Game Development Giant

Yes, this game is the famous "Super Mario".

The character Mario is a character in the legendary game "Donkey Kong" created in 1981 by game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, who can be prefixed with "the greatest".

But this character is not the protagonist of this game. Although Nintendo used this character and his twin brother Luis as the theme of the game in "Mario Brothers" released last year, it was just a still-screen pass game, and this This game is not a big seller, and the gameplay is even a bit old-fashioned. Therefore, Mario is now just like the gold digger in "Gold Digger", and he is just an unknown game character.

But this will all be completely different after Super Mario, which will be released next year.

One of the most famous characters in the history of human gaming will be born.

Shigeru Miyamoto used his genius brain to design an incredible game. Once this game was released, it instantly became popular all over the world. Whether in Asia, America or Europe, men, women, old and young, all were instantly attracted to this side-scrolling game. I was conquered by the game and became a loyal fan of this Italian plumber wearing a red and blue overalls.

There was even a survey conducted by the American media in 1990. In the minds of Americans, Mario's influence far exceeded that of Mickey Mouse.

You must know that Mickey Mouse is the signature of Disney. It can be said that everyone in the United States knows it and is a household name. More than 40 million copies were sold on \u003ces, with a net profit of several billion dollars. Needless to say, this figure was at the time. Even in 2014, when Jester traveled back in time, there was only one game. break in.

How old is this game? It's ridiculous to say that compared to those games in later generations that have a capacity of dozens of gigabytes, this game is so small that it's not even a fraction of theirs, only 68kb!

Even among FC games, this game is not too big. The largest FC game "Fudo Myooh" is nearly 1m in size.

It’s hard to imagine how Miyamoto Shigeru designed so much playability in a 68kb capacity.

Now that I think about it, I can only describe it as miraculous.

For Jester, who comes from a later generation, he has also studied some small games from the FC era. He even studied the codes of some of the most famous ones, and even rewrote various fan versions himself. Mario, he can now recite most of the codes for Super Mario Classic.

\u003ctosh and an old-looking IBM 5150, there are also a lot of scattered electronic components and various types of circuit boards scattered on the ground and tables. \u003ctosh is Steve Jobs's first masterpiece. Perhaps the name Macintosh or Macintosh will be more familiar to Chinese people. It is also the first personal computer in the world to use a graphical interface. All graphical operations in the future will It can be said that the system is all derived from its creativity. This is a cross-era design, a computer that can be recorded in history.

As for the IBM 5150, it is the first real PC in human history. Esterlich, the greatest product manager in the history of IBM personal computers, completed its design. It is also an undoubted masterpiece.

The whole room seemed very messy.

Judging from some scattered plastic casings, these electronic components turned out to be from several Atari vcs2600 consoles, and even the vcs5200 console that was announced to withdraw from the market two years after it was released. Release plan, removed from the vcs7200 host that has not yet completed the final design!

But what surprised Jester the most was not these, but the fact that there were two FC game consoles here!

The impression of the classic red and white appearance was too deep in his mind.

One is intact, the other has been disassembled.

Next to it are the Japanese versions of "Donkey Kong", "Golden Digger" and other FC classic game cartridges.

You know, Nintendo FC has not yet been released in the United States.

Even in Japan, it was only released for less than a year.

It is not easy to get an FC game console.

But this is not a difficult problem for Jester, not because of anything else, but because of his father's special status.

In fact, after Jester understood the memory of this body, he was quite satisfied with this mysterious game development system.

It seems to have designed everything for itself.

Although apart from that mission, he has not seen any strange abilities of this system.

But the owner of the original body chosen by this system for his rebirth is indeed very suitable for entering the gaming industry.

Jester Lee is a top student majoring in electrical engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has been extremely interested in video games since he was a child. Moreover, he is a well-known programming expert at the University of California, Los Angeles.

And more importantly, his father is also a hardware engineer at Atari, responsible for the design of Atari arcade machines. The presence of these things in Jester's room is naturally inseparable from his father's contribution.

But now it's not like the days when Atari was prosperous a few years ago. The company is heavily in debt and in a precarious situation, and his father's life hasn't been easy lately.

