Game Development Giant

In a huge company like Nintendo, it is impossible to hide this kind of news from people who are willing to make two completely opposite transfers in a short period of time.

And that morning, so many people saw Yokoi Gunpei and Mura Masayuki, the two cores of the hardware development department, entering Yamauchi Hiroshi's office. After more than an hour, Yokoi Gunpei walked out of Yamauchi with an extremely ugly face. Pu walked out of the office without looking back.

On the contrary, Masayuki Uemura, who had always been under Junpei Yokoi in the hardware development department, stayed in Hiroshi Yamauchi's room.

No third party knows what Masayuki Uemura talked about when he stayed in Hiroshi Yamauchi's room. However, after Gunpei Yokoi left Hiroshi Yamauchi's office, he immediately told him that he had just established it and was already interested in developing a new handheld game console. The development team held a meeting with preliminary plans.

After the meeting, many employees from other development teams who had been deployed two or three months ago packed up and returned to their previous positions.

And just that afternoon, Hiroshi Yamauchi personally announced at a high-level meeting within the group the establishment of a 16-person home game console development project team, led by FC's chief designer Masayuki Uemura. .nsb.om Moreover, Hiroshi Yamauchi said: This project team attaches great importance to it, which means that it must mobilize the hardware development elites of the entire group for development, and recruit a large number of highly skilled employees to enhance its R\u0026D strength. Such news cannot be concealed, and Nintendo has no intention of concealing it. Recently, rumors that Sega's 16-bit home console has been basically finalized have been widely circulated in the world. Many third-party manufacturers on Nintendo's side are also interested in it, and they have inquired about Nintendo's internal plans for new products. Home hosting information.

After the matter is confirmed, announcing the news will also help stabilize the morale of the military for Nintendo.

"Yokoi Gunpei followed Mura Masayuki, and Yamauchi Hiroshi had a falling out?"

When Jester learned the news, he was stunned at first. Then he muttered something in disbelief. He took another look at the information sent from Japan, and then he slapped his head. He might know the reason.

The previous news that Nintendo concentrated its staff on the development of handheld mobile phones was carried out in secret. This work was probably proposed and presided over by Gunpei Yokoi. For the Nintendo hardware department, which did not have any particularly important development tasks at the time, it was understandable to do so.

And because of the internal transfer, the employees were ordered to keep it confidential. It may have been carried out for a short time, so it is normal that no specific relevant information was received before.

"So. Nintendo is also developing a handheld phone?" Jester was actually very happy to hear the news. Although Nintendo saw that there is a market for handheld phones, they simply did not see how huge the market would be. Therefore, Yamauchi Hiroshi could not make up his mind to go both ways, and he had previously set up a separate company to specialize in the development of handheld mobile phones, and his strategy of secretly plotting against Chen Cang was quite successful. At least Nintendo did not realize that the development of its own handheld mobile phones had already been completed. It has been going on for almost a year. According to the progress I just learned some time ago, it will probably take no more than half a year at most. You can come up with mature products.

Judging from the parameters, the skills of his handheld phone are at least no worse than the Nintendo gameby he remembers.

As for the 16-bit machine, Jester laughed first when he thought of this. He has a profound understanding of the replacement of successive generations of consoles, and the peak lifespan of each generation of consoles is only five years. Therefore, as soon as his eight-bit machine was put into the market, Jester asked the hardware department to immediately invest in the new console. in the research and development work.

But judging from the timeline that Jester knows. He has at least four or even five years to develop a new console, so the development progress of his company's new console is not very fast. But there are advantages to being unhappy, that is, you can think more carefully when designing and experiment with different design ideas. For example, his 16-bit machine continues to be designed with a dual display chip architecture, which allows designers to have more Image processing capabilities.

The original idea of ​​the design team was to find inspiration from the drembx dual display chip, and wondered whether dual CPUs could be used to greatly improve the computing power of the new console. However, after Jester learned about it, the first thing he thought of was the future Sony. The ps3 is a very classic console.

