Disclaimer: This article was written with funding from the Video Game History Foundation back in 2017. This is an updated version of the original text.

Back in 1985, games developed in Brazil were practically nonexistent in the local market. While they were not completely unknown to the population, as arcades were common and pirated translations of American titles existed, there wasn’t much of a national industry. In fact, no commercial game had ever been developed in Brazil so far.

Why? Certainly not for the lack of creative people. The main problem was the lack of a proper industry. If developing a game is not a business, you can hardly expect one to do it for a living. You would need a visionary for that. Pirating software, on the other hand, was very profitable.

In 1984, the Brazilian government, still a military dictatorship at the time since the coup of 1964, passed a market reserve law called the National Policy of Informatics. It prevented foreign technology companies to officially be present and having offices in the country as well as it restricted the importation of computers. Because of this law, piracy skyrocketed. The practice was already common before and it grew a lot as foreign companies couldn’t do anything about it.

The government defended the idea that the law would help in the creation of a true Brazilian industry without the meddling of international corporations like IBM. While it can be argued that the industry did grow substantially because of it, the idea backfired at the same time as a lot of people simply knew that they could not be sued by reverse engineering already existing technology and selling it as their own.

Unsurprisingly, the software industry followed this path. When it came to games, it was easier to translate and sell them as your own than to create new ones. Whatever Brazilian games that could be found at the time were mostly amateurish or nonprofit efforts. In this context, a man called Renato Degiovani made an important first step: he released Amazônia (Amazon), the first big commercial title created in the country.

Amazônia, launched in 1985, was the remake of Aventuras na Selva (Adventures in the Jungle), a game Degiovani created two years before, but never received a proper commercial release. It was a text-based adventure in which the player would control a man whose plane crashed in the middle of the Amazon rainforest. The goal was to escape from there, but this obviously wasn’t an easy task.

The structure was very similar to American adventure games of the early 80s. The player had to collect and use items and find out how to finish it without the other visual aid of later point and click adventures. It was a big commercial success. Degiovani estimates that from 1985 to 95, Amazônia and its subsequent versions sold more than half a million units. Sales continued online afterward, but no numbers were divulged by the developer.

From Industrial Designer To Game Developer

Renato Degiovani loved games since his youth. In the 70s, he used to play arcades all the time in Ribeirão Preto, in the state of São Paulo, where he used to live at the time. “I was finishing high school and attending to classes to apply for college at the time, but I spent most of my time playing in the arcades”, he admitted. Curiously, he barely remembers the names of the games he used to play back then, just the feeling of going to the arcade and playing them.

He also liked board games such as Monopoly, War and 1914. They inspired him and some of the spark that would lead him into game development could be seen at the time. During his teenage years, Degiovani tried to make his own board games by mixing the ruleset from different ones, drawing scenarios and making up new rules, but he could never make something that really satisfied him.

A real developer needs his tools, though, and personal computers were not so popular at the time. His first contact with computers happened at the end of college in 1981. He bought a computer, an NE-Z80, which was a Brazilian Sinclair ZX80 clone.

“I saw a feature about the release of this new computer in a magazine and I bought it because it was very cheap, it was one of the cheapest ones in the market. Nobody I knew had a computer back then. I was the only one”, Degiovani revealed. He had just graduated in Industrial Design and Visual Communication and thought the computer could be useful for work, but turned out it wasn’t so much.

The model he bought did help him to learn more about how to program but it did not have graphics that were good enough for his work with Visual Communication. Fortunately, he quickly found out that he could make games in it and then started to remake versions of classic games like Hangman and Tic-tac-toe.

While Degiovani was still learning the ropes with the computer, a friend presented him to Computique, which he claims to be the first computer store in Brazil. He went there looking for books and magazines that could help him to program better and bought the Micro Systems Magazine (Revista Micro Sistemas, in Portuguese). After reading it, he started buying every edition.

At the end of 1982, he decided to send a letter to the magazine. He complained about the lack of material about computers of the Sinclair line, which were increasingly popular at the time because of their low prices, and suggested that more articles should be written by computer users, not only experts who only cared about technical aspects.

