Osorio, 24, designs mobile apps, and he’s also a long-time gamer. The monster, at least five times bigger than Quico, tumbled closely behind. On the screen, the boy, Quico, ran through a colorful favela in Brazil. I met up with Osorio at his home near San Francisco and watched as he maneuvered through Papo & Yo. It’s a tension that resonates with fans of the game, like Vince Osorio. It’s the premise behind Papo & Yo, where the main character - a boy named Quico - tries to survive a monster’s destructive behavior. But then, when I put the control down, I came back to my reality and said that game didn't give me any clue whatsoever for how to cope with an alcoholic father.” “It was really terrible because I was just waiting for the electric garage door to open to start figuring what I'm going to do, where I’m going to hide.”Ĭaballero took refuge in games like Mario Brothers. “I remember that I'd spend days and nights trying to defeat Bowser, who was the evil guy. “It was really, really hard to go to sleep after 8 o'clock if my father hadn't arrived home… because that means that he was drinking,” says Caballero. Caballero’s family was wealthy, pretty walled off from the violence.īut Caballero faced another type of threat at home. He grew up in the 1980s in Bogotá, when the capital city was a battleground for drug cartels.
To understand how Papo & Yo works, let’s start with Caballero’s childhood. “I want to do a game that would have served me when I was a kid,” says Caballero. It’s called Papo & Yo, or “Dad and I” in Spanish. So Caballero quit his job at a major game developer and launched Minority Media, a company based in Montreal that’s focused less on shoot-em-up games and more on offering players something a bit more meaningful, like the game Caballero created. You just have to figure out how to use the skills you have with this new medium and tell it,’” says Caballero.Īt that moment, he realized that he could “do this… take my suffering and my hurt and transform it into something positive for others.” “Nilo looked at me and said, ‘Look Vander, don't take this the wrong way, but your story has been told a thousand times. He spoke to his mentor, Nilo Rodis, who worked on the visual effects for the original Star Trek Trilogy. A central figure was his father - an alcoholic. Game designer Vander Caballero had an idea for a video game based on his childhood in Colombia.
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