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As a brazilian myself, as a person who loves history and preservation and also a part of this history(played on a master system of my friend before getting a megadrive when I had 6 or 7 back in the mid 90's, pretty much following sega until the bitter end with the dreamcast) I am fairly impressed by your research. It is fairly accurate AFAIK. Brazil's market where filled with clones by one big reason: We had just came from a 20+ year of military dictatorship, and our government mad a lot of embargos for imports. We were literally proibited from getting computers or electronics from outside... So the practice of making clones of the products from the outside turned common and when we got free from the military dictatorship in the mid 80's this still reverbed, this is also why whe had no official distribution. Tectoy indeed cared about their consumers Add to the fact that tectoy was the only company that did something like that. NO other company came close to it. The translations of famous games like PS were really good in that it respected the particularities of portuguese(except the missing accentuation, which is also used by a lot of languages derived from latin), and their support and after sales were TOP NOTCH... You did something I wanted to do, a mini documentary about the market I grewn up, about sega and tectoy relationship and the different games this collaboration made possible. Really cool

Hi Kim, im brazillian and i watch your video/docs always that i can. I must to say two things. The first one is, amazing job my friend! You really got all the truly aspects why we are stopped in the 16bit era (taxes) and why all we really like tectoy a lot. The second is, tec toy already made a big project of a 32bit console game called Zeebo -- and its was a perfect disaster. Anyway, thanks for calling a few of my country, and a really enjoyed the momento where you explaned about senna and his game. Amazing job, please keep on!

An english saying "el chapulín colorado" pure gold, great video Kim. Greatings from Argentina.

I'm Brazilian, and I think there is too much of a deal made of the SEGA-TecToy parternship, even with your video, Kim. The truth is it's very hard to find someone who actually owns one of TecToy's Mega Drive/Master System consoles here. Most poor people have a PS2, or even an X360 nowadays. The Mega Drive and the Super Nintendo died in the middle of the PS1's life over here, by the time of the PS2 they weren't prevalent anymore, although you could still meet poor people who still had them and easily find cheap cartridges for them. Back in 2010 I was seen as a weird guy for having an SNES as my only console (wasn't interested in modern gaming by then), and I studied at a public school, so we were all poor! Everyone had a PS2 by then.

This is by far the best video I've seen on KZfaq about the Brazilian gaming market made by a foreign creator. Congratulations and thank you, Kim. You are awesome.

Oddly enough, all the most recent game consoles sell well here too, it's relatively easy to find someone who owns a Playstation 4, 3, an Xbox 360, Nintendo consoles... it's just a case that Tec Toy managed somehow to hold its own in the game market far after the Sega consoles lifespans. If I was to explain why, I would say: - Brazil is an enormous and complex country, so what happens in the most developed regions (usually coastal ones) don't exactly propagate to the least developed and poorest ones. The most modern consoles do pretty well at São Paulo / Rio de Janeiro / south regions, but we probably can't say the same about the northeast, central west or the north and Amazon regions - Brazil never fully developed its market and economy and these regions barely started to develop at all - Tec Toy marketing division is strong and came to the right conclusion - newer generations would be a nice target for cheap consoles that were mostly the rebranded Master System and Mega Drive ones purchased by their parents (this is an important detail. Brazilian youth today don't care about Sega. Their limited-budget parents do). Not every market move from Tec Toy was a success though - their exclusive gaming console project - a 32-bit machine called Zeebo - was a tremendous flop - Brazilians are very emotive so yes, nostalgia definetly plays a heavy role in this Sega success case. We the thirty-somethings brazilians have the most dear memories toward the Sega consoles - I myself still own my working high-quality model 1 Mega Drive by Tec Toy from the nineties. Every brazilian adult knows who Sonic the Hedgehog and Mario are...by the way, Nintendo was very present too - there definetly was a space for the Snes, but this leads to a more obscure and hard-to-research topic: piracy - It's not that Nintendo was not present here at the time. These are the facts: most of the Nintendo 8-bit consoles and games here were unnoficial clones, as you could notice; the same went for their games. You could point it out well - SNES had an official release late in the game here but the unnoficial and pirated games market was by far larger than the official market. So let's say Sega was the king of the official games market, and Nintendo dominated the obscure piracy market - Brazil is odd in almost every aspect, as you could expect from a large, isolated, complex, dynamic and mixed-race country, so the answers are not always easy. Anyway, here is my contribution.

I'm thoroughly enjoying these more considered, recent "mini docs". The editing is tight (Brazil accompanied with SOR2 under narration, awesome!) and we are getting new info again, just when I thought I'd exhausted the internet of sega retro goodness! Thank you kim, much appreciated.

