Emergent Countries Play, Too!: A Decolonial Take on the History of Videogames Through the Zeebo Platform

Bruno de Paula's paper challenges the universalist assumptions that have shaped conventional histories of videogames, which have typically been written from North American, Japanese, and British perspectives with little attention to geography. Drawing on a growing body of scholarship on the Global South, the paper argues that non-mainstream contexts should be treated as sites of knowledge production rather than as peripheral or exotic footnotes to the mainstream gaming story. Its central aim is to preserve histories from the Global South and to show how these histories disrupt assumptions about what videogames are and who plays them.

The paper's primary case study is Zeebo, a Brazilian console produced in the late 2000s and marketed to lower-income consumers. Adopting Benjamin Nicoll's concept of minor platforms as epistemic tools, the author treats Zeebo as a window onto alternative structures of feeling and suppressed cultural patterns rather than as a simple commercial failure. The analysis relies chiefly on discursive media archives, including Brazilian press releases and retrospective interviews with people involved in the platform's conception and production, to trace how discourses about the console, its players, and the markets it targeted were articulated.

The paper's principal finding is that Zeebo occupies an ambiguous position as a partial decolonial project. On one hand, it emerged from the specific economic and cultural context of Brazil during the commodities boom and the rise of emerging economies, foregrounding Global South players and challenging the notion that innovation flows only from the Global North. On the other hand, the platform ultimately adhered to epistemological structures set by Global North markets, particularly regarding piracy and the framing of Global South audiences. The paper's scope is thus a single national case within a specific historical window, and its contribution lies in demonstrating how such minor platforms can complicate universalist accounts of videogame history.