Game Development Giant

Regarding this anecdote, most people who know the history of the development of video games have heard it.

It was precisely because of this incident that Nolan Bushnell entered the game console industry without hesitation. This led to the prosperity of video games and the first giant in the history of the game industry, Atari. Birth.

It was a summer in 1972.

Bushnell, who had just experienced the failure of the first commercial game console he designed, the arcade "Computer Space" because the game was too complex, was not discouraged. He and his partners designed an extremely simple game. Arcade - pong.

In fact, this can only be regarded as an experimental work by Bushnell.

Now it seems that this is a simple game that cannot be simpler. If you have seen his pictures, you will know that what I said is true.

There are only three simple lines. The middle one runs through the screen to symbolize the net, and there is a short symbol on each side to symbolize the racket. A light spot in the middle represents the tennis ball moving back and forth on both sides through the impact of the racket. The player simply The joystick and buttons are used to control the racket to hit the light spot, which is the tennis ball.

The two of them just filmed back and forth boredly.

It seems like no fun now, but surprisingly the game was an astonishing success.

In fact, Bushnell had no intention of selling this simple game console at first, because his partner Alan Alcorn, apart from being an excellent electrical engineer and computer expert, knew nothing about designing games. , Bushnell's original plan was to make a racing game that was his favorite, but because of Alcorn's ignorance, he changed his mind and decided to teach him to design a simple game to practice, which is pong.

As for the reason for such a strange name, firstly, it is because someone has already used this name.

After the game was completed, because it was too simple, Bushnell, a top student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Utah, had no interest in this childish game. However, in order not to disappoint his partner Alcorn in making the game, he deceived him and said that this game was too simple. General Game Company has decided to sell it as an agent.

In fact, he just put it in a wine shop called Andy's in Saint-Nivelle, where the little company they started called Atari was located, because it also ran several pinball machines. machine.

Unexpectedly, just a few days later, Bushnell received a call from the wine owner Andy, saying that the two strange machines he sent were broken and hoped that he could repair them.

Unexpectedly, after Bushnell went to take a look, he discovered that because there were so many people playing this machine, the coins were too full and the coin slot was blocked...

As everyone knows, the pong arcade machine became popular in the United States. It printed US dollars for Atari like a money printing machine, laying the foundation for them to become the overlord of the gaming industry.

It was precisely because he thought of this story that Jester realized that the situation now was so similar to that time.

Yes, it was a barbaric period for video games. To put it bluntly, it was a blank period for video games. It was precisely because Atari was the first to try it that they became so successful. .

And isn’t that exactly the case now?

The Atari shock was catastrophic to the American gaming industry. To give a less fitting example, it was the Battle of Pearl Harbor for video games.

After this, no investor wanted to enter this industry.

Coupled with CBM's forceful termination of Atari's development of games for its own game console Atari 2600, and the despair of the American people towards video games, the current European and American game industry has experienced a blank period in video games. .

Temporary, to a certain extent, created a situation similar to what happened when Atari first launched Pong.

The emergence of this gap period is due to Americans' hostility to repetitive games without any new ideas, rather than a true feeling that video games are meaningless.

Of course, Americans today do not call this a temporary blank period in the video game industry, but call it a period of death. \u003cWhen they came to the United States and swept the world with "Super Mario", Americans just woke up from a dream.

But it was too late.

After that, the video game industry entered an era of Japanese rule, first by Nintendo, Sega, and then Sony. It was not until a full fifteen years later that Microsoft returned to the market with its Xbox at a cost of losing $2 billion a year. When it comes to the field of home console games, American talents have returned to this market that they once dominated and now covets.

And I can completely copy the classic success story of Atari and Nintendo at that time.

Use arcade machines to become famous and get your first pot of gold, and rely on home consoles and "Super Mario" to sweep the world.

Of course, the premise of all this is that he needs a game that can reactivate the extinguished American passion for video games.

Even if it can't do this, at least it can be a super hot-selling game.

There are not many such games, but they are not few either. The problem is that they can adapt to the current development environment, which is almost rare.

"Super Mario" is of course such a game. In fact, in real history, it was this game that fulfilled this mission.

But he can't do that now. Although he has to make "Super Mario" before Nintendo, it is definitely not now.

Now is not the time, he does not have a gaming platform equivalent to FC.

