Game Development Giant

Nintendo's trial launch date is February 7th in New York.

Originally, Jester planned to hold a trial sale in New York on the same day. Anyway, the flagship experience store in New York was prepared a month ago, so it was not used in vain. However, after he received the news of OEM from Japan, his first A batch of 500,000 new consoles would not arrive in the United States for a week, so the original plan could only be scrapped.

However, in order to prevent Nintendo from attracting attention on its own with its independent trial sale on February 7th, and to make Nintendo as disgusting as possible, Jester resorted to the same old tricks he used when selling arcade machines at the beginning.

Pre-sale.

However, this pre-sale is different from when he sold arcade machines before. Jester played a new trick this time.

He first revealed in advance through various media that the first batch of trial-sale Dreamboxes had a limited stock quantity of only 500,000 units. After this trial sale, no more Dreamboxes would be sold before the official launch. The trial sale time was set for the early morning of February 15th, and there were only two trial sales locations, Los Angeles and New York. After the official launch, the Eastern United States and the Western United States were equally divided, with 250,000 units each.

At the same time, Jester also prepared a small trick for the trial sale of Dreambox. On February 7, which is the day when Nintendo's game console, which was renamed NES after the CES show, was released, he would experience it at two flagship stores in Los Angeles and New York. The store has officially launched an invitation letter for the trial sale of Dreambox, priced at US$120. Only with this invitation letter can you purchase the official trial sale Dreambox on February 15th, and the buyer will also receive a lucky draw. Chances are, all games released on the same day. It's possible to get them. Dreambox costs $220. It's slightly more expensive than the NES's price of $199, but considering that the performance of the Dreambox must completely surpass that of the NES, and the appeal of the first-release games, especially those games that have long been well-known in arcades, Players didn't complain much. In their eyes, it was natural that Mars Entertainment was more expensive than Nintendo.

Just like Sony's Walkman is of course more expensive than similar products from other companies.

This is also the effect that Jester most hopes to achieve, to make his company a benchmark in an industry. When people talk about video games, they will naturally think of Mars Entertainment.

Although Jester's price is more expensive than Nintendo, it is really not as bad as Nintendo. You must know that its configuration is much higher than that of fc/nes, especially the dual PPU architecture, and the memory is several times that of nes. But these two item, the cost is much higher, even if it is twenty dollars more expensive than nes. The real profit per machine is not even as high as fc/nes.

This is also very helpless, because this Nintendo machine has been in mass production for more than a year, so the cost has been reduced a lot by quantity. Of course, even though this is a Christmas promotion, it is also related to the fact that the cost and price of hardware will inevitably decrease in three years. However, according to Nintendo's style of never selling hardware at a loss, we can also draw a conclusion. At that time, the cost of nes might not even cost fifty dollars. It doesn’t even cost forty dollars.

Even if the production cost now is not as cheap as it will be three years later, according to Jester's estimation. It will definitely not exceed 80 US dollars, but the cost of the OEM I found in Japan is almost 100 US dollars.

The cost difference of twenty US dollars is a quite high figure for an electronic product that only sells for more than two hundred US dollars.

However, Jester is not in a hurry. The reason why his cost is high now is because he has just started production and has not yet relied on large-scale industrialization to significantly reduce production costs. More importantly, a large part of the cost is In terms of labor, once its production base in mainland China is completed, the reduced cost of labor alone will be an astronomical sum that Nintendo can't even imagine.

At that time, it was almost time to enter the Japanese market.

Before Nintendo pre-sale, Minoru Arakawa made a lot of efforts to weaken the previous negative image.

For example, it first donated US$5 million in supplies to the Great Famine in Africa, which had just attracted great international attention, and then donated US$1 million to a certain disease foundation. Then, it donated US$1 million to several hospitals near New York. Public high schools donated hundreds of thousands of dollars in books and equipment... and scattered seven to eight million dollars in donations, which still won Nintendo a lot of reputation.

Both Minoru Arakawa, Hiroshi Yamauchi, who was thousands of miles away, and Jester, who had flown to New York to take charge of the day, paid great attention to February 7th.

