@KingMike That confusion is totally understandable, and it perfectly illustrates the Playtronic strategy I mentioned. The Playtronic/Gradiente version of A Link to the Past was indeed a localized packaging variant. The box and the beautiful manual were fully translated into Portuguese (with Portuguese text also appearing on the cartridge sticker in later releases). However, the in-game text, dialogue, and menus remained entirely in English.
That was the standard for all Nintendo first-party titles sold by Playtronic/Gradiente: manuals and packaging were localized, but the game ROM itself was the standard North American English version. The only exception as I'd mentioned was the minor text localization in the football game Super Copa. So, you were likely hearing about the unique Brazilian packaging variant, not a officially translated ROM.
And regarding the International Superstar Soccer games, they were technically released in the US, but you are right to mention the perception of rarity! Both ISS and ISS Deluxe had such extremely limited distribution and low sales in North America that they are widely believed to have been effectively unreleased or forgotten by the American public. They were certainly much more prevalent and relevant, particularly in Latin America, Europe, and Asia (as Jikkyō World Soccer - Perfect Eleven/Fighting Eleven).
@JoeYabuki
That's a great point about the difficulty of getting exact numbers. You're right, 2 million official consoles shipped by Playtronic/Gradiente until 2000 sounds like a lot, but I think the timeline of that shipment number actually "weakens" the SNES dominance argument.
If you look closely at the 1996–2000 window, that 2-million number has to be heavily skewed by the Game Boy family. The N64 struggled, as you mentioned, and the SNES was essentially retired by Gradiente by 1997/98, while the Game Boy Pocket (1997) and especially the Game Boy Color (1998) were massive, kind of affordable hits and the primary focus of Gradiente's portable efforts. In fact, the absolute explosion of Pokémon in Brazil around 1999/2000 guaranteed that the Game Boy Color was the volume king in that final shipment period. It's very likely that a huge chunk of those 2 million shipments are Game Boys, not SNES consoles, which doesn't change the fact that the pre-1993 gray market had a huge impact, but does dilute the official SNES sales figure.
On the other hand, TecToy's 1.7 million units by 1996 is a much clearer snapshot of the 8-bit and 16-bit console war itself. Not only that, but their commitment to local manufacturing ensured the Mega Drive and Master System remained accessible and officially supported for decades in Brazil, which was an absolutely crucial factor for regions that didn't have easy access to the Paraguayan or alternative routes. TecToy created a deeper, more entrenched local presence.
Ultimately, the distinction seems to be: while Nintendo, through the gray market and locadoras, undoubtedly won the cultural battle for the high-end experience, TecToy achieved a highly significant victory in the area of somewhat accessible and officially sustained ownership for a broader demographic range across Brazil.
P.S.: You mentioning the 'not so common' consoles in locadoras brought back some great (and painful) memories! Thanks to those 90's indispensable rental stores, I actually got to experience Psychic World (one of my guilty pleasures) on the Game Gear in its first year. More importantly, it was the only place I could play the legendary Neo Geo AES and its CD counterpart. The AES was pure arcade perfection, but the Neo Geo CD gave me permanent Loading Time PTSD... shudders. 😅
@KingMike
Oh, yeah! Ronaldinho Soccer is the perfect meme example of this phenomenon. It was indeed a bootleg, created by a Peruvian group (if I'm not mistaken), which was widely sold in Brazil on the gray market, and also found in rental stores.
But going back a bit further, we'd already had Campionato Brasileiro (we write CampEonato, by the way, in Portuguese) and Ronaldinho Soccer 97/98 for the SNES (which were also hacks/bootlegs of the International Superstar Soccer Deluxe series)! These versions even tried to "out-localize" the official release by adding (sort of) real player names and that hilarious, now-memetic, "Portuñol" announcer!
In Konami's defense though, full game localization wasn't common at that time in the global market. TecToy was a notable and pioneering exception with Phantasy Star for the Master System in 1991, which was completely translated into Portuguese, and later the Wonder Boy - Turma da Mônica swap... (Other companies did localize a few games much earlier than Sega and Nintendo during the Odyssey and Atari heydays in the early 80's).