Tec Toy is awesome. Their Mega Drives back in the day (the original ones) were super high build quality, comparable to the ones built in Japan. The same for the Saturn and Dreamcast. I'm from Brazil.

Very interesting! I heard that the SMS Illusion series (Castle of Illusion and Land of Illusion) had a third installment in Brazil called Legend of Illusion. Didn't know about things like Duke Nukem 3D though!

As a fan of your channel and being brazilian myself, thank you for taking the time to put this video together. It is quite a shame that our country's work in gaming goes unnoticed for the most part, even by our own people

Great job Kim, as a SNES owner and big Nintendo fan as a kid I used to envy my friends who could play Sonic and the Monica games (sort of Brazilian Disney), all in portuguese. It was amazing how Tectoy throve despite the massive piracy and outrageous taxes in our country, and still thrives re-releasing consoles and even new games to this day. A fine research you did there.

Wow, I'm really proud of your work, Kim. I'm brazilian, and as many other brazilians, started my gaming life with Tec Toy's Master System. Thanks a lot for this, I feel homaged.

The PS4 is now priced at around 1600 reais in Brazil, which is about 487 dollar as of the end of 2016 (it can be bought even cheaper on internet shopping like Mercado Livre)...

I'm from Chile. Here it was relatively easy to find games from Tectoy, I have Sonic Spinball, Street Fighter 2 for the Genesis with Tectoy's logo and a Road Runner game for Master System. But I never stumbled with a console.

YAY Brazil episode! When i was a child my dad took us to the TecToy factory in São Paulo so we can exchange a faulty Master System, i remember seeing some merchandise for the Sega Saturn launch at the time, they even had a test system with that 3d platformer with the green bug game, my mind almost blew out of my head at the time. This would be the best! *grabs Popcorn*

Nice! I've been waiting for this! Greetings from Portugal (but I'm Brazilian)

Will you make a vid on Steepler and it's famiclone "Dendy" in the future? A company that, much like TecToy for Brazil, shaped gaming in Russia in the 90s and created a huge culture around its product, with "official" shops, magazines and even a TV show on one of the biggest channels at the time - in other words, more than an interesting topic for review.

You're doing fine with your Portuguese, Kim! :) What a great video! :) Thanks for this one! Have a great 2017!! :) Cheers!

You know? This is your best video of 2016, screw that poll

The SEGA Master System was my very first gaming system and i still have it!

The very first console I owned was a SMS, upgrading from the Speccy as it happens. Loved so many games on it.

Nice one, Kim: a terrific mix of nostalgia and insight into a land far from these shores (these shores being north west England). Most enjoyable, as always.

*Magnificent!*

Amazing video!!! As a SEGA fanboy, I love learning all about this kind of stuff. I think I'll pass this video along to the people at SEGAbits.

Great video Kim, one of my favorites yet. Your videos are always on stuff I didn't even know I wanted to know about and its great!

Awesome to finally see this topic covered in detail. Thank you for continuing to cover genuinely interesting subjects.

Great coverage of the company. I love how you put so much effort into these videos and cover a broad range of companies that very few seem to do.

This is an amazing video, extremely well researched. However, it's missing a piece that is not to be found in official histories, interviews and narratives: how big piracy and smuggling are. Even if Sony and Nintendo machines are expensive and officially have smaller marketshares, their smuggled stocks sell really, really well. Sony is HUGE in Brazil, and the PS1 and PS2 were everywhere. No one gave a damn about the GCN or OXbox, the PS2 was king. You could walk into a street tech market and buy a modded smuggled PS2 for far cheaper than the regularly imported one, and even get 10 bootleg games for free. Also, I don't really know how prevalent are these weird versions of the Mega Drive that Tec Toy kept releasing for years. They were kinda expensive for what they offered, and you could buy a weird Fake-PS1 NES clone for cheaper. Also, kids would obviously demand PS2s and Xbox 360s instead.

I'm Brazilian and I can say that TecToy did an excellent job with games in Brazil at a time when it was very expensive to buy a video game or even imported games.

Some really interesting history here, I'm just getting back into Master System titles and it amazes me how many Japanese developed games weren't released in Japan. The number of Brazil exclusives is also a unique phenomenon.

You’re a beautiful person Kim. Thanks for all the hard work you put into these videos. 👍

Road Rash 3 - Brazil theme haha good job!

