courtesi96
06-17-2008, 09:37 PM
I know the Odyssey 2 and Sega Master System enjoy many years of success in Brazil. What other consoles were popular there?
Zebbe
06-18-2008, 06:36 AM
The Sega Mega Drive. It sold 2 million units there and the last game was released in 2002. They still sell the console with built in games there, even.
thom_m
06-18-2008, 09:49 AM
The Atari 2600 was huge here, too, much more than the Odissey 2. It was the first gaming experience to a whole generation, and it's kindly remembered even by those who doesn't play games anymore - while the Odissey is seen more as a cult item today, and mostly by gamers.
Nintendo's 8-Bit system was successful here too, but mostly through the famiclones. Two of them, the "Phantom System" (made by Gradiente, which, years later, would be one of Nintendo's official business partners here) and the "Dynavision" did specially well. I don't really know about how the official NES sales performed here, but it shared the market with the clones during all it's brazilian time. And with the SMS, which was the heaviest contender. It came a little late, anyway; it was already 1993!
Later, together with the Mega Drive, the SNES owned the brazilian gamers' hearts. Even at first, when they only could be imported, it had a huge following, which increased when it started to be sold officially. The 16-bit console wars caught on heavilly here; I remember I had heated arguments with a friend of mine about which console was cooler, the SNES or the Mega Drive (I was on the Genesis side :)) .
Then came the Playstation. And the rest, as they say, is history. Saturn, N64, Dreamcast... they all had some fans, but never came close to threat the PS1's kingdom.
It cemented the way to the PS2, which reigns supreme until now - specially 'cause you can find pirated games everywhere. The next generation of games is still off to a slow start around here, 'cause they're still too expensive.