Playtronic (Nintendo's representative) adopted a strategy similar to TecToy's. They sold games with boxes and manuals in Portuguese, but the in-game content remained in English, following the US standard. Konami officially sold ISS 64 via Playtronic this way (just the North American English version with generic player names like "Allejo").
Heck! Even Nintendo's first first-party game officially localized in Brazilian Portuguese was only in the Switch era, starting with Mario Party Superstars in late 2021. Before that, the only official PT-BR text in a Nintendo game from the Playtronic era was the minor text in the football game Super Copa! (That game was a localized version of Tony Meola's Sidekicks Soccer). It's often remembered because it came in a special Brazilian-only World Cup bundle with a regular console and a golden controller.
Great points, you bring up some extremely important context about the gray market, which often gets overlooked.
However, with all due respect to your original comment, Brazil is a massive country with continental dimensions, and the experience varied drastically by region. That perspective feels very Southern/Southeastern-centric. I'm from the Northeast, and it definitely wasn't so easy to get things from Paraguay up here! In my region, the choice was essentially (for quite a while at least) between the official Sega/TecToy ecosystem and the NES/Famiclones.
As it's known, crucially, those NES clones were almost everywhere because major and minor Brazilian electronics companies actually gave them "official" distribution in department stores. Brands like Gradiente (with the popular Phantom System), Dynacom (Dynavision), Milmar (Hi-Top Game), and CCE (Top Game and Turbo Game) all manufactured and sold these clones legally under the "market reserve laws" of the time.
Funnily enough, a classmate's dad was the regional manager for Milmar, so I even visited their local regional office once! While there, I actually played what was likely the first video game with Brazilian teams: the game simply titled 'Futebol', which was a ROM hack of the bootleg game 'Ultimate League Soccer' (the irony of a hack of a bootleg being the "first official" local soccer game isn't lost on me 😅).
But I digress... Because of TecToy's robust, fully licensed local manufacturing, it was way easier to find official Master Systems and Mega Drives and their games stocked even in supermarket chain stores.
In my experience, far fewer people actually owned an SNES outright. Even if you had the money, ownership wasn't easy if you didn't have the "right connections" (or at least that shady... er... cool uncle who traveled internationally 😅). Instead, many of us relied heavily on playing in or renting consoles and games from local "video game rental stores" to get our Nintendo and etc. fix. This was a way more common cultural phenomenon than ownership for Super Nintendo fans in my area!
It just goes to show how varied the "Brazilian gaming experience" was depending on where you lived!
Fantastic read! A huge thanks for gathering all this information and sharing it. I lived through this entire saga as a child and a teen, and the nostalgia is hitting hard.
It really puts into perspective the sheer magic TecToy brewed down here. While I never owned a Zillion gun (I watched the anime religiously on Globo!), I certainly had a Pense Bem—which, by the way, is still around and working perfectly, complete with the "Programmed activities" books!
The hardware longevity was (still is actually) unbelievable. My 1991 Mega Drive, 1992 Master System, and the 1995 Master System Super Compact are all alive and kicking today, along with every single cartridge from my childhood collection.
Honestly, I feel incredibly lucky to have grown up during that era. The "Console Wars" weren't just marketing; they were a lifestyle. I remember walking into massive department stores and seeing entire walls plastered with glorious Sega/TecToy merchandise.
And the mini-game craze! Taking those licensed Tiger handhelds (released by TecToy) to school to compare high scores. We were none the wiser about the gameplay factor back then (I still don't think they totally sucked, but that AVGN video really hurts the cause 😅) but we loved them anyway. (Game & Watches were obviously superior, but they were rare, expensive imported beasts in my neighborhood)... We devoured every page of magazines like Ação Games and Videogame, creating core memories (and lots of food memories during those gaming sessions, too!).
PSA: The Capcom DnD duology also got a Japan only physical release for the Ps3. Only Japanese language options unfortunately, same as the Sega Saturn one.
Comments 6
Re: Interview: "We Were Fighting Nintendo Clones Backed By Big Companies" - How A Small Toy Company Helped Sega Conquer Brazil
@KingMike
That confusion is totally understandable, and it perfectly illustrates the Playtronic strategy I mentioned. The Playtronic/Gradiente version of A Link to the Past was indeed a localized packaging variant. The box and the beautiful manual were fully translated into Portuguese (with Portuguese text also appearing on the cartridge sticker in later releases). However, the in-game text, dialogue, and menus remained entirely in English.
