During my research for the Ronaldinho
Soccer 64 video, I purposely didn't look
for other people's videos on the subject.
However, this morning I came to look at
said videos and, well, there are none. 
There aren't really many review videos out
there. Today we're going to try and
remedy this problem at least a little bit
by delving deeper into the
Ronaldinho 64 rabbit hole. Here is the
infamous Ronaldinho 64 splash screen,
amateurishly done, mainly because of the
blurry bits around Ronnie and, I don't
know, he's starting to fade into the
background. There you can see there is a
fart cloud. Here we have Kevin Ames's
Micro-64.com write-up on the game. He
claims it's (probably) the strangest N64 game ever.
Now this is just one presentation of the
Ronaldinho hack because I'm sure there
were a few generations of the cart.
Looking a little bit worn and clearly
printed off with a printer and glued
on by hand, possibly even cut around
with a pair of scissors. This is the
pinnacle of bootleg video games. This is
peak WordArt, and something that people
might look at and say this should be a
meme. Look at this! As much as I would
like to say that this image right here
is the reason Ronaldinho 64 is a meme, it
isn't. That dubious honour goes to the
commentator on this game.
Hahahaha, Ronadlinho Sock-sairrrr!
Golaco go- golaco, golaco!
Incredible djogada! (?)
Lateral, Coréia.
Twin Eagles Group are responsible for
this bootleg cart. TEG were formed in 1989
by a bunch of Commodore 64 hackers 
and BBS enthusiasts.
They ran BBS's in Peru back in the late
80s. However, in the 90s they moved
on to hacking video games. Here is one of
them for the SNES: Campeonato
Brasileiro. I'm sorry I can't do the
accents. Yes, in Peru, Lobsang Alvites is
an absolute legend of the gaming industry.
And here we have an article from
vice.com. This translation says that
Lobsang, also known as Mr Byte, was a
'beast' of the Commodore 64. The Twin
Eagles Group made modifications to
existing video games, 'hacks', and so the
ISS teams became clubs from countries in
South America, and the players actually
had real names. So for people in South
America it was possible to play with
localised teams, which as you can imagine
was an absolute boon for TEG and they
absolutely did corner the market.
An interesting titbit here. Do you know, for
example, who is the narrator that was
immortalized by the shouts 'Graaande Djogada'
and 'Fooorte Bomba'? It was the
same guy who managed the cartridge sales for TEG. 
The hacked games were mainly for
the SNES and Playstation, and
there was one for the N64: Ronaldinho
Soccer. In hindsight they just gloss over
stuff like this but in actuality the
hacking of Nintendo 64 cartridges was
really quite rare, especially for the
time. In Europe and North America, if you
did something like Ronaldinho 64 you
would have been sued to oblivion, but in
South America things were a bit more
relaxed. Okay, so here is an excellent
article on polygon.com which I do
recommend you go and read. The daily
routine of the group was to receive
games from other countries (mostly Europe),
crack them and send them to local stores
in Lima or sell them through ads in the
classified section of the newspaper. And
through this they became massively
famous. The first copyright law in Peru
was passed in 1995 after TEG had been
cracking games for the C64 for several
years. This change led to increased
police activity and raids on software
pirates, and Mr Byte returned to making
original games.
"Get out of here, this is MY game!"
So exactly how rare is the Ronaldinho 64
cartridge? As it happens, quite rare
indeed. Here is a presentation by Mike
Ryan and John McMaster who talked about
reverse engineering and cloning a 20
year old copy-protection chip for the N64.
So here's an actual game cartridge.
This is a legitimate one, so the chip on
the left is the lockout chip. It looks
exactly the same, they're made by Sharp.
It's just the more modern iteration I
suppose. Now I should say, unlike the
older Nintendo stuff, instead of having
very widespread pirate chips, this pirate
game is actually very very very rare. If
you actually have one of these and
you're willing to donate in the name of
science we would really like to see
what's inside those. There's a very
small number of pirate games made in
Hong Kong that have this chip and we 
have very little information about the
history of this pirate and its CIC so
again please let us know if you have any
leads on these. This is NESWorld.com
which talks about N64 pirate cartridges.
There are only nine entries in this list
currently. That's not say there are only
nine pirate cartridges out there, but we
only have nine in this list. And we can
see that Ronaldinho Soccer is one of
them. Interestingly it has an internal CIC,
a pirate CIC, and works just like a
normal cart, which means you can stick it
in your, I think North (South?) American N64,
and it'll work without a converter
whereas this other stuff like, for
example, the pirated version of ISS64
requires something like the N64 Passport.