He also pointed out that the magazine should focus more on people who had recently bought their computers, as they were increasing in number, and less on formed professionals. These people, like him, were learning about programming and would be interested, which would make the magazine more popular and easy to understand.

Thanks to his letters, Degiovani was called for an interview. There, he met the editors and exposed his points. He was so enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the subject that he was actually called to write for the Micro Systems Magazine.

“For starters, I wanted to write a feature about computer ergonomics as I was graduated in Visual Communication”, he affirmed, and he was very ambitious from the start. “I wanted to be on the cover of the magazine. Was it an ambitious plan? Yes, but it worked out in the end” His feature appeared in the cover of the 20th edition some months after the interview.

Initially, the new feature writer started to work as a collaborator, but soon he was hired as a technical assistant. The position included doing a bit of everything: program reviews, features and story pitches.

All his effort actually paid out as he was promoted to technical director after a short time. The new function included managing the laboratory in which the new products would be tested and to run the art sector of the magazine, as he had a degree in Visual Communication. He dropped all of his outside projects and started to work at the magazine full time after the promotion.

While working on Micro Systems, he published his first games on its pages. The magazine used to publish the source code from games, so Degiovani’s first public work has seen the light of day there.

His first public game was Aeroporto 83 (Airport 83), published in the 22nd edition (June 1983). It was described by the developer as being very similar to Space Invaders. The objective was to safely land in an airport, but before the player could do it, he had to destroy the enemies.

While the project was very simple, Aeroporto 83 was the first Brazilian game made in Assembler and Degiovani’s first exercise in animation. Aventuras na Selva (Adventures in the Jungle) would appear in the following edition, released in the next month.

Creating The First Brazilian Commercial Game

Aventuras na Selva was a text-based adventure game. Its development lasted eight months. It was born from Degiovani’s wish to make an adventure game in Portuguese.

Degiovani’s first contact with the genre happened when he played Asylum. Unfortunately, he was not completely fluent in English at the same, so he struggled to understand the game and hated the experience. His second experience was with City of Alzan, which he understood fairly better. However, he misunderstood the word “wood” for “earth” and this almost ruined his experience.

The positive aspect of these two experiences is that they sparked his wish to make something that Brazilians could play. He hated to play in English so he could see the potential of bringing that interesting but difficult genre to the country.

In his effort to make something truly Brazilian, the same feeling that backed the law that prevented the importation of computers, he chose a very Brazilian setting: the Amazon rainforest. The idea for the setting came up because he always watched news about it on TV.

Following the traditional text-based formula, in Aventuras na Selva the player had to explore his surroundings and gather clues and items to discover how to move on and get out of the forest. The game started at a plane crash site and then the player was allowed to explore his surroundings without any clue about what to do.

To progress, the player would need to cross a river. Obviously, this was no easy task at all. First, he would have to pick up a rope and an ax somewhere. After that, he would have to use the ax to get wood from the jungle and then build the boat with the wood and the rope.

Aventuras na Selva was filled with similar item-based puzzles. In another part of the quest, the player would need to use a flashlight to see inside a dark cave, but the flashlight would only work after batteries were found.

Degiovani’s north when developing was that the person playing the game would have to explore and always think about the surroundings, not just move forward aimlessly. Every area was designed in a puzzle-like way, so exploring and using items to solve puzzles was a constant challenge.

Despite his degree in Visual Communication, what Degiovani liked the most about his own game was that it only used words like “examine plane”, “go north” and “use wood”. Why? Because he was astonished by the richness of detail as he played City of Alzan. “Computers did not have fancy graphics in Brazil, generally, so it was amazing to be able to create rich and wonderful worlds using only words and the imagination of the player”, Degiovani affirmed.

The Final Challenge: Finding A Publisher

Publishing the work was no easy task. At first, Degiovani tried to sell his title to the magazine in which he worked. The plan was to release it on a K7 tape instead of only printing the code. However, despite the success of Aeroporto 83, they didn’t seem willing to do so, so he tried to find other publishers.

