Since childhood, I've always been passionate about video games – which we also just called “games”, here in Brazil, to simplify. A school friend had been won a Magnavox Odyssey 2 console by his parents (launched in 1978 by the merger between Magnavox and Philips as an evolution of the Magnavox Odyssey, considered the first commercial home console), and he always invited me to his house to play. I even dreamed about those wonderful little colored squares that moved around the screen. And they made the most incredible noises! Those sounds stuck in my mind. As time is relentless, I remember a few of the console’s games, such as the Western Gunfighter (1979), the tag game The Mousing Cat (1982), the bouncy dolls in P.T. Barnum's Acrobats! (1982) and the endless battle of Atlantis (1982).

When I was 7 years old, in 1985, my father bought me a 14-inch television, a VHS VCR and an Atari 2600 console, which had been launched in Brazil two years earlier. To this day, I remember my euphoria when I saw the store technician installing the devices in our living room, in an old house in the suburbs of Bauru, in the interior of the state of São Paulo, in one of the city’s oldest neighborhoods. I hadn’t even considered asking my father to buy me a video game, as they were expensive, and our family was far from wealthy. But luckily for me, he was a friend of the manager of an electronics store, who offered a consortium plan so that my father could afford to make the purchase. From then on, I spent many afternoons playing games at home, both with my father and especially with friends from the street. And the fun intensified, as the Atari was by far the first option of gift requested from children at the time. As my friends were also getting the same console from their parents, cartridge loans between us became constant.

We soon discovered that there was an Atari and Odyssey cartridge rental shop in a more elite neighborhood of the city. We visited weekly, as renting was much more affordable than buying the cartridges. I never forget the patience that the owners of the rental cartridge store, a father and son (already adult), had with us. We spent hours trying out different games until we decided which one to take home (or which ones, depending on how much money we had managed to scrape together during the week, usually from school snack money). At that time, minigames were also common, portable electronic games that many kids at the time carried back and forth – at least for a certain period, since these minigames were too simple and ended up becoming monotonous, “getting bored”.

My father never played video games after the Atari 2600. I think he found the games on the later consoles too complicated. He was one of those who could barely handle a VCR or, later, a DVD player. And perhaps because of this loss of interest in video games, my father never gave me a console as a gift. I didn’t get a console again until decades later, when I bought a PlayStation 3 (PS3) as an adult, around 2013. But I never stopped playing video games and following their evolution in the time between the Atari 2600 and the PS3. And quite closely. In the following years, some of my friends in the neighborhood started getting more modern consoles, such as the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES, the famous “Nintendinho” here in Brazil, or “little Nintendo”, sold in my country as an imported product from 1985), the Sega Master System (launched in 1989 in Brazil), the Mega Drive (Sega Genesis, launched in Brazil in 1990) and my favorite of all: the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, better known as Super NES (arrived in Brazil in 1993).

In a period of 10 years, from 1985 to 1995, video games were very present in my life, whether in pairs or trios of friends such as “a life or a phase” (whoever died in the game or passed the stage had to pass control to the next) with famous games such as Alex Kid, Mario Bros. or Sonic; afternoons playing Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat with a group of friends; on nights drinking mate tea and playing NBA Jam, International Superstar Soccer, Rock ‘n’ Roll Racing, Top Gear, Skitchin’, Pilot Wings, Bomberman; or late nights trying to decipher clues, discover passages and find characters or items in the memorable The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Flashback and Out of this World, which led me to another passion: tabletop RPGs (role-playing games).

In mid-1988, an uncle who lived in Osasco, in the Greater São Paulo, set up a computer with pieces brought from Paraguay, which he ordered from someone from the black market, the most common way – perhaps one of the only ways – to assemble a PC in Brazil at the time. It was with him that I had contact with the first computer games, until then very rudimentary. Asteroids (or some replica), Gunship and Flight Simulator are some of the (few) that I remember.

