Everybody knows the PS2 by now. Sony's best selling console of all time, released in March 2000 and absolutely annihilating its competition, with the Xbox, Gamecube and the poor Dreamcast all staying in its long shadow - way beyond the end of that generation.
It was no different here in the land of samba and football, the Playstation 2 sold immensely, but there are a couple of key factors that separate its presence here from the rest of the world.
The Playstation 2 wasn't just another leap in graphics, gameplay and inovation over here - it defined a generation and is still very much something that is part of the daily lives of millions of gamers.
What might surprise you however is that this incredible piece of kit only [officially released here in 2009](https://tecnologia.uol.com.br/ultnot/2008/11/14/ult185u9020.jhtm), and only the Slim model. This does not mean that it wasn't sold here before that date however, despite not being in production and all units being imports from the US, Japan and other neighbouring latin-American nations, its presence was still immense and it was impossible to not know someone who had one.
But why was that?
There are a variety of factors, such as the success of the Playstation 1 before it and the great library of games, not to mention how hard it was to get your hands on the Nintendo Gamecube or the Xbox. The Dreamcast was officially released here, but with SEGA on its last legs it seems as if TecToy didn't bother to promote as much as it could, seeing as how the MegaDrive and Master System were still their cash cows back then (and still are), with most Brazilian SEGA fans nowadays that are in the know preferring an American or Japanese model as they have functionality which was cut in the Brazilian release (such as the modem).
However, even if attaining the other consoles were easy back then, it wouldn't have made a tent into Sony's sales here, for one simple reason: *Piracy*.
I want to make it very clear that I don't condone piracy, but it is necessary to understand why such a thing happened here in the first place while original copies of games were selling just fine in North America, Europe and East Asia.
Latin America has always been the United States "backyard", this dates back to the Monroe doctrine in which the United States pledged to support and defend the nations of the Americas from European colonialism, this wasn't out of kindness of course, the United States always had their own interests - they simply did not wish for competition.
After a troubled 20th century of stagnant growth for most of the continent, dictatorships and hardships, we were left as nations with a culture of American consumerism but none of the prosperity or purchasing power.
This is of course what made companies such as TecToy so succesful in the gaming market, bringing older, cheaper titles officially, avoiding import fees and bringing fun regardless of your social status.
The companies that cared about our markets were few, and it's one of the reasons why I have so much love for SEGA. Nintendo tried with a partnership with Gradiente here in Brazil but giving up after that and Sony never even officially releasing the Playstation 1.
Despite all this, the Playstation 2 still managed to break the mold with its comparably low price when matched with the next-gen competition and the simple fact that installing a Matrix modchip on one was cheap and easy.
The Matrix modchip allowed burned discs to be played, together with discs from other regions. It wasn't the first one, but it's the most notorious, and while obviously there are no official stats, I'd wager a guess that 99 out of 100 PS2s here are hacked with that modchip. In fact, when I used to resell them, only one did not have Matrix, but it still had a modchip.
*What you see when turning on a PS2 with the Matrix modchip installed*
This opened the door to a thriving market of bootlegs, amidst lax laws on piracy and a police force that didn't care, since there were way more pressing matters and for them it was also the only way to obtain the latest movies and games.
I still remember going out to a shopping mall in 2008 with my dad to buy some games and one of my dad's friend, who was a cop was also there. We both went to the same seller of bootleg games, a very nice guy in fact who gave out chocolate when you purchased 3 games (which only cost $2USD), the cop friend was there not to make an arrest, but to buy a game for his son.
This grey-market continued for way more than a decade, with some places still selling burned PS2 games alongside burned Xbox 360 games, even the convenience store across my house has both.
The convenience and low price of having all of these easily accessible titles for those who either didn't have the knowhow on how to download games themselves or didn't even have a computer at home, something which wasn't easy back then.
What were the effects of this however? Well, it's easy to think that this was one massive blunder for Sony and all the other corpos involved, but I don't see it that way. The surprising success of the Playstation 2 alongside our perseverance to play things that weren't made in the 90s for 8 or 16bit hardware showed the world that Brazil was a force to be reckoned with - it was a market worth tapping into.
I can't imagine Sony, Microsoft or even Nintendo's terrible attempts of breaking in to our market happening if it weren't for the success of the Playstation 2 and its grey market.
When the 7th generation consoles finally began to sell well, piracy started to phase out. Newer consoles are almost impossible to hack and even on PCs most people are on Steam now.
As Gabe Newell once said:
βThe easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It's by giving those people a service that's better than what they're receiving from the pirates.β
And it worked for us. It wasn't exactly giving us a better service, but giving us any service at all - anything other than relying on crime to play games without breaking the budget, budgets that were always low for most of the Brazilian or Latin-American population.
The Playstation 2 was a revolution, it brought eyes to us, it brought us what we wanted even if Sony never intended on it.
Out of those 150+ million sales, it's pretty safe to guess a good ton of ten went down here.
This is a system that despite being 22 years old, [was still the 3rd most popular console in 2020 here](https://www.theenemy.com.br/playstation/playstation-2-terceiro-mais-popular-brasil), and while we aren't exactly on the right foot right now, I wouldn't attribute this to economic woes, but simply to what a great system truly is, to how a better time in gaming history has never really died, and I hope that one day developers will be able to recapture the magic of those days, but for a whole new audience of players, in places where they can't even imagine will be playing them - all within the boundaries of the law, all within a reasonable cost.
Thank you, PS2. You may not have solved our socioeconomic problems, but you sure as hell made them a lot easier to live through.
hiveblocks