Here's a picture of the Passport
courtesy Kevin Ames, and that's how we
got his game to run. As we can see we've
got the Ronaldinho cart here,
and on the back a
normal, I guess North American cartridge.
Kevin Ames also claims that TEG made
these games for a 'quick buck', but he
might not be right in that assumption.
Did TEG make money on these games? They
state that they didn't, at least not for
their cracked games. They did some
"legitimate" games and
sold them, but they also, I'm guessing,
sold stuff like Ronaldinho 64.
And there's plenty of evidence out there
that that particular Ronaldinho 64
variation wasn't the only one. For
example, here's a cartridge box that's
obviously been designed... quite well.
They've moved on from WordArt. Does that
say 'seal of approval'?
They've stolen the seal of approval from
Nintendo, or maybe they've made up their
own version. You can see the sticky tape
on the right there. Now, this box
proudly claims that this version is in
Portuguese. The text at the bottom here
says 'with teams from the First Division'
so 'with teams from the Brazilian First
Division', we can assume. Here is the cart
itself, looking a little bit dog-eared.
Maybe printed on slightly better
quality paper than the previous cart we
saw and this seems to confirm that yeah,
this version of the game, which I don't
think we have a ROM dumped for, had teams
from the Brazilian First Division. That, I
assume, is the Brazilian localisation, and
I don't think we've seen footage of that
yet. I would love to see that surface - if
anybody out there viewing this has
access to that, please do link me to it
or upload it. In my video I claimed that
there never was a Ronaldinho 64 1.1
but maybe *this* is.
And quite possibly there was a 1.2 and a
1.3. There's no trace of this on the TEG
website but they could exist, who knows?
TEG would have these underground copy
parties where they would meet up and
distribute software so maybe they did
special versions of the Ronaldinho
cartridge for those events. So here's
another interesting cart. We have another
sticker and it's pasted over the top
of an existing sticker of a previous
hack, I would assume. But yeah, that's another
variation that exists out there. And here
we actually have a different Ronaldinho.
This is probably a good time for me
to explain the whole Ronaldinho
confusion. Kevin Ames brings it up in
his Micro-64 article: "The guy on the
front of the original Ronaldinho 64 is
not Ronaldinho, it's actually Ronaldo."
However, this was released in 1998, and
back then Ronaldo used to be known as
Ronaldinho. Ronaldinho means 'Little
Ronaldo', and there already was another
Ronaldo who they would call 'Ronaldao'
or 'Big Ronaldo' or something like
that. However, later on, *Ronaldinho* came to
prominence - a different dude altogether.
History sorts Ronaldinho and Ronaldo
into their own separate boxes, but back
then I guess their namings were fluid
and by the time this cartridge came out
there was a new Ronaldinho and he was
the new star of the game. Oh here we go,
it seems that the last picture we saw
with Ronaldinho on the front is a
reproduction cart courtesy Vintex64, and
here's the proof.
this one says Vintex64.com on the back.
And before we wrap up I thought I would
include a couple of things that I found
on the forums, not necessarily reliable
sources but quite interesting to read
nonetheless. Here's a discussion from
2019 about modded N64 games wrecking
your console. This dude, Odin Games, says:
"I had three pirate cartridges and the only
one I bought is an ISS 64 hack called
Ronaldinho 64, and it works without an
adapter." He talks about obtaining 8
more carts from a dude who couldn't sell
them because buyers were afraid of
breaking their consoles. This guy says
that pirate cartridges can "burn your
console", it did with his. He had several
pirates like Turok, Cruisin' USA, ISS64
and his console burned, so he took it
back to the store and they replaced it
with a new device. So that's interesting
to learn, but we can't say that that was
specifically due to Ronaldinho 64. And
that's all the information I've found up
to now. I'm sure a lot more is out there
and it would be interesting to speak to
Lobsang to see if he knows anything more
about this game. Indeed, I've only
scratched the surface of the history of
TEG: we haven't yet gone over how they
eventually folded, which is an
interesting story in itself
and has links to unsavoury organisations
in Peru, shall we say. So that might be
interesting to talk about in the future
but for now thank you for watching and
if you have any more info about
Ronaldinho 64, please let me know. Until next
time, sayonara.
Hahahaha, 
RONALDINHO SOCKSERRRR!
Cheers to KK 1 for the synthwave remix!
Look him up on YouTube.
