Brazilian Christmas Anachronisms
It’s almost Christmas again, yikes! In the Christmas spirit, here’s a photo of last year when I was at a shopping mall and saw this interesting arrangement on a bookstore’s display window:
I’m sure Brazil’s the only place in the world where you’ll see a Nintendo Switch being sold right beside a Master System. I’m also pretty sure we’re the only country in the world where Master Systems are still manufactured and sold in stores, which is crazy for a 40-year old game console ⤴. It’s not even cheap: looking at the bookstore’s site ⤴ right now, it’s selling for R$429,90 (around 80 USD), which is a considerable amount in a country where the minimum wage per month is R$1518.
That shows how successful and influential Tec Toy ⤴ (the company that brought the Master System and Mega Drive to Brazil) was in the past. Nowadays, I guess they’re mostly surviving on nostalgia and the grandparents who want to buy a videogame for their grandkids but don’t know that a Switch and a Master System are technologically more than 30 years apart. Tec Toy’s also trying to sell a portable console caled Zeenix ⤴, an overpriced Steamdeck knockoff which I’m pretty sure is flopping hard.