Joeveno's favela shooter harkens bootleg Brazil PS2s
BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER BEFORE 4 treats the bootleg discs of Brazil's PS2 era as a national style, and Steam reviewers agree at 99 percent.
Joeveno shipped BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER BEFORE 4 on September 16—full stylized title: DEMONS FROM THE PORTAL TO HELL I OPENED ARE STILL IN THE FAVELA AND NOW I HAVE TO SAVE MAMADAS FROM RONALDO—and announced the launch in exactly that way. It's a standalone expansion to his cult shooter BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER 3, built in id Tech 2, the engine Quake ran on in 1996, and its arsenal includes a berimbau, a payphone that shoots coconuts, a feijoada bowl on a slingshot and a chimarrão flamethrower.
From the US trailer for BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER BEFORE 4 (silent excerpt—the full trailer, soundtrack included, is on Steam). Courtesy Joeveno.
Joeveno—a musician and YouTuber from Rio de Janeiro—frames the game as a tribute to the Brazilian mods and bootleg discs of the 2000s, the era when a hacked GTA San Andreas circulated as GTA Rio de Janeiro. Asked about it at PAX East this year, he said those bootlegs led him to put a favela Grove Street into his own game. The pirate copy, the thing that was never supposed to count as authorship, is now treated as a national school of design—with the fictional band Mamadas holding the whole cosmology together.
Killscreen was early to this territory—we wrote about Brazil's bootleg console culture back in 2014, when it looked like an economy. A decade later it looks like an aesthetic, and the kids who grew up on those discs are shipping it back to us.
Screenshots from BRAZILIAN DRUG DEALER BEFORE 4. Courtesy Joeveno.
Killscreen covers the game-making that never gets a marketing budget—bootleg aesthetics, regional scenes, one-person cosmologies. The free Radar newsletter delivers it three times a week.