Very interesting video. I thought that the Master System and Genesis have been discontinued a long time ago. But I was wrong. It feels like Brazil had become the alternate universe for video games. Its like the VHS is outselling DVD/Blue-ray players. I had the Master System when I was a kid living in Canada. I felt that the Master System was an underrated game console while the NES was dominating the markets in North America and Japan in the 80's.

A very nice, in-depth explanation. Still seems absolutely crazy though, like this weird time abyss where the Master System and Mega Drive is forever without advancement. *shrugs*

Brazilian fan here! Loved the video!

Really cool video. I love learning more about these weird markets in other parts of the world, as much of game culture focuses on the US, Japan, and the UK/Europe. TecToy is a really interesting company to me, and the way the've hung on in the Brazilian market with the Master System and Mega Drive is fascinating and kinda crazy (though largely driven by massive poverty). I'd love to learn more about the Zeebo and how that did (not very well from what I understand), how well it was received, etc. Similarly, there's gaming in other parts of the world we never really consider. Like Sony launching a PS2 title in India, derived from Indian folklore. Or the Chinese version of the N64 that used a concept similar to the Famicom's disk system. Or efforts to develop games in the Middle East. One company and market I find really interesting is Robotron in East Germany (back when there was an East Germany), who made computers for state-owned facilities and departments. But they took the chips they manufactured that weren't up to scratch, and used them to launch cheap home computers (not that they were cheap to buy - but the quality of them was). You got a board with a terrible 8 line display, a horrible membrane keyboard and no power supply or mass storage. So if you wanted to hook up to a TV, with a decent keyboard and have a case on your computer, with cassette tape storage, you had to largely figure that stuff out yourself. And this was all going on while West Germany had a massive plant manufacturing Commodore 64's and later Amiga computers. Needless to say, once the wall came down, and as C64 owners upgraded to the Amiga, Atari ST, PC and Mac, they dumped their older C64 systems in former East Germany, where they were snapped up.

I appreciate hearing about some of the gaming History of my country. Hearing you pronounce Portuguese is a bonus.

hello iam a brazilian and i like it the video. olá eu sou brasileiro e gostei do video

Loving the channel! Thanks for an interesting trip down memory lane.

This was an amazing video about an amazing topic just have a tech toy where the hidden redistributor’s of surgical strike 32XCD. That game alone drove me crazy trying to find anything about it. Great job Kim, this one you should be especially proud of❤️👍

Thanks! That was one of the best videos and / or articles about the SMS in Brazil history I've come across!

It was a general strategy from Sega ofJapan to look for local celebreties for games specifically targeted to the local markets. In Germany we got Otto's Ottifants for example. I read an interview in my father's Playboy regarding Sega's strategy with the German head of Sega at that time. Sega of Japan did this for their home market as well. Looking for big names to ensure sales of their non-arcade games. Up until Sonic there were close to zero original Mega Drive games in the first two years of the machine's existence. All games they released were either Master System sequels (Alex Kidd, Phantasy Star), Arcade ports (Altered Beast, Super League Baseball, Ghouls n Ghosts, etc.) or games with some sort of big license attached: Osumatsu-kun, Fist of the North Star (which also was a sequel to a Master System game, Rambo III, etc. The first licensed sports game was Arnold Palmer Golf which was a sort-of sequel to an arcade golf game. It was licensed by the brother of the golfer that gave his name for the arcade original.

hi kim, i am a brazilian that actualy bought tectoy products, like the master system, mega drive and others. i really liked your video, very educative but with a british taste that makes it unique (somehow).

First of all, I would like to congratulate you on the video. It was very nicely done and we can see you put a lot of research into it. Now, I would just like to make a few observations regarding the current gaming generation, and also the two previous ones (the PS2 and PS3 era) here in Brazil. The first thing I'd like to say is that games here are expensive not only due to taxes but also because retailers put a big margin of profit over the stock prices. There are a few articles around the net showing how much of an impact this profit margin affect the prices here. Another thing that I'd like to point is that of all the consoles that were sold here since the PS2 days, a good chunk of them were not exactly bought legally. Most of them were imported to this country without paying the proper taxes, hence being sold much cheaper than you'd find on regular stores. This was specially true during the first half of the PS2 life time, when Sony wasn't selling their console officially here, and you couldn't really find it being sold on major store chains. We still had support by Nintendo back then, but none by Microsoft whatsoever, so only the Game Cube was sold on stores. To this day you can still find a lot of imported consoles being sold unofficially around the country, much cheaper than how much they cost on major store distributors. However, after some time, the prices dropped enough that it started to become affordable to purchase them legally without having to resort to the black market. Now, just one last thing, the PS2 was the most popular console here on its generation. That happened much because of piracy, and the console sold very well even when the PS4 was released. It was really easy to get pirate games for the PS2. All you had to do was go to the major business centers of our cities and look around for stands selling games. Things changed a little bit when the PS3 and the Xbox 360 were released here. Since the 360 kept using DVDs instead of Blu-Ray, like the PS3 did, it became the most pirated console of its generation. People still bought a lot of PS3's here, even without piracy, but the 360 managed to become a huge thing here. Today we have both the PS4 and Xbox as the most popular consoles here, with the Switch a little bit distant, even costing much more that in the United States. The prices are not cheap, but they are enough to be affordable by people who really consume this type of entertainment here.