The following year, in 1989, on November 25, Bauru’s first shopping mall was inaugurated, and on that day I was amazed to come across a space that I would frequent assiduously for many weekends from then on: the mall’s electronic games area, with dozens of arcades and pinball machines. My favorite arcades were The Simpsons, Final Fight, Ghosts ‘n Goblins, After Burner II (with an incredible cockpit simulator that moved according to the player’s movements) and Karate Champ, which had no buttons, just two joysticks, whose combinations of positions resulted in different karate moves.

In early March 1993, at the height of the Mega Drive and Super NES consoles, Bauru Games was founded, a video game store owned by a nice man of Japanese descent known by his last name, Minoru. The mother of my neighbors and friends who lived across the street from me was “addicted” (as we used to say at the time) to video games, and every Friday it was part of our ritual to go to the store – my friends, their mother and I – to exchange the cartridges that were idle and pick up new ones, and so we would spend the night, sometimes at dawn and even the whole weekend, playing the new titles. It was one of the most nostalgic and fun periods of my adolescence, not only because of the many wonderful games we had at our disposal in the first half of the 1990s, but also because of the unforgettable friendships, exciting musical discoveries (I had jumped into the world of extreme metal and punk rock and was fascinated – I think I’m still), the martial arts we practiced (at the time, I practiced kendo, aikido and a little ninjutsu), the RPG and board game sessions, the first computer classes (typing, DOS, Lotus 1-2-3 and then Windows 95) and Saturday and Sunday afternoons skateboarding around the city. There was virtually no single day of my life at this time that was not exciting and full of new experiences. To this day, when I go to Bauru to visit my parents and friends (In the meantime, I returned to live in the city where I was born, São Paulo, and currently I live in Piracicaba, also in the interior of the state of São Paulo), I feel a pleasant sense of nostalgia for a pre-adolescence and adolescence that were enjoyed every minute, to the point that they still echo in my life today, since many passions from that phase I still carry with me, even after nearly 30 years.

Between 1996 and 1998, I had contact with the Sony PlayStation and the Nintendo 64 that my cousins got from their parents, my uncles. I remember being impressed by the 3D graphics of Tomb Raider and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and later The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Around the same time, the mother of some friends of mine decided to open a video game rental store in the living room of her house, where you could also play games paying by the hour. As she worked away from home, most of the time who attended the rental shop was her children, so I could play at will without spending a penny, as we were friends in the neighborhood and walked up and down the street together – I even practiced aikido with this friend of mine on Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings. Thanks to this wonderful video game rental store, which was just two and a half blocks from my house, I was able to get to know a multitude of games from the consoles of the time, from the fourth generation (Sega CD and Neo-Geo CD), the fifth generation (Atari Jaguar, Sega Saturn, PlayStation and N64) and the sixth generation (Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo Game Cube). With such diversified access to various consoles, a privilege that few kids had, I could have contact with a wide range of game mechanics and graphic and sound aesthetics, which were evolving with new technologies, and with that, the universe of games amazed me more and more with the narrative, interactive, playful, visual and acoustic possibilities that were unfolding with the constant advances of the time in the area of video games and computing.

After many memorable years, the video game rental store closed, but my friends kept the PlayStation and PlayStation 2, and we spent hours and hours playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater in its various versions. In addition, around 2001, this friend of mine started working in an arcade located in a supermarket in the city, and we would always stop by before or after college (I was studying Journalism at the time, but unfortunately, for financial reasons, I had to drop out after two years) to play Street Fighter Alpha and The King of Fighters with the “arcade coins” we got from my friend. And as if that wasn’t enough, around the same time, a girl, friend of mine, started working at a famous arcade in the downtown, called Rex, and it became a tradition for us to go there early on Friday and Saturday evenings to play a bit and drink a few beers – all for free, as always, since she had a way of cheating the daily sales sheet – before going out to “partying” around the city. Rex became a meeting place for friends to get together before going out to a bar, show or meeting at someone’s house.

