Brazilian Drug Dealer Before 4 launches today on Steam
Joeveno's bootleg-flavoured boomer shooter lands on Steam at €4.99 with a 10% launch discount, carrying more than 70,000 wishlists into launch day.
The game with the longest name on Steam launches today. Brazilian Drug Dealer Before 4 — in full, Brazilian Drug Dealer Before 4: Demons From the Portal to Hell I Opened Are Still in the Favela and Now I Have to Save Mamadas From Ronaldo — is a standalone expansion to Brazilian Drug Dealer 3 from developer Joeveno and publisher NoQuarter, and it costs €4.99 with 10% off for the first two weeks.
It is also a deliberate throwback: a fast, ultraviolent Brazilian old-school shooter built on id Tech 2, the engine behind the original Quake, and pitched as a tribute to the Brazilian mods, bootleg games and burned discs of the 2000s, to Brazilian music and to the band Mamadas. Steam lists Windows as the only platform.
What's actually going on
The premise picks up where the last one stopped. Having saved Mit Aia, Mackie Jackie and the Mamadas, you throw a party in heaven, only for the Mamadas to be kidnapped by a character called Ronaldo McDalest. You are sent to get them back, recover their Globoceta portal-opener car and sweep up the demons still loose across Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Salvador.
Movement is deliberately Quake-ish, with a dash and a double jump to keep you strafing clear of the dead, the demons and what the studio calls “other Brazilian possessed”. The trailer below is the developer's own.
A demo has been playable since 4 June, and Joeveno's Steam updates describe it as overwhelmingly positive, at 99% across more than 200 reviews, with the wishlist count past 70,000 before launch day. The review embargo on the full release lifted at 09:00 CET today, so verdicts will start landing across the next few hours.
Our opinion
The joke is in the title, but this is one of the rare cases where an indie marketing bit has done real work: 70,000 wishlists for a €4.99 game running on a 1997 engine, from a small team led by a musician and content creator in Rio whose last release became a cult favourite. Joeveno is also going against the industry's direction of travel by putting Brazilian Drug Dealer 3 back on physical discs, installer and all, with the same promised for this one — a louder statement about game preservation than most publishers manage in a keynote.
The catch is the platform list. Windows only, no Mac or Linux build at launch, and the whole thing is pitched at people who already love the crude polygons and relentless violence of a 1997 shooter. For everyone in that crowd, €4.99 is a rounding error next to the price of a modern blockbuster, and the absurdity is the point rather than a warning label.