Wondernaut's Luiz Sampaio on breaking into games
Brendan Sinclair
Managing Editor
Thursday 13th January 2022
In some ways, Luiz Sampaio's story is pretty standard for indie developers.
A lifelong creator, Sampaio wants to share his ideas with the world through the medium of games. He pays the bills with a day job and fits his game development aspirations around that.
In other ways, not so much.
Sampaio is 70 years old. His day job is a career working with planetariums and other such institutions as the Brazilian representative for German optical manufacturer Carl Zeiss. Oh, and games is really his second passion pursuit, with the first being poetry.
Luiz Sampaio
"I spent all my life since I was nine years old writing poems," Sampaio tells GamesIndustry.biz. "I studied literature. I have about 2,000 poems but I had never published them."
Not until recently, at least. In July of 2019, Sampaio was working on his poems one night in one of his preferred spaces, a Japanese karaoke bar in Sao Paolo. There he met Pablo Abraham, a developer who had been attending the BIG Festival (Brazil's Independent Games Festival) and the two hit it off.
Sampaio told Abraham about his poetry and his desire to publish it, perhaps over social media. Abraham offered to help him, and the pair soon after set up pages for Sampaio on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube where he could finally share his work.
"We always think about our games as a deep, human experience. We love to share poetry, beauty, deep human experiences that could enrich the players"
"We were so successful in about 12 months, we already had about 150,000 people reading my poems daily," Sampaio says. "For Brazil, this is huge. Normally when a poet publishes a book, they make 500 or 1,000, max 2,000 copies. I was so enthusiastic
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