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Finding an arcade game in the wild anywhere in the world is reason enough for celebration, be it a tired-looking Neo Geo cabinet too bulky for anyone to bother moving that's resolute in the corner of a chippie or a Numan Athletics that sits unplayed in a run-down casino, cast in the dreary blinking light of a dozen fruit machines. If you ever manage to stumble upon a Nave cabinet, however, consider it a red-letter day: there's only one in existence, and it's never ventured beyond the borders of Argentina. It's a curious, eccentric creation, the brainchild of a curious and eccentric pair. Hernan Saez and Maximo Balestrini, two residents of Buenos Aires, are an unlikely couple. Balestrini, you get the impression after a late afternoon's chat, is the orderly core of this unlikely pairing, a systems engineer who's also got a flair for creating websites. Saez, meanwhile, is the more erratic, more eccentric half: a filmmaker, editor and sometimes actor who's made fantasy, action and horror shorts; he's always happy to chase down a fleeting metaphysical thought. Balestrini, it seems, is always there to make sense of it all.
The two met through a shared love of videogames (on the set of a zombie film, their official story goes, although Saez tells me it's because he used to go out with Balestrini's sister, a truth that's ironically not quite so romantic). They then did what any smart, enterprising pair would do: they set about creating a game themselves, a feat that isn't necessarily so straightforward in a country with no recognized industry in the form.
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