In the summer of 2001, Ecuador found itself gripped by soccer fever.
With each match, including a 1-0 victory over the Brazilian giant, residents still reeling from a financial crisis were lifted out of their funk, carried along on a country-consuming wave of hope as the men’s national team sought to qualify for the World Cup for the first time.
That period — one filled with the palpable excitement that Ecuador was set to arrive on the world stage (which it duly did) — looms large in the imagination of Julián Cordero.
He was only 4 in 2001 yet has “idealized” the time, theorizing that its horizon-shifting power was formative for his generation. So Cordero set out to make a video game about it from the perspective of a child in Quito, Ecuador’s mountainous capital.
His game, Despelote, is a reconstructive voyage into this halcyon period, a narrative adventure that gives players not gun battles or dragon-slaying quests but more humdrum activities: skipping class, causing mischief and, naturally, kicking a soccer ball about in the park for hours on end.
You play as a lightly fictionalized version of a young Cordero, having to orient the first-person camera upward to look at everything. Its 3-D world is made from photographs of actual neighborhoods in Quito, rendered in a dreamy impressionistic style that evokes Cordero’s own act of remembering. The bustling, excitable sounds that waft through these settings are field recordings.
Despelote, which is being released for the Xbox Series X|S, PC and PlayStation consoles this week, is a striking hybrid: video game, autofiction and documentary all at once. It was born from Cordero’s own philosophical conviction that video games are “obsessed with creating worlds” at the expense of actually “capturing our own.”