The most detailed video I have seen on this topic. Nice!

The odd advertisement at 2:33 is legendary and there's probably enough twists and turns for its own episode.

I was enjoying this video as always, but when the SoR2 soundtrack kicked in around 6.30 suddenly I want to get my game on! Loving the adverts and story in this one, great as ever!

Another amazing video! Greetings from Brazil! :)

very interesting and informative vid Kim! Thanks a lot :)

I'm from Brazil. I saw the console wars in the 90's. I had a mega-drive, and a SNES. 😊 Congratulations for your channel! High quality content. 👍👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

Wow!! Crazy good documentary!!! Really good video!!

Brazil stage music from Road Rash 3 Tour De Force, nice touch Kim

besides, Brazil does NOT use exclusively the PAL system. We have had NTSC and Pal work just fine in our TVs since the nineties. I'm not sure, however, if the videogame systems were built to work with pal or NTSC, but considering I've owned a NTSC PS1, PS2 and even a Zeebo (if you've ever heard of that lol), I guess most of the systems were NTSC in the end of the day.

Great video, as always Kim. But, there are some things I have to say. Firstly, i never knew there was a Speccy clone here. Here the IBM PCs dominated the market, the more close of a British computer I ever saw was a Amiga 1200 in my childhood. Secondly, Tectoy not only distributed the Saturn and the Dreamcast, they produced it while they lived. Thirdly, Gradiente didnt't make the SNES and so on, Playtronic, which was a company created by Gradiente and Estrela ( a famous toy maker here) that made it, Gradiente alone only made the Phantom System, the most sucessuful Famiclone. Fourthly, Tectoy also made the Sapo Xule series of games, which are hacks of Kung Fu Kid, Psycho Fox and a Shump which name I forgot, and the Show do Milhão game came inboxed with the Mega Drive II, that here came after the Mega Drive end of life, in 96.

I'm brazilian and hearing you speak Portuguese is more like a whole new language to me. Still a good attempt though, and I've certainly heard worse.

Super ! And you are so productive. You're a machine Kim!

You put in a nice effort in pronouncing the original names, thanks for that :-D

Thank you for this upload just heard of this tec toy story today and immediately went to Kim Justice only to be once again very happy that you did a whole story on this!! SEGA Master System fanboy

Nice use of Mike Rotunda footage!

Interesting niche video, really enjoyed it! BTW, there are lots of parallels between video games and the auto industry in South America. Lots of dope SFA Toyota trucks in South America peps in the US would kill to have!

man i love this channel so much for this kind of obscure knowledge that might be useless but is just so darn interesting! :)

This is really interesting. When I'd visit Brazil as teen in the 90s and my mum would always bring something like a gameboy for someone in my family. I never realized how rare / expensive they were over there

Excellent Video, congratulations!Tectoy has always innovated in Brazil. In today sales Mega Drive, Master System and Atari Flashback. I am Brazilians.

Hey Kim. This video is amazing, you’re really taught me about tech toys. Looks like Sega, is doing very well in Brazil to this day. It looks like Brazil, is singles alternate universe.

Thanks for such an informative exposé on Tec Toy, and I'm sad to hear it wouldn't be easy to get a newly-produced MegaDrive. Remarkably, I did manage to find a Master System in a Portuguese-owned junk shop here in Toronto for 8 dollars, and was able to make it work thanks to the folks at A&C games. Amusingly, the cords cost more... Now I want to collect all those Euro-titles. Thank again for your excellence, Kim!

It would be cool if you tell the story of the NES in Brazil and its thousands of clones

magnificent stuff kim. i had no idea senna was so heavily involved in the making of that game - explains a lot!

Brasil also received a Sega Master System version of Sonic Blast.