Therefore, he thought of a masterpiece that could also play this role.

A masterpiece in every sense of the word.

In almost all subsequent game selections, there is no doubt that only two games can compete for one or two places, one of which is "Super Mario".

And the other one is tetris - Tetris!

Just do what comes to mind has always been Jester's style, and the game "Tetris" is not that complicated. It is because of its special algorithm that makes this little game so popular.

In the world of the soul in Jester's body, he has carefully studied the algorithms of many "Tetris" derivative games, and he is very familiar with the not-so-complex code program of the first version of "Tetris".

After all, this is a still-image game, far from a complicated side-scrolling action pass like the "Super Mario" just now. It's just that after Jester spent more than two hours typing on the computer selflessly, he finally A simple version of "Tetris" that can run on his IBM5150 was completed.

After running the program, Jester casually operated the first game he had written in this world, watching them run perfectly. With the dexterous operation of Jester's hands, several Tetris patterns on the screen quickly dropped. Then connect rows of blocks at the bottom of the screen to eliminate them successfully.

The numbers on the scoreboard on one side are also constantly jumping up.

“Perfect!”

After playing the game more than a dozen times and trying out the five difficulties he had set, there was no running problem at all in the entire game. Only then did Jester sincerely admire the programming ability of the original owner of this body.

It is really a mess of strength. Needless to say, it is far superior to myself in the previous life. Even the best programmer I have seen in my time may not have half the programming ability of the original owner of this book body.

"No wonder my friend who is very good at programming always says that even now, the best programmers in the world are still those who were honed in the 1970s and 1980s with kilobytes of memory. Their logic writing skills It’s so powerful that they can do with just a few lines of code what later generations would do with dozens of lines of code.”

Jester himself remembers that the Tetris code was written by later generations. Although it is the same logical algorithm, later generations have no memory limitations, so many codes are not concise enough, but this is not possible in this era. You must know that the IBM5150 The personal computer that just came out not long ago is already the most advanced one, but its memory is only b! As for Atari's classic console, the memory of the Atari 2600 is only 2kb!

If you want a game to run perfectly on such a machine, the program must be extremely short and concise due to memory limitations.

This process has a name dedicated to people in later generations, called optimization.

Fortunately, Jester in this world is a master of programming and can simplify the complicated code programs he remembered to the point where they can be used now. Otherwise, Jester may really have no solution.

After finishing the production of his first game, Jester's only remaining question was how to market the game.

He has decided to use Bushnell's method of placing arcade machines equipped with this game in public places to first cause a sensation within a certain range.

For this method, Jester also has unique advantages.

His mother runs a medium-sized supermarket in the city. There are several Atari arcade machines in the supermarket. Jester visited them when he was free. Those arcade machines were also affected by the impact of Atari. In the recent period, Time management is not very good.

But he believed that as long as he built a few Tetris arcade machines and put them in his mother's supermarket, it would be impossible for the business not to be booming.

Because this is something that history has verified.

As long as he creates a sensation, he won't have to worry about finding people willing to buy his game arcade machine.

This is Tetris, one of the greatest games ever created by mankind. Even in the selection of the 100th issue of the egm journal, this one was removed.

As for the original name of this game - tetris, this name comes from the Greek word four. Because it is too abstract, it is not suitable for promotion to the American people whose average IQ is not high.

On the contrary, the name China gave to this game back then was very instructive.

Naturally, the name Tetris cannot be used. First of all, this game has nothing to do with Russia, which is now the Soviet Union. Secondly, in the United States, calling this game Tetris is not a good idea.

Now in the midst of the Cold War, Reagan began to implement his Star Wars plan, and the confrontation between the East and the West was at its most intense.

"However, Tetris is indeed a good name, easy to understand..."

Thinking of this, Jester's eyes lit up.

Since it can’t be called Tetris, why not call it American Tris?

You must know that the American people also attach great importance to the sense of national honor. Otherwise, MacArthur's classic West Point Military Academy speech about responsibility, honor, and country would not have caused such a sensation in the United States. \u003c-diamond! American cubes! This is a good name! "

Jester wrote the name on a piece of paper.

In addition to square, diamond has another meaning, diamond.

In Jester's eyes, this game will definitely shock the entire United States like a diamond that is too bright to be added. ?