And so was the beginning of my journey in the video game world. My favorite games? Hard question. But it’s impossible not to think of the wonderful Super Mario World (1990) and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (1991), both very beautiful, in pixel art, with a great soundtrack, released for the Super NES, directed by Takashi Tezuka and produced by Shigeru Miyamoto. The first had incredible gameplay, a great variety of movements and a total of no less than 96 levels (with exquisite level design), many of them secret, and was part of the fun to find them; and the second featured a huge map for the time, with fun missions of balanced difficulty and a narrative that was perhaps the game’s greatest charm. I play them again and again and have just as much fun as I did 30 years ago. Among the recent games that excited me the most were: Ico (2001), the entire InFamous  series (2009, 2011, 2014), Skate 3 (2010), Life is Strange (2015), Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End (2016), Mafia I (2002) and III (2016), Grand Theft Auto V (2013) and Marvel’s Spider Man (2018), as well as the indies To the Moon (2011, quite moving), Journey (2012), Fez (2012), Papo & Yo (2012), Hotline Miami (2012, with an incredible soundtrack!), Guacamelee (2013), Olliolli (2014), BroForce (2014, one of the most fun games of all time!), Graveyard Keeper (2018, I laughed out loud at the crazy story), Crossing Souls (2018), Shakedown: Hawaii (2019), Blasphemous (2019) and Huntdown (2020).

All this nostalgia combined with my curiosity and my passions for narratives and music led me to try to understand games from another angle: design and development. I’ve been involved with the fascinating and complex area of design and game development for a long time. At first, I decided to approach and explore this world of assets (any graphic, sound, textual or code element that makes up a game) because of my ability with texts.

Since my childhood, I’ve been passionate about reading and writing. In my early teens, I met the fanzines [1]. I was enthusiastic about that amount of information that couldn’t be found anywhere else (at the time, the internet didn’t exist, at least not in Brazil, and not in the way we know it today), and so I decided to edit my own zine [2], because of my aforementioned closeness to extreme metal (music has always been omnipresent in my life, both in my family – since my mother, sister and grandfather listened to a lot of music – and in my social circles, since my friendships used to form because of my closeness to music). From then on, my involvement with writing only increased. Faced with the new enthusiasms that arose in my life (music genres, sociopolitical views, counterculture, literature, comics, games), I edited other zines, created my own blogs, studied for a degree in Literature, started working professionally as a copywriter in advertising agencies (a job that I hated), wrote for many websites and magazines, did a postgraduate degree in Creative Writing, even won some small literary prizes and even taught short story writing and screenwriting courses. And it was precisely my interest in screenwriting that led me to game development.

My interest in games came about around the same time as my love for reading. I was always surrounded by comic books and books from the Vagalume Collection (a collection of children’s literature books very famous here in Brazil) when my father came home with an Atari, and since then I’ve played on practically every console, as I mentioned above.

The sum of all this sparked my interest in game development after about 25 years. At first, because of my familiarity with reading, writing, narrative, and storytelling, I wanted to be a video game scriptwriter. With the important support of my wife – who was my fiancée at the time – I took courses and studied the subject. Then I delved into game design – and not just electronic games, since I was heavily involved with board games, card games, dice games and wargames [3]. As a result, I ended up coming across the area of programming, and I got excited. It was like playing god, with the possibility of creating digital worlds with my fingertips. So off I went to study programming. I also studied level design, a bit of pixel art, 3D modeling, Twine, Construct 2 and 3, RPG Maker, Unity… Unfortunately, and for several reasons that don’t fit here, most of my games were nothing more than prototypes. But all that experience was worthwhile. And so much!