That was the standard for all Nintendo first-party titles sold by Playtronic/Gradiente: manuals and packaging were localized, but the game ROM itself was the standard North American English version. The only exception as I'd mentioned was the minor text localization in the football game Super Copa. So, you were likely hearing about the unique Brazilian packaging variant, not a officially translated ROM.
And regarding the International Superstar Soccer games, they were technically released in the US, but you are right to mention the perception of rarity! Both ISS and ISS Deluxe had such extremely limited distribution and low sales in North America that they are widely believed to have been effectively unreleased or forgotten by the American public. They were certainly much more prevalent and relevant, particularly in Latin America, Europe, and Asia (as Jikkyō World Soccer - Perfect Eleven/Fighting Eleven).
Re: Interview: "We Were Fighting Nintendo Clones Backed By Big Companies" - How A Small Toy Company Helped Sega Conquer Brazil
@JoeYabuki
That's a great point about the difficulty of getting exact numbers. You're right, 2 million official consoles shipped by Playtronic/Gradiente until 2000 sounds like a lot, but I think the timeline of that shipment number actually "weakens" the SNES dominance argument.
If you look closely at the 1996–2000 window, that 2-million number has to be heavily skewed by the Game Boy family. The N64 struggled, as you mentioned, and the SNES was essentially retired by Gradiente by 1997/98, while the Game Boy Pocket (1997) and especially the Game Boy Color (1998) were massive, kind of affordable hits and the primary focus of Gradiente's portable efforts. In fact, the absolute explosion of Pokémon in Brazil around 1999/2000 guaranteed that the Game Boy Color was the volume king in that final shipment period. It's very likely that a huge chunk of those 2 million shipments are Game Boys, not SNES consoles, which doesn't change the fact that the pre-1993 gray market had a huge impact, but does dilute the official SNES sales figure.
On the other hand, TecToy's 1.7 million units by 1996 is a much clearer snapshot of the 8-bit and 16-bit console war itself. Not only that, but their commitment to local manufacturing ensured the Mega Drive and Master System remained accessible and officially supported for decades in Brazil, which was an absolutely crucial factor for regions that didn't have easy access to the Paraguayan or alternative routes. TecToy created a deeper, more entrenched local presence.
Ultimately, the distinction seems to be: while Nintendo, through the gray market and locadoras, undoubtedly won the cultural battle for the high-end experience, TecToy achieved a highly significant victory in the area of somewhat accessible and officially sustained ownership for a broader demographic range across Brazil.
P.S.: You mentioning the 'not so common' consoles in locadoras brought back some great (and painful) memories! Thanks to those 90's indispensable rental stores, I actually got to experience Psychic World (one of my guilty pleasures) on the Game Gear in its first year. More importantly, it was the only place I could play the legendary Neo Geo AES and its CD counterpart. The AES was pure arcade perfection, but the Neo Geo CD gave me permanent Loading Time PTSD... shudders. 😅
Re: Interview: "We Were Fighting Nintendo Clones Backed By Big Companies" - How A Small Toy Company Helped Sega Conquer Brazil
@KingMike
Oh, yeah! Ronaldinho Soccer is the perfect meme example of this phenomenon. It was indeed a bootleg, created by a Peruvian group (if I'm not mistaken), which was widely sold in Brazil on the gray market, and also found in rental stores.
But going back a bit further, we'd already had Campionato Brasileiro (we write CampEonato, by the way, in Portuguese) and Ronaldinho Soccer 97/98 for the SNES (which were also hacks/bootlegs of the International Superstar Soccer Deluxe series)! These versions even tried to "out-localize" the official release by adding (sort of) real player names and that hilarious, now-memetic, "Portuñol" announcer!
In Konami's defense though, full game localization wasn't common at that time in the global market. TecToy was a notable and pioneering exception with Phantasy Star for the Master System in 1991, which was completely translated into Portuguese, and later the Wonder Boy - Turma da Mônica swap... (Other companies did localize a few games much earlier than Sega and Nintendo during the Odyssey and Atari heydays in the early 80's).