Last year, Atari was defeated in front of the Nintendo FC before Japan, and in China, it was insincere, shoddy, and had a large number of similar third-party games, especially the release of "ET", which ignited the anger of the entire United States. A super money-attracting machine that had a net profit of US$2 billion a year ago and accounted for the vast majority of the profits of its parent company Time Warner Group has turned into a company that is almost bankrupt and losing tens of thousands of US dollars every day.

Not long ago, Atari just completed the landfill plan that made them "famous in history". The most important thing is that they have now been collectively boycotted by almost all gamers.

This allowed them to sell almost no game consoles or game cartridges this year.

Some shopping malls and retailers even sell Atari consoles at 10% or 20% off, but still no one cares.

Finally this year, Warner Group, which couldn't bear it anymore, sold Atari's sales department to CBS Corporation.

Many people may not have heard of CBM, but the modor64 computer they produce is a name that players who truly understand the history of gaming will definitely come into contact with. This is the first real gaming computer in history.

Of course, it doesn’t matter if you haven’t heard of it. You only need to know that the modor64 computer once quadrupled the sales of Apple’s Apple II at the same time to know how great this computer and this company are.

However, Jack Trammell, the president of CBM, has no interest in game consoles and even believes that video games are dead. He has frozen the development of almost all games of Atari's VCS2600 own platform and stopped selling the just-launched VCS2600. Two years of vcs5200, and even the 8-bit host vcs7200 to be released this year has been extended indefinitely.

You know, when Jack Trammell announced the news indifferently in front of everyone, almost all Atari engineers were furious.

Because this is their hard work and making games is their dream.

But that doesn't help at all.

Although Jester's father worked for Atari, an arcade machine factory in Costa Mesa, Orange County, Los Angeles, the small city where Jester's family is located.

He is also engaged in the research and development of arcade machines and has nothing to do with the home game console project. But just recently, due to the bad news about home consoles and the situation that the American game industry can almost be described as collapse, there are also rumors coming from the headquarters. News that the arcade department will be sold.

Jester's father, who is wandering in confusion as he doesn't know what the future holds, has also been looking gloomy lately.

Only Jester knew that Atari's future fate was sealed.

After giving up the game console market, they came back after seeing the popularity of Nintendo. Two years later, in 1986, they re-released the improved vcs7200. However, they had been away from the market for too long and the impact of Atari. The reputation is so bad that almost no third party makes games for them.

As we all know, a gaming platform without third parties is worthless.

Since then, Atari has been in decline.

Shaking his head, Jester expelled these messy thoughts from his mind and carefully recalled the codes of "Super Mario Classic" in his memory. \u003ctosh, but chose the ibm5150 using the doc system.

Lines of code continued to appear on the green display screen of the ibm5150 as Jester tapped. Then Jester frowned and deleted the previous line, and then entered a new line.

He is writing the program for "Super Mario" based on the IBM5150 computer.

Suddenly, Jester's movements paused, and his brows furrowed again, as if he had remembered something. Then a look of annoyance appeared on his face, and he clenched a fist fiercely and hit the table hard. on, making a loud bang.

"How could I forget such an important thing!"

Just now, Jester realized that, except for the Nintendo FC, he could not find any 8-bit game console on the market that could run "Super Mario" perfectly!

The Atari 7200 was originally available, but its release plan has been terminated indefinitely.

As for msx?

Not to mention this kind of scam, the capacity of the scammer's ROM can't even allow it to display two bullets on the same screen, and its platform share is very low, especially in the United States.

As for other 8-bit consoles?

Atari's vcs2600 has a high market share, but it has the same shortcomings as the msx, even more serious. Its graphics processing capabilities are far inferior to those of the fc which is specially equipped with a PPU graphics controller.

In other words, the image processing capabilities of the Atari 2600 are very, very, very poor. It can only process some pixel blocks that cannot distinguish what the character is.

In other words, you can't tell whether it's a person or a monkey from the Atari 2600.

It might be okay to play some low-level games that don't require graphics, but Super Mario is clearly not suitable.

As for game consoles developed by other manufacturers?

Haha, now Americans regard the gaming industry as an industry that is about to die, and no one is willing to invest in the development of a state-of-the-art 8-bit console.

