In 1983, Almodóvar premiered in darkness (the one in which Carmen Maura hides with some hallucinated nuns after her boyfriend dies of an overdose), Alaska and Dinarama triumphed with bloody Pearls and Lola Flores pronounced the famous phrase «If you love me, leave »At the wedding of his daughter Lolita. Spain had not yet entered the European Economic Community. And in Badajoz the first Spanish video game began to take shape: La flea, designed by Paco & Paco . It was first launched in the United Kingdom and quickly placed number 1 in sales. In Spain there was still not enough computer park - we talked about the Spectrum - to pay it off and it took a few more months.
A garage in Silicon Valley is the foundational scenario of computer mythology in the United States. But the legend of the video game made in Spain begins, against all odds, in Extremadura with two Pacos. «We had been studying physical simulation in computers for a while. Doing this in Spain in the late 70s was not very common and less so in a land like Extremadura, which at that time everyone imagined full of Holy Innocents, ”explains Paco Portalo, who graduated in the first Industrial Engineering promotion of the University of Extremadura, where today he collaborates with a research group in Perception and Intelligent Sensory Systems.
The flea was a milestone of Spanish software and is claimed in the origins of the video game in the Gameplay exhibition of the Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB), where you can play the original version. Although the argument seems surreal (it is nothing more than that of an Italian plumber rescuing a princess from Donkey Kong), it was a revolution in the sector: it introduced a narrative at the beginning of the game. Actually, it took advantage of the minutes it took for the Spectrum to load. «The concept to define what we wanted to do was that of interactive video counting. For us, the video game had to be more than just pressing buttons, it had to tell video stories, like now, ”says Paco Portalo. His story: an alien flea goes in a spaceship and receives a sign of life from a strange planet; sends an exploration probe and, on landing, falls into a cave from which it has to escape while chased by a yellow pterodactyl. Yes, a pterodactyl and a flea ...
How did the unusual character of a flea appear? From a jumping asterisk or, if preferred, the materialization of Newton's universal gravitation laws , the final career of Paco Portalo. «I worked the simulation of the parabolic shot with the ancient microcomputer ZX81. Paco Suarez saw on the screen the movement of an asterisk and thought that this could be a game. It was a tiny bug hitting boats: 'a flea', we said ».
In October 1983, it was put up for sale in the United Kingdom and quickly placed at number 1. In Spain, we would have to wait until Christmas because there were not enough home computers : we had to wait for the Spectrum launch campaign to be published The flea. To understand the context, Portalo pulls figures: in the late 1970s there were just over 10,000 computers in Spain, mainly in the hands of companies, banks and institutions, while in the early 1990s, the park had risen to two million equipment, especially domestic.
«The American video game was in crisis. Atari was having a bad time . And in Europe, the United Kingdom, took the lead in the production of video games, both for quality and quantity. In Spain we join that Golden Age. Video games were a paradigm of innovation, ”says Portalo, who published the Bugaboo book in 2009 , a milestone in the history of Spanish software. A milestone that gives name and image to the National Video Game Awards, released in 2010: if Goya is the statuette of the cinema, the Flea (thus, in capital letters) is that of video games.
'Like Walt Disney on an 8-bit computer'
The two Pacos were "of the same basca," recalls Portalo, two modern and hippies from Extremadura who disagree with the system. And they went to Madrid to work at the pioneer Indescomp company, to which they had sent a demo of their jumping star. During the summer of 83 they rented a house at the end of Alcalá street and dedicated themselves to work on the 49 kBytes video game for an XS Spectrum, which had practically not been released.
In October, Bugaloo (The Flea) appeared in the United Kingdom and was an immediate success, praised by critics and number 1 in sales. What did that 'bugaloo-flea' have? Spectacular graphics for the time, with hyperintense colors and an almost pop minimalist aesthetic . «The graphics were very surprising. I still remember a criticism that said: 'It's like Walt Disney taken to an 8-bit computer,' ”says Portalo, who introduced a new gameplay option: the press time of a button determined the power of the flea's jump. In addition, it did not change the screen, but instead slid up-down or right-left depending on the movement of the flea.
Few later, from the studies of Indescomp would leave Fred , another mythical game. Both are part of the fund of the National Library of Spain, which will recover Spanish video games as part of our heritage.
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