There have been countless videogames about sports over the decades, but can you think of any about sports as a concept? Not about recreating a specific sport like baseball or football, but about the larger cultural context in which sports exist, and the role they play in society? I’m asking because, hey, I can’t, and I’ve been playing these videogame things since they could only deliver the vaguest, most abstract approximation of any real-life sport. Or I should say I couldn’t, not until the last week or so—not until I played Despelote.
Despelote, a short new work by the Ecuadorian developers Julián Cordero and Sebastián Valbuena, is a game about football (or what Americans still generally call soccer). It’s not a football game, though. It does include a playable recreation of a ‘90s-style football videogame, but you won’t spend much time playing it. Despelote isn’t interested in football as a sport but as a cultural touchstone, as something that brings people, communities, and entire countries together, and how our shared experiences with sports, and our memories of them, continue to impact us throughout our lives.
To accomplish this Cordero and Valbuena focus on a pivotal year for Ecuador’s national football team. Some of Cordero’s earliest memories involve Ecuador qualifying for its first World Cup in 2001. Their run to the 2002 games takes up most of the foreground in Despelote, as a football-obsessed 8-year-old Julián turns anything he can get his feet on into a makeshift soccer ball. He and his friends kick around glass bottles, VHS tapes, even actual balls when they can get one, and when they aren’t doing that or playing Tino Tini’s Soccer ‘99 they’re dreaming about football in geography class. On game days, when Ecuador’s facing a South American rival with a World Cup slot in the balance, every TV and radio in town is tuned into the game; it becomes a point of consternation within Julián’s family when one game coincides with a wedding. Other stories about Ecuador and its culture are able to penetrate Julián’s consciousness—there’s a banking crisis related to the country adopting the American dollar as its currency, leading to financial instability and protests, and Ecuador’s struggles to fund and support its own arts and culture is a constant undercurrent in the form of conversations between Julián’s parents, who in real life are an acclaimed director and producer of films—but football is always number one, encompassing everything else happening in Julián’s world. The sound of the protests is identical to the sound of football fans massing on game day, each one a distant, monolithic roar echoing from somewhere else in town, unseen but always heard.
For those crowds, Ecuador’s unlikely run to the World Cup isn’t just a source of pride, but a unifier, and a boost to the country’s sense of national identity at a time of turmoil. Despelote taps into how sports can forge instant bonds between strangers—how if you see somebody wearing your team’s colors, whether it’s the Georgia Bulldogs or Atlanta’s pro teams for me, or the Ecuadorian national team for Julián and his friends and family, you know you have a shared passion and something you can connect over. And given the explicitly nationalistic nature of the World Cup, Despelote looks at a particularly powerful version of this phenomenon—one that Americans like me, spoiled by our routine Olympics dominance and marked by a general lack of passion for any other kind of international sports, can’t fully understand or relate to. (Really, I think the closest American sports gets to the passion of international soccer is college football, but I’m a Southerner who went to an SEC school, so of course I’m going to think that; it’s hard to imagine how much stronger and more personal that kind of loyalty would feel if it wasn’t to some bureaucratic institution I went into debt in order to stay drunk at for four years, but the land I and all my loved ones come from.)
Here’s a brief, personal aside about the emotions sports can stir in somebody. Early in DespeloteCordero talks about the national pride Ecuador felt when Jefferson Pérez won the country’s first two Olympic medals during the 1996 games in Atlanta. Footage from Pérez’s gold medal-winning race appears on screen, fuzzy and distorted and in yellow monochrome. Even though I’d never heard of Pérez before and didn’t even know power walking was an Olympic sport, I got excited because I knew I was watching video shot in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Stadium, which was turned into Turner Field, the Atlanta Braves stadium I visited many times before that team abandoned it far too early. My hometown has absolutely nothing to do with Cordero’s story or Despelote as a whole, and yet I felt a little bit of a thrill knowing it brushes up against both, even in such a trivial, insignificant way.
Despelote’s snapshot of Ecuador’s World Cup run is filtered entirely through Julián’s perspective, which gives it both a deeper emotional resonance and the justification to use a purposefully fuzzy and abstract visual aesthetic. Despelote’s striking style puts flat, all-white, paper cutout-style human figures against muted backdrops of black and grey tinted with a single color. These are Julián’s memories, after all, more than two decades later, and things aren’t exact. The people are clear, but the spaces—his family’s apartment, his schoolroom, Quito’s La Carolina Park—aren’t entirely there. Like the dull roar of the crowd, it’s all indistinct, flattened, the words on the tip of Julián’s tongue but just barely eluding him.
This focus on memory drives Despelote’s surprisingly bittersweet ending. Throughout the game there are brief, jarring flash forwards to a teenaged Julián in different situations—at a soccer camp, struggling to find friends at a party, visiting his mom in a cafe that used to be the family’s video rental store. The real Cordero eventually admits some of the liberties Despelote takes with the facts; the game’s version of Julián is four years older than the real one, for instance, and his family didn’t live close enough to La Carolina for him to play in it every day as he does in the game. He reveals that La Carolina’s reputation today is so rough that his team hired a security guard to protect them while they were gathering information for Despelote. The game even discards its distinctive fuzzy visuals for a short moment, dropping Julián into a massively deformed 3D approximation of the park, complete with intentional glitches where you can fall through the bottom of the screen and see the whole park map from above as you plummet back down to it. (It’s a short but entirely successful critique of “realism” in games, underlining how Despelote’s impressionistic style works far better.)
But that bittersweet finale comes not from a metatextual critique of game design but a simple, effective recreation of a memory—whether it’s a real one or not—and the inherent sense of loss that accompanies growing up. Julián, now a teenager, meets up with two of his friends to idly kick a ball around La Carolina at night. They talk about teenage things—parties, school, who got drunk, who’s dating who—as you flick the right joystick on your controller to kick the ball back and forth. It’s impossible to not feel instantly nostalgic for 2001—not for the Ecuadorian team’s World Cup chase, but for the sense of wonder and adventure with which 8-year-old Julián explored his neighborhood. Eventually the camera shifts to the first-person perspective of the ball itself, as it’s kicked throughout La Carolina and the surrounding neighborhood, giving us a final look at the characters and community we’ve spent two hours with, catching stray snippets of their conversation as a football unites them all, weaving an invisible strand between them.
Despelote makes no grand pronouncements. It’s averse to big gestures, precious sentimentality, and emotional manipulation. Cordero delivers his sparse narration with a laidback monotone. It might be a short game but it’s consistently unhurried—a patient, long exposure snapshot of a time and a place that might be faded by memory, but is only stronger and more evocative because of it. And it knows at its core one of the most important things about being a sports fan: when it’s over you move on. Whether it’s a game, a season, a career, you don’t get too hung up over it. You hold on to the successes and let the failures slide. You feel the moment as vibrantly and powerfully as you can, exulting in success or commiserating in defeat, hugging your loved ones and high-fiving strangers, and then let it fade. There’s always another match, another game, and there will always be sports, even if your team doesn’t always qualify for the World Cup. There’s more to life than sports, obviously, but sports can be an enriching, entertaining part of life, and Despelote is the first videogame to really explore that. Hopefully it won’t be the last.
Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.