Although the development of this 8-bit console is not difficult, even some small factories in Hong Kong and mainland China are able to perform almost perfect reverse mapping of FC game consoles and copy them.

But still no one is willing to invest in it, and no one has noticed the popularity of FC in Japan and Asia. In the eyes of Americans, Japan? Asia? That's just a place outside.

Electronic games? That’s what’s left from our play!

Video games are dead, period, and with Atari collapsing almost overnight and all gamers giving up, that's what almost everyone in America is thinking right now.

In the eyes of Americans today, the video game industry will be relegated to the corner of the 21st century encyclopedia, as a once hot topic, but eventually forgotten.

As for the second reliable 8-bit console after FC, we have to wait until the Sega master-system in 1986. But what is the point of waiting until 1986 to release this Super Mario?

The day lilies are cold.

Countless ideas flashed through Jester's mind in an instant, but he rejected them one by one. "Super Mario" was a game that he could never give up. Coming from a later generation, he knew the value of this game all too well.

As for providing this game to Nintendo FC?

Jester sneered, not to mention the royalty system that Nintendo will implement soon. No matter how much profit a game makes, Nintendo will take 60% of it, which he cannot accept no matter what.

What's more, after producing a game for Nintendo FC, except for the six third-party giants owned by Nintendo, other game developers can only release five games a year, and they are also prohibited from producing games for other platforms within two years.

This made him unable to accept it no matter what, because he knew that there was no way he could become one of Nintendo's six giants.

But he has more than fifty classic games in his head?

What's more, the FC version of "Super Mario" has sold more than 40 million units, which is a sales volume of billions of dollars, and a unit profit of one billion dollars!

That’s billions of dollars before 1990!

You can buy the entire Shanghai Pudong and still have some leftover!

What's more, his version is "Super Mario Classic Edition", which has been revised countless times by players for more than 30 years. It is more fun and playable than the original Super Mario.

In other words, this is a better game, written with the wisdom of all players in the next thirty years, almost squeezing the design potential of this game to the limit.

He was unwilling to join the fiery pit of Nintendo hell even though he knew "Super Mario" would be a huge success.

what to do?

Thinking of the mission in his mind's system and Super Mario that will be released next year, Jester felt his headache getting worse.

Although there was no deadline for completing the task, Jester could tell with just his toes that time would definitely be a factor that affected the final evaluation.

In particular, if you don't make "Super Mario" first, then by the time Nintendo launches it next year, Nintendo will have the nuclear weapon Mario. In the next ten years, until the PS appears, no one will It can shake their status.

This is not Jester's unfounded worry, but the real "Super Mario" is so **.

Among the four highest-selling games in FC, the "Super Mario" series occupies three positions, namely first, second, and fourth, followed by "Super Mario", "Super Mario 3", and "Super Mario" Austria 2》.

Sega's MD function is so powerful and Sonic is so classic, but in the face of SFC's "Super Mario World", there is almost no resistance at all, and it was beaten to pieces.

Such is the power of Mario in the gaming world.

Once Mario comes out, the outcome is decided.

It can be said that Mario is a veritable nuclear bomb in the gaming industry, the law of cause and effect.

No game is his rival, and it can even be said without exaggeration that even if all other games in the world are tied together, none of them can match Mario's influence in the gaming industry.

Because the game "Super Mario" saved the dying gaming industry.

This difficulty is like pulling the sunken Titanic out of the sea and letting it sail normally.

"Super Mario" that accomplished this feat has transcended the game itself and become a culture. It can no longer be called a legend because it is the legend itself.

If you do it yourself, no platform other than FC will be able to release this game in the next two years. What's the difference between not doing it?

Jester looked around blankly, scanning the circuit boards and electronic components on the ground one by one. An extremely bold idea suddenly came to his mind.

Since there's no home console suitable for releasing Super Mario, why don't I make one myself?

Even Jester was startled by this sudden idea.

At this time, after not considering Mario as his first game, Jester also came up with a game that was more suitable for him now, and he even thought about how to promote this game. .

He recalled a classic story about a video game console from Atari founder Nolan Bushnell.

The new game he thought of was the famous Tetris, and as for the promotion method...

Thinking of Bushnell's story, Jester couldn't help but smile.

Because this story is too familiar to game lovers.

This is Bushnell and pong! s story.