identified as characteristic of Latin America, ordered from the least confrontational to the most radical: baroque infiltration, in-betweenness, creolization, cannibalism, and cultural anthropophagy. The work is positioned as one part of a larger cartography of Japanese influences on the Brazilian game industry.

The case studies center on two partnerships. Nintendo's Brazilian arrangement with Playtronic, a joint venture of Gradiente and Estrela, was tightly controlled, with translation work sent to Japan or the United States and only a handful of titles localized. The Sega partnership with TecToy was far less restrictive, yielding more than 500 titles from the late 1980s to 2000 and allowing Brazilian staff to alter on-screen text, sprites, and backgrounds. Working largely through trial and error and reverse engineering, TecToy developed creolized works such as Sapo Xulé vs Os Invasores do Brejo, and produced the Mônica game trilogy, which recast Wonder Boy in Monster Land around a Brazilian comic heroine with a substantially new narrative.

The authors find that TecToy's attempts at wholly original games, including Férias Frustradas do Pica-Pau and Sítio do Pica-Pau Amarelo, largely failed in the market. They interpret this as evidence that the company embraced cannibalization without the nationalizing dimension central to Oswald de Andrade's cultural anthropophagy, relying instead on internationally popular characters such as Chapolin Colorado and Woody Woodpecker. The study is qualitative and historical, drawing on published game-magazine coverage, a company blog interview with a former TecToy designer, and the games themselves, rather than on survey or quantitative data.