crpg_book_2.0-1.pdf

When thinking about where a book dedicated to computer RPGs ight come from, one might consider countries like Germany, Canada, UK or the US. Maybe Fra1nce, Russia or Poland. Surely never Brazil. There’s a good reason for this. When the first personal computers and games started to appear in the late 70s, Brazil was under a military dictatorship which banned all computer imports. We couldn’t buy an Apple II, C64 or IBM PC, only the slow and crude national alternatives. Some, like my father, managed to bypass this by smuggling a computer into the country. Still, to play you also needed to find games, and those were a rarity (especially CRPGs!). You had to know someone who travelled to the US and brought the floppy disks back – and then copy those. That’s how Betrayal at Krondor arrived at my house back in the early 90s. Even with the computer and the game in hand, there was still one final barrier: the language. As much as I enjoyed seeing my father play, I had no idea of what those costumed people were saying. I spent months playing Krondor, exploring its large world, but never even left the first chapter. My biggest achievement was brute-forcing a riddle chest. I found solace in JRPGs. Not only they were much easier to play, but consoles were growing popular in Brazil, as in 1994 we finally began to emerge from a long and brutal economical crisis. A friend in my apartment building had a Super Nintendo with Chrono Trigger, and that game became my passion. By then, owning a PC was finally legal, but the CRPG genre was dead – computers were Doom machines. Years later, I was reading a games magazine and something caught my eye: a bizarre game where you could teach farmers about crop rotation to earn XP – but only if you had created a smart character. I had just started playing tabletop RPGs and was fascinated by a computer game like that. So, in 1998 I bought Fallout, which I love to this day. Not only is it an amazing game that breathed new life into CRPGs, but I finally knew enough English to play it properly. My younger brother didn’t. He couldn’t do most quests, so he just walked around and killed everyone. But that was also allowed, and we had a lot of fun talking about just how different our experiences were and all the cool things we kept discovering. I wanted to do that with more people, to talk with my friends in school about this game, to hear their stories, to partake in the joy of a shared hobby. However, my parents had just divorced and I was then living in a small town in Brazil’s countryside. My father gave me his old computer, but no one else I knew had one. They were still very expensive and complicated machines. Cyber Cafes began to appear around this time, but people played Counter-Strike there, not hundred-hour-long CRPGs. Other than my brother, I had no one to talk to about the wise-cracking sword in Baldur’s Gate II, how I became a vampire in Morrowind or the fact that you Read less