The leader The leader

Mr. Byte has 32 cats on his roof. He has been rescuing cats with some kind of disability for some years now. He takes cats which have been attacked or run over to a veterinarian friend, and then he adopts them. He loves cats.

"They are more intelligent than dogs, and they are the favorite pets for programmers as they are independent," he says. He remembers Mirfusila, the cat that he got when he arrived in Peru in 1986. She was always at TEG, resting on top of a monitor.

xSound, one of the members of TEG that was there at the time, remembers Mirfusila's death in 2001 as the first and only time that he has seen Mr. Byte cry. "He was always a very rigid man, but that day he showed that he had feelings like the rest of us." The leader of a team has to show the way; he can't get distracted or emotional, otherwise, the whole team could fall apart. But that night, with Mirfusila lying dead on his arms, Mr. Byte didn't have the strength to disguise himself.

Mr. Byte hates sunlight. He works in complete darkness, simulating perpetual night to get things done.

Spunk, one of Mr. Byte's oldest friends, remembers him as a wacky genius. "He had a strange personality, but once you knew more about him he was really a great guy," he says. "I always thought that he would be a legend, I don't know, like Bill Gates." Spunk remembers that people had to take off their shoes to enter Mr. Byte's house.

After working with the Commodore 64 for some years, Mr. Byte decided to try new things with the Amiga console. He and other members of TEG ported a game published by Konami for SNES to the Amiga 1200. They named it Gunbee F-99. It was a vertical shooter where the player had to defeat five bosses to retrieve a kidnapped princess. The game was an exact replica of the original title from SNES, except for the last level, which Mr. Byte and his team transformed into a Peruvian scenario, full of references to its geography and history. The final boss was the Tuminator, a symbol from a Pre Incan culture.

Gunbee F-99 became the first Peruvian game ever published, released in 1998 for the European and American markets by German company APC & TCP. The game got excellent reviews from magazines from around the world, and still occasionally shows up on YouTube speed run channels.

Eduardo Marisca, a Peruvian Research Assistant from the Education Arcade at MIT who is studying the Peruvian game industry, believes that the time that TEG spent modifying games helped them learn how to make videogames. "It's a gray area when you analyze it. ... Piracy — although I don't think is the best word to address it — was how you gathered experience and started to work on other projects," he says.

He gives the example of the manga industry in Japan, which started copying famous works until original material began to appear. Or Nollywood, which started because of the boom of piracy as a way to show young directors how to shoot a movie. "The problem arrives when these industries pretend to maintain themselves like informal ones forever. Then you start to generate a high social cost," Marisca says.

The first copyright law in Peru was passed in 1995, after TEG had been cracking games for Commodore 64 for several years. The change led to increased police activity and raids on software pirates and Mr. Byte's return to making original games.