Ação Games Magazine (1991)
Pioneering Multi-Platform Brazilian Video Game Periodical Spanning Four Console Generations
Originating in late 1990 from three special gaming editions of A Semana em Ação and launching as an independent monthly in São Paulo in May 1991 under Editora Azul, Ação Games ran for 171 regular issues until January 2002. The periodical documented 8-bit through 128-bit console libraries, arcade fighting move lists, and reader correspondence across Portuguese-speaking South America prior to household broadband.
Spin-Off from A Semana em Ação and Editorial Multi-Platform Neutrality
At the turn of the 1990s, rapid sales of TecToy's licensed Sega Master System and Mega Drive alongside Gradiente's Phantom System and competing NES clones created a nationwide audience of console players in Brazil who lacked dedicated Portuguese-language print coverage. Testing newsstand demand in late 1990, São Paulo publisher Editora Azul—an affiliate associated with Grupo Abril—issued three special video game supplements under the banner of the general-interest magazine A Semana em Ação. Rapid sell-through prompted the launch of Ação Games Issue 1 as an autonomous periodical in May 1991. Whereas competing early-1990s Brazilian publications initially split along corporate licensing lines—with SuperGame focusing exclusively on Sega hardware and GamePower covering Nintendo platforms—Ação Games maintained editorial neutrality across competing ecosystems from its inception. Its newsrooms photographed screen captures directly from cathode-ray tube monitors using 35mm slide film to review Master System, NES/Famiclone, Mega Drive, Super NES, Game Boy, Game Gear, PC Engine, and SNK Neo Geo software side by side.
Rental-Shop Walkthroughs, Arcade Move Directories, and 171-Issue Archive
Throughout the 1990s, high import tariffs made original 16-bit and 32-bit cartridges prohibitively expensive for many Brazilian households, channeling daily play through neighborhood cartridge-rental shops (locadoras) and street-corner arcade parlors where Japanese or English-language releases circulated without translated instruction booklets. Ação Games addressed this linguistic and economic reality by dedicating substantial page counts to step-by-step Portuguese walkthroughs (detonados), password compendiums, Game Genie hexadecimal codes, and illustrated button-input tables for arcade fighting franchises such as Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, Fatal Fury, and The King of Fighters. Reader mail columns, classified cartridge-exchange boards, and international trade-show dispatches from the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), and Tokyo Game Show connected Brazilian players to global release calendars years before domestic residential internet adoption. Transitioning across ownership changes from Editora Azul and Editora Abril to Editora Símbolo while alternating between monthly and biweekly schedules during peak fifth-generation PlayStation and Nintendo 64 demand, Ação Games concluded its regular print run with Issue 171 in January 2002.