A Spanish-language version of this article was originally published on Press Over, and there are also versions in both languages inside the Ludoparodies launcher. All versions are slightly different in completely unimportant ways, to best fit their different contexts.Ludoparodies is a collection of 8 games that I made and released between 2016 and 2024. Each one parodies a specific Argentine game I thought it was important to homage and/or disrespect.
Some of the original games were made by friends, others in part by me, and others by people that I didn’t know, or that I don’t know still. Some were small jam experiments, and others were so big and popular that the local community couldn’t seem to talk about anything else for months. The only thing they have in common is their nationality and the fact that most people today don’t remember them at all, because the history of Argentine games is written in sand.
The parodies I made are going to remain free on the internet, but now they’re also going to be available in this prettier package (with cover art and UI by the wonderful Judith Asilos), with a few bug fixes and texts like this one that try to offer additional info, put them in context, and somewhat protect that history from the waves of time.
Some of the games
Okhlos (Coffee Powered Machine, 2016) is one of our big Argentine gamedev success stories, published by Devolver, about an angry mob in Ancient Greece led by outraged philosophers, that rebels against the gods and takes Mount Olympus by storm. My version, Pochokhlos (2017), is about a popcorn flake that swears revenge against the human who ate its family.
(In most but not all of Argentina, popcorn is called “pochoclo”.)
Right Turn (2017) is a parody of Turn Right (AVIX, 2017) but where in addition to turning right physically, the game revolves around the ideological right: an annoying capitalist shows up and steals a surplus (percentage) of the value (little coins) you create (collect) throughout the level. I’ve been told the ending is particularly good. It’s something of a meta-parody as well, because part of the joke when I released it was that back then a bunch of shameless Turn Right knockoffs were turning up on the Play Store.
Element: Space (Sixth Vowel, February 14th 2019) is a 3D turn-based combat game with an epic sci fi story and a very troubled development, while Element: Date (also February 14th 2019 but much more appropriately) is a Tinder-like where you can hook up with characters from the original game, and its development story is just that Alli, another writer from the original game, and I, thought it’d be funny to put them in romantic dates to take a break from the solemnity of their official conversations.
Just like the first demo of Tenebris Somnia (Saibot Studios, still in development), my parody Penumbris Doña: The Woman in the Dark (2024) is a pixelated graphic adventure with a live-action cutscene, about a woman who goes to her ex-boyfriend’s apartment after an unsettling dream. The difference is my version is set in my actual, real apartment, it revolves around preparing a mate, it has a more clownish ending, and the live-action sequence was recorded on a cellphone.
(Mate, roughly MAH-tay, is a traditional South American infusion.)
The parody’s protagonist and actress for the cutscene is my real-life ex-girlfriend, Mer Grazzini, multi-talented gamedev and artist.
Ludoparodies: Origins
Now then, what possessed me to start making game parodies? The truth is that I make parodies and homages to anything and everything I consume since I can remember, and I just never really stopped.
I’m sure many people can say the same, but here’s my version: ever since I was a kid I changed the lyrics to the songs I listened to, I drew my own Medabots, I designed my own Sonic levels in continuous form paper, I made comics based on the shows I watched, where each character was called like a pun based on the original character’s name.
I still remember circulating those Rivadavia notebooks among my primary school friends whenever I finished drawing a new chapter of “Chuky-Oh!” or “Beyblade (David’s Version)”. I remember when Ms Marisa overheard me singing my rude version of Corazón by Los Auténticos Decadentes, and took me to sing it to the Music Teacher, who grabbed his guitar and played the chords for me. And I also remember 4last week, when the channel Gelatina played my version of Para no verte más by La Mosca Tsé-Tsé with the lyrics changed to make fun of Javier Milei’s somewhat pathetic decree to change the Kirchner Cultural Center’s name.
Argentina has a long history with parody, from the satirical humor of Caras y Caretas (an originally Uruguayan publication, to my surprise) to the changed lyrics of football chants, demonstration songs, Videomatch, and Todo × 2$. Rather than ask why I make parody games, sometimes I wonder how I didn’t start any sooner, but then I remember my first game (Úrquel, the black dragon, 2012) was already a joke on the typical medieval fantasy hero, and my second game (Eioioio, 2012) was already a homage to one of the most popular stories in Argentine pop culture.
So I can’t act all surprised when one day in 2015 I made a joke to a friend about something that could happen in his game My Little Humanity (Santiago Franzani, canceled (the game, not my friend)), and later I thought it was the most normal thing in the world to start programming an alternative version where exactly that happened. I didn’t know it, but that’s when Ludoparodies was being born.
Ludoparodies: Now It’s Personal
I’m going to share a pet hypothesis of mine on the nature of parodies, which like any good hypothesis will either be super obvious or super false, you decide. It goes like this: parodying is an act of love.
And I’ll justify it with a generalization, which is even worse, but here it goes: making art is taking a piece of the real world, interpreting it though our own experience, and giving it back to the world as a representation of our own unique perspective, but in which the audience can still recognize traces of the universal experience that inspired it.
Parodying, then, is admitting that there are works of art which are already pieces of our world, and therefore that we can take them, interpret them, and give them back to the world in a different shape and with our own perspective, just like we’d do with any other aspect of our life.
I don’t know which experiences the Videogamo guys have had to end up creating DOBOTONE, for example, but the point is they created it, took it to parties and events, I went to many of those parties and events, I played it, and DOBOTONE thus became one of my life’s experiences, which I then took to create my own version.
“We have to make sure”
To conclude, I’d like to explain why I care so much, not only about the parodies I made, but also about this compilation project that tries to preserve some of my history and the history of all those other games that inspired me.
The videogame industry is not very good at talent retention, therefore it has a pretty weak memory, which as an Argentinean never ceases to worry me. I’m barely over 30, and I’m already noticing how the big issues that once dominated the discourse in our spaces for months, the ones that seemed like they’d be with us forever, aren’t even a distant recollection by now.
Making this compilation that spans these last 8 years of my life made me visit different points in my past and got me all nostalgic for the most ridiculous things. I see new, extremely young faces becoming this community’s new protagonists, who never in their life heard about ludonarrative dissonance, Gamergate, narratology vs. ludology, or The Hum (remember The Hum?)
The other day, at the FIJA after party, I was talking to a former student of mine and I introduced Tembac to him, already outraged at how kids these days in the community don’t know who Tembac is. I expressed these worries of mine to them both, my fear that the community forgets its best moments and repeats its worst by failing to remember them, and then Tembac said something I still can’t get out of my head: “That’s why we have to make sure nobody forgets Jere.” We spent the next half hour of the party telling my poor ex student who was Jeremías Babini and all the amazing things he had done.
In the best of cases, parodying a work of art is telling its authors, “What you did made its way into my life and now it’s a part of me forever”. That’s where I find the motivation to sit and fix 8 year old bugs to compile my “ludoparodies”. The culture I draw from to create is Marvel, A24, Braid, Martel, Borges, Mario, Beatles, Drexler, Portal, sure, but it’s also that Argentine action puzzle that people talked so much about in 2014 and now it doesn’t even show up on the Play Store, or that game that my friend who now lives in Berlin made for a jam and now it barely even works because the gameplay depended on its Twitter integration (remember Twitter?).
We Argentine game devs need to dare more to be inspired by each other as much as we are by other media and by other countries. After all, games are culture, and our national games are national culture. That’s why we have to make sure we respect them as such, even if it means we need to disrespect them.