I was totally ignorant to all of this information, thank you for a great video. Chief

I believe Tec Toy also make all the 40 extra games that were included in the AtGames Sega Genesis plug and play too.

amazing as usual

I'm very pleased to see that twisted scrote remains in the outtro.... : )

Great video as per usual

At 17:46, Kim says (about Show do Milhão) "According to Stefano Arnold, there was a plan to also put this game on the Mega Net too - and allow people to play the game online, but alas it never came to fruition", and so you just hear Silvio Santo's digitized voice low in the background saying "Que pena!", which means "What a pity!". For the ones who can understand both english and portuguese, this is a hell of a syncronicity. :-)

That Road Rash music to play us out, beautiful choice

Excellent video!

Have you ever heard about Pegasus(Pegazus) console? :) 1988-89 Polisch clone of Famicom(NES) made in China - still on sale for a price of about 10$(40zł) on Allegro :) with games ;)

A truly great video as always Kim. This style of documentary is exactly why you're one of my favorite youtubers! Now I need to track down a Tectoy Master System and Mega Drive, since I now live in Brazil. Do you know if any of them ever supported RGB output through the years?

I loved the video! Here in Brazil, these consoles are still released because here, the Retro Gamer community is very strong, but we all play new games like the rest of the world. It's not like we just had that option, you see. Here, old consoles do not go to waste, we keep then all in our collection.

Your videos are great. Keep em coming!

If I remember correctly, Fire & Ice was released in the UK for the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga - I'm sure I saw the ads or a review in ST mags at the time.

Excellent video Kim. I love Sega

Goddamn invisible ninjas cutting onions next to me when you started talking about Ayrton Senna's Super Monaco GP II

Nice video, in Brazil the top ten of Genesis / Mega Drive, includes: Fifa 95, Super Monaco GP 2, Sonic 2, Super Street 2, Mortal Kombat 2, Road Rash, Earthworm Jim 2, Streets of Rage 2, Castle of Ilusion and Ecco the Dolphin... Unfortunately the sucess of a console in Brazil is about the avaliability of piracy, it's the cause of dominance of Microsoft, the X360 continues to be the best selling console, the modchipped X360 cost the same of Xbox One console (an average price around U$400), but while a Xbox One game is tagged around U$70, a X360 pirated game is found in game stores for U$2 or U$3, i worked in a few brazilian game stores and we selled about 200/250 piracy games/day in the Fridays and saturdays the sales rise to 500/600 games by day.

Tec Toy would also export their Master Systems and Mega Drives to other South American countries, which thanks to the Mercosur bloc made them cheaper. Now, the Master System wasn't able to pick up popularity thanks to the very popular Famiclones. In Argentina, for example, there were so many famiclones, some imported, some built locally, that they would have commercials and compete with each other (even if, at the end, they were all the same console). But the Mega Drive was a different deal, there were no Super Famiclones at the time so you could only get a Super NES by getting an original imported from the USA. Which was expensive, but a Mega Drive imported from Brazil and made by Tec Toy was a much cheaper option. And thus the Mega Drive became the most popular 16-bit console in South America by far. Don't get me wrong, people would still buy a Super NES, but having one meant your family was well off and could afford an expensive console. The average Joe would buy a Mega Drive.

Tec Toy also released a translated version of Yu Yu Hakusho fighting game by Treasure .The series was a big hit here between 1997-1999.

Ohhh man, you reminded me of the painful PS4 launch. My friend bought it at launch and everyone thought he was an idiot. It's $400 now, sometimes less, pretty good.

Another excellent video.

love your videos!

Very interesting thanks. I always wondered why the Sega machines are so popular in Brazil. Now I know!

That price of 4000reais was announced/rumoured in 2013 some months before the ps4's launch but I really doubt it was the ACTUAL price in shops when it launched in december that year...

I expected Top Gear to get mentioned, as I assumed it's really popular there. Also, there was a license conversion of an Asterix game. Have you ever mentioned Asterix or any bande dessinee game on your channel?

Irwin R Schyster! (aka Bray Wyatts dad! Bolieve that!) great video though, only recently heard about Tec Toy.

Im brazilian. The secret here (at least for the post cd generations) is that the console with the easier piracy will always prevail. That explains xbox360 and psone winnings here...

Hey +Kim Justice, the PS4 has lowered it's price around these parts to between R$1500~R$2500. In USD (current exchange rate), that'd be between U$450~U$750. Still freaking expensive, but not nearly as much as when the PS4 first came out.

Actually, Mega Drive sales in Brazil started to decrease when PlayStation 2 came

Wow I gotta find these Brazilian master system roms!

As an brazilian, i just adore this video that shows how amazing is the relation between sega and brazil.

nice use of the road rash music around 3 minutes.