At a certain point, I came across an area of game development that had never caught my attention before: game audio – which is curious, since, along with reading/writing and video games, I’ve always been practically obsessed with music. I think I could count on my fingers the days I haven’t listened to music in my life. And even so, it took me a long time to start studying and playing an instrument – the “excuse” I give myself to this was the lack of money to buy an electric guitar and take lessons, but fortunately I managed to remedy this flaw. The fact is, it was because of rock music – by far the most popular genre of my youth, perhaps even today, and probably the most important musical genre of the 20th century, due to its aesthetic and sociocultural characteristics (RENTFROW; GOLDBERG; LEVITIN, 2011) – that I got to know fanzines. It was also because of rock that I met many writers of whom I became a fan [4]. Rock music led me to many friendships that have lasted for decades. And it’s also because of rock that I’ve met so many musical genres that make my life so much better: blues, jazz, soul, funk, ska, reggae, rap, electronic music… It’s all interconnected to me. One thing led to another. My taste for music (which probably comes from my mother and which I am invariably passing on to my daughter, who always plays with her instruments) merged with my interest in reading (comics, literature and non-fiction), and this fertile mix has made me see games from a differentiated perspective, with special attention paid to soundtracks and narratives, and not just to graphics and gameplay, as usual with most people.

When game audio came up in one of the many game design and development courses I took, I already played a bit of acoustic guitar – finally, at the age of 34, in 2012, I decided that I couldn’t let life go by without learning to play an instrument and compose music, and so I enrolled in the popular guitar, music theory and singing courses at Emesp Tom Jobim, a traditional music conservatory in São Paulo, my hometown, where I lived again from 2008 to 2016. At first, as I didn’t play the guitar very well (and still don't play to this day), I didn’t pay enough attention to game audio, as I was fascinated by programming and didn’t feel up to composing music. However, I’ve never had much interest in mathematics – although I’ve always been passionate about computing – and gradually I came to understand that programming might not be my “aptitude” and that I should start considering new possibilities. And when I took a closer look at music composing and sound effects design for games, a kind of “eureka” happened, probably because interactive audio already had a strong connection with my aesthetic predilection.

I consulted my library about game development – which by then already had several titles because of my consolidated interest in design and game development – and read everything related to audio. My interest only grew. After all, as game designers and scholars make very clear, audio is a fundamental part of this audiovisual medium, not just for aesthetics, but as a form of communication, in creating unique experiences for the much sought-after immersion.

After readings, I took specific courses on game audio and studied a lot, not only the use of a DAW [5], but also the fundamentals of audio in game design, music theory, composition, music production (planning, recording, editing, mixing, and mastering), sound design (creating sound effects and ambiences), home studio equipment, foley, workflow, plugins, middleware for audio programming etc. And the learning never stops. There’s always a need to learn something new about computer technology, design and game development, music composition, guitar techniques, music production, software, equipment. Currently, for example, I’m studying the neuroscience of music in order to better understand the cognitive processes related to sound communication in games and also how music modulates and evokes emotions, facilitates the synchronization of movements and moods and promotes social cohesion and a sense of identity – which, in the latter case, relates to another passion of mine: music genres.

After taking my first steps in the field of game audio and being able to set up a portfolio, I decided to go further. That’s when I decided to take a postgraduate course to research the subject in depth. After a lot of thought, I opted for the Master’s in Music at Unicamp’s Institute of Arts. And after completing it with the defense of my dissertation, entitled An interdisciplinary study of sound communication in narrative games, I am currently attending a PhD in Music at the same institution, this time with a project more focused on electric guitar and rock music, whose title is The construction of meaning in rock subgenres based on the sonority of the electric guitar. I’ve taken part in congresses, published a lot of papers in academic journals and conference proceedings, I’m part of three research groups, I'm always taking new courses, readings are constant, as is production (both academic and authorial), I’m currently a professor in a Cinema and Audiovisual undergraduate course, and the learning never stops. Everything always involves music, games, cinema/audiovisual and narrative.

Today, I'm sure I made the right choices.