Playtronic (Nintendo's representative) adopted a strategy similar to TecToy's. They sold games with boxes and manuals in Portuguese, but the in-game content remained in English, following the US standard. Konami officially sold ISS 64 via Playtronic this way (just the North American English version with generic player names like "Allejo").
Heck! Even Nintendo's first first-party game officially localized in Brazilian Portuguese was only in the Switch era, starting with Mario Party Superstars in late 2021. Before that, the only official PT-BR text in a Nintendo game from the Playtronic era was the minor text in the football game Super Copa! (That game was a localized version of Tony Meola's Sidekicks Soccer). It's often remembered because it came in a special Brazilian-only World Cup bundle with a regular console and a golden controller.
Re: Interview: "We Were Fighting Nintendo Clones Backed By Big Companies" - How A Small Toy Company Helped Sega Conquer Brazil
@JoeYabuki
Great points, you bring up some extremely important context about the gray market, which often gets overlooked.
However, with all due respect to your original comment, Brazil is a massive country with continental dimensions, and the experience varied drastically by region. That perspective feels very Southern/Southeastern-centric. I'm from the Northeast, and it definitely wasn't so easy to get things from Paraguay up here! In my region, the choice was essentially (for quite a while at least) between the official Sega/TecToy ecosystem and the NES/Famiclones.
As it's known, crucially, those NES clones were almost everywhere because major and minor Brazilian electronics companies actually gave them "official" distribution in department stores. Brands like Gradiente (with the popular Phantom System), Dynacom (Dynavision), Milmar (Hi-Top Game), and CCE (Top Game and Turbo Game) all manufactured and sold these clones legally under the "market reserve laws" of the time.
Funnily enough, a classmate's dad was the regional manager for Milmar, so I even visited their local regional office once! While there, I actually played what was likely the first video game with Brazilian teams: the game simply titled 'Futebol', which was a ROM hack of the bootleg game 'Ultimate League Soccer' (the irony of a hack of a bootleg being the "first official" local soccer game isn't lost on me 😅).
But I digress... Because of TecToy's robust, fully licensed local manufacturing, it was way easier to find official Master Systems and Mega Drives and their games stocked even in supermarket chain stores.
In my experience, far fewer people actually owned an SNES outright. Even if you had the money, ownership wasn't easy if you didn't have the "right connections" (or at least that shady... er... cool uncle who traveled internationally 😅). Instead, many of us relied heavily on playing in or renting consoles and games from local "video game rental stores" to get our Nintendo and etc. fix. This was a way more common cultural phenomenon than ownership for Super Nintendo fans in my area!
It just goes to show how varied the "Brazilian gaming experience" was depending on where you lived!
Re: Interview: "We Were Fighting Nintendo Clones Backed By Big Companies" - How A Small Toy Company Helped Sega Conquer Brazil
Fantastic read! A huge thanks for gathering all this information and sharing it. I lived through this entire saga as a child and a teen, and the nostalgia is hitting hard.
It really puts into perspective the sheer magic TecToy brewed down here. While I never owned a Zillion gun (I watched the anime religiously on Globo!), I certainly had a Pense Bem—which, by the way, is still around and working perfectly, complete with the "Programmed activities" books!
The hardware longevity was (still is actually) unbelievable. My 1991 Mega Drive, 1992 Master System, and the 1995 Master System Super Compact are all alive and kicking today, along with every single cartridge from my childhood collection.
Honestly, I feel incredibly lucky to have grown up during that era. The "Console Wars" weren't just marketing; they were a lifestyle. I remember walking into massive department stores and seeing entire walls plastered with glorious Sega/TecToy merchandise.
And the mini-game craze! Taking those licensed Tiger handhelds (released by TecToy) to school to compare high scores. We were none the wiser about the gameplay factor back then (I still don't think they totally sucked, but that AVGN video really hurts the cause 😅) but we loved them anyway. (Game & Watches were obviously superior, but they were rare, expensive imported beasts in my neighborhood)... We devoured every page of magazines like Ação Games and Videogame, creating core memories (and lots of food memories during those gaming sessions, too!).
Thanks for the trip down memory lane! Cheers!
Re: Best Beat 'Em Ups Of All Time
PSA: The Capcom DnD duology also got a Japan only physical release for the Ps3. Only Japanese language options unfortunately, same as the Sega Saturn one.