If it was before Jester was reborn, the ps4 had been on sale for nearly a year, and the ps3 also proved its success in the later stages of the console war of that era. However, because of the price of dual CPUs, the ps3 had just been released. The ps3 is almost in dire straits.

Even Ken Kutaragi, the father of PS and the meritorious founder of sec, had to resign due to the failure of PS3.

It is true that the PS3 is indeed very good in terms of performance, but because of the price of dual CPUs, it is difficult for designers or design teams who want to develop games on this console to fully understand the architecture of the PS3. If you make a game without having a thorough understanding of a game console, you will definitely not be able to make a good work.

Without the support of good works, sales in the early stage will inevitably suffer.

The success of ps4 is due to the lessons learned from the failure of ps3.

However, in the later stages of the PS3 series, when the major development teams had fully understood the dual-CPU architecture of the PS3, each high-quality game, especially the works of 16 top studios under Sony, perfectly proved this. a little.

For example, "The End of Beauty", which was released shortly before the release of PS4, is hailed as the pinnacle of graphics in the era of PS3 and SB360. For example, GTA5, which had a total sales volume of 41.17 million copies before the release of PC, was also In every aspect, it is typical of the game mechanics of the same era.

In fact, think about it, more than 20 years later, a $69 game can sell more than 41 million, close to more than 42 million copies of the game, and this is still without the PC version being released. The numbers are too incredible for anyone who knows anything about video games.

If you don’t look at the 50 million units of an extremely low-priced game like “Minecraft” or the 80 million units of Wii Sports bundled with Wii, GTA5 is the highest-selling single game in history. Game, but after all, this is an achievement that can only be achieved by a platform that spans two eras. Compared with the sales of Wii's new carriage on a single platform of 38 million, it is still a little behind in terms of gold content.

However, GTA5 is something that Jester doesn’t like because the values ​​he promotes are incompatible with Jester. Therefore, no matter how successful the game is, how strong the design team showed in making this game is. Regardless of the level of praise the game was given, Jester had not played it.

Although so many games were released at the end of the PS3, one of Naughty Dog's designers regretfully said that it was too difficult to fully understand the architecture of the PS3, so that we could not be used on this console. When eliminated, thoroughly explore his potential.

In other words, the PS3, a game console that has slowly withdrawn from the stage in Jester's history, has never fully realized its potential.

Therefore, there is no doubt that when he learned that his next-generation console development team planned to develop a dual-CPU architecture, Jester immediately dropped everything and rushed back to the United States. He did not want his new console to become Like the ps3, it failed miserably in the early days because it was unfriendly to designers. Although the ps3 was able to catch up in the later period, it does not mean that it can now.

This is just an episode that Jester recalled about his development of 16-bit computers. He has not learned about the specific development process of 16-bit computers for a while. It just happened that Sega's new console was exposed this time. He also asked.

After the call was connected, Jester made a brief inquiry and had an idea. Moreover, the development department in the United States also knew the news about Sega's 16-bit machine. If Sega's real machine has already begun testing to read cassettes, , then the progress is much faster than them.

This made the people in Mars Entertainment’s new console development team very anxious. After all, during their development of a 16-bit console, Sega’s home console development team had already completed an eight-bit console called MS—— In other words, this time Sega's 16-bit console must have been officially developed after the MS development failed. Before that, there was at best preparatory work.

The opponent's time is shorter than his own, but his progress is faster than his own. Although he still doesn't know the performance of the game console developed by the other party, Sega's hardware development level is well known in the gaming industry, especially their When it comes to the development of large-scale arcade hardware, basically no one can match it.

Although there is a big difference between the development of home consoles and the development of arcade machines, in later generations, there is such a formula in the gaming industry. Large arcades are the testing ground for home consoles. Many technologies on home consoles were first tested on arcade machines. Make it, get popular, and then port it to home machines.

The simplest one is 3D, which first appeared on arcade machines. Another example is motion sensing, which also appears on arcade machines. The simplest one, the 16-bit architecture, also transitioned from arcade machines to home machines.

The significance of these technical reserves to the research and development of home machines is immeasurable.