“As a designer, creating the game wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to design a product, so I wasn’t satisfied with just publishing the code on the magazine, I printed a whole pocketbook with the code to be sold along with the tape”, he explained. However, all the publishers he tried kept stalling him, so his decision was to publish the code in Micro Systems, just like he did before. The game was developed for the NE-Z80 and the model was getting old, so there was no time to lose.

The edition of the magazine that had Aventuras na Selva was a big success and it was quickly sold out, becoming a rarity at the time. The success of the title culminated in the proper release of Amazônia two years later. This mainly happened because Degiovani felt unhappy with the limitations of the NE-Z80. The game was complex and he only had 16 Kbytes of memory, so a new release, a remaster, would be perfect.

By this time, he was contacted by his friend José Eduardo Neves. José, or Zé, as he was called by his friends, was angry with Degiovani. “He complained that I didn’t release the title with his company. Then I told him that I was planning a remake of it, a bigger version that would be compatible with more systems”, he explained as he offered to grant his friend his wish.

José Eduardo Neves was one of the owners of the JVA, a Brazilian software company that published translated versions of pirated games. “I always urged my colleagues to pay the royalties to Brazilian creators”, affirms Degiovani, “but most of the foreign titles sold in the country were pirated and none of them ever paid a single cent in royalties”. The company used to sell game packages with three or four titles together at the time. Amazônia would be the first original project of the company ever.

As the development for the remake started, though, Degiovani soon ran into trouble. He wanted the game to be compatible with the biggest possible number of systems, so his work grew exponentially in order to port Amazônia. In the end, the game was released for the TRS-80 (and its national versions, the CP 500 and the CP 300), Sinclair ZX81 (TK 85), ZX Spectrum (TK-90X) and MSX.

While Aventuras na Selva had 40 different areas, Amazônia had about 70 and a more complex story. The main objective was still the same, but all the side content was heavily upgraded. This version was more akin to the creator’s original vision of the project and most of what was inserted in the remake felt more like something that should always have been there than an actual addition.

Several additions, like new enemies, were made. For instance, a jaguar would wander the jungle and attack the player. Some new items, a couple of them completely useless and inserted only to confuse the players, were also added. Amazônia was the ultimate version of Aventuras na Selva.

Another important addition was that an old swamp area which already was in the original game now could only be passed with a map, which added more difficulty and something that would challenge even the people who played the first title. The objective was to make everything more complex, challenging and interesting.

Former versions of Amazônia would add support for other computers and actual graphics in the early 90s. They were initially monochromatic, as Brazil didn’t have many computers with colors at the time, but with the rise of VGA cards, a new colored version started to be sold as well.

Legacy

It’s hard to pinpoint if Amazônia was really the first game commercially released in Brazil or not, but it was certainly the biggest hit of its era. Divino Leitão, a close friend of Degiovani who worked with him for some time in the magazine, affirmed that he also released some games with JVA at the time, but they didn’t make so much success. It’s safe to say that Amazônia was the first to be developed, though, as Aventuras na Selva began its development in 1982.

Despite being a success eventually, Amazônia was not a big hit right from the start. A strong economic crisis began in 1985 and many of the stores in which the title was supposed to be sold delayed their purchases. JVA went bankrupt in 1986 and Degiovani was left on his own, too. He used the Micro Systems Magazine to advertise the title as a way to reach the audience. In the following years, though, the game maintained steady sales and it was very lucrative in the end.

The story of the developer was not finished with Amazônia. Degiovani developed several other games. One of the most important ones was Angra-I, a 3D adventure that was supposed to be released in 85, but its troubled development and Degiovani’s increasingly greater demands in his work in the Micro Systems Magazine made the release only possible in 1990.

Today, Degiovani has a site at Tilt.net, named after a magazine he founded in 1984, but didn’t last for a long time. You can find free downloads of some of his games there (all in Portuguese), including Amazônia, that is still being updated today.