Because this day is the first day of trial sales for NES, for Nintendo, it is also their first battle in North America. Even if the results of the trial sales are not ideal, it will not make them change their American strategy that is absolutely impossible to change. But failure is something no one wants.

And for Jester, this is even more true. He has been planning for Nintendo since the CES show. Even if there is no ready stock, even if he wants to do this kind of pre-sale that can only be a gimmick, he has to cooperate with Nintendo. They worked together to gain an absolute upper hand at the beginning of this eight-bit machine war and completely suppress Nintendo's enthusiasm.

Jester knew that many Nintendo employees who had been cheated by him before were holding their breath. They had lost in previous exhibitions and public opinion, and they would definitely want to make it back in the next match. .

This time, Jester specially asked a professor from the Yale School of Art to participate in the design of the pre-sale invitation letter. It uses simulated parchment, the font is a very gorgeous fancy writing, and their company’s PS is used on the paper. The software has been aged. Moreover, the envelope is also made in a medieval style, and the seal is also sealed with beeswax. There is also the Mars Entertainment logo on the beeswax.

Just in terms of appearance. Especially for players who love video games, this simple invitation is highly collectible.

It also fully reflects Jester’s sincerity.

However, Nintendo is not fuel-efficient and so on. As soon as he returned from the CES exhibition, Minoru Arakawa spared no expense in advertising in various media. The focus of the promotion was on the many peripherals that Dreambox did not yet have, especially the light gun.

To be precise, the NES light gun is still somewhat attractive. This kind of peripheral is also very new to Americans today. After the trial sale officially started at 8 o'clock, some people have seen Nintendo's advertisements and are interested in it. A large influx of players. Moreover, the game quality of Nintendo and its software manufacturers is indeed of high quality, so many people have purchased one after experiencing it. This kind of purchase can easily form a blind obedience effect. When I see someone rushing to buy it, I will blindly buy it. So in the first hour, NES successfully sold an astonishing 1,500 units!

After getting the news, Jester also sighed. He had made so many preparations before. They also carried out tit-for-tat pre-sales today in order to suppress the sales of nes as much as possible in the initial stage, although some results have been achieved. But seeing so many people still buying NES, Jester instinctively felt a little depressed.

However, when he saw the endless queue in front of his New York flagship store, he slightly relieved his unhappy mood at this time.

"I hope it will be a big success." Jester could only comfort himself in this way. No matter how much preparation he had done before, when he really started to fight with real swords and guns, he would feel nervous, and Nintendo was the first to do so. The hourly data really put a lot of pressure on him.

The release time of the dreambox trial sale invitation letter is set at 9 am on February 7th, which is one hour after the official trial sale of NES. When Jester received the general sales data of NES in the first hour. The sale of his invitations has also officially begun.

Azshara Newmoon is a college student who traveled all night from Georgia. Studying at Georgia Tech, one of the top three universities in the United States, is like a girl studying mechanics. She also has completely different interests and hobbies from other girls. According to her friends, she is more like a boy.

And video games have been Azshara’s love since childhood.

She has also experienced the Atari shock, and she once burned her Atari game console into a ball of black garbage out of anger, but her love for video games has never weakened.

One night last year, she was at a party organized by her classmates. During the chat, she heard for the first time many people talking about a new arcade game that had just come out. She still remembers those boys she had with her back then. When the students talked about the game called "American Cube", their eyes inadvertently revealed their obsession.

This also made her a little curious about this strangely named game for the first time.

The day after the party, she went to an arcade near her school and played the game for the first time.

As a person who grew up under the influence of Atari games and played classic games such as "Pong", "Little Bee", "Pac-Man" and so on, Azshara almost picked up the game the moment she started playing it. , I was deeply attracted by this extremely exquisitely designed stacking block game. This simple game is just a random combination of seven blocks of different shapes composed of four small squares. It actually has endless possibilities. charm.

She even started a crazy practice journey after hearing about the Easter egg hidden in "American Cube" that could be completed if it reached 10,000 points.