Rebirth of America, this is my time

After the Atari collapse, Atari's revenue plummeted.

Before the big crash, they were still an industry giant with a revenue of over 1 billion. After the big crash, they lost nearly 500 million. When millions of copies of "E.T." cassettes were hauled by dozens of container trucks to Alamogordo, New Mexico, and buried directly, no individual could bear such a huge loss. As a result, in order to protect himself, Steve Ross had no choice but to separate Atari from Warner Group and bear all losses alone.

Of course, this is also related to the hostile takeover they encountered from the outside world.

Take Rupert Murdoch, for example. The company he first wanted to acquire was Warner. If it hadn't been for Steve Ross's broken arm and his survival, the landscape of Hollywood might have been rewritten.

Since Steve Ross was unwilling to split up the company, after splitting Atari from Warner Group, Steve Ross still wanted to save himself. A large-scale reorganization officially separated games and hardware, and the unprofitable hardware division was sold.

But even so, Steve Ross failed to save Atari's game department, so in 1985, they introduced an external investor to Atari——

Namco.

Namco invested in Atari and acquired a 60% stake.

Warner retains 40% of its shares and still enjoys certain corporate powers.

As for why Namco invested in Atari?

This matter is actually very simple.

After the success of "Pac-Man", Namco wanted to truly enter the American market.

They don’t want American companies to represent their games, because seniors like Sony and Toyota have learned from it, opened branches in North America, and sold in the name of the branches, which will allow them to make more money.

And Atari, a company with supreme prestige on the North American continent, was the skin they liked, so when Warner couldn't bear it, they took action.

Then, Namco exploded.

According to Namco's vision, they are the saviors of North American players. After they acquired Atari, they could continuously export excellent video games to America.

When the huge wealth of restructuring the market falls on their heads, America will become their back garden, and the tens of millions of players here will become their new leeks, but unfortunately...

Namco signed a capital injection contract with Warner, and Nintendo came to North America with "Super Mario". When the Mario Brothers swept everything with thunder, Namco's dream was shattered. But even so, Namco did not really break through the defense. What really made Nakamura Masaya lose hope in Atari was the trouble caused by Warner, another shareholder in the company.

Steve Ross, who was unwilling to give up video games, intervened in all aspects of Atari's daily operations. At first, Nakamura Masaya wanted to suppress it, but when he found that almost no one at Atari listened to him, he decided I lost interest and patience in Atari.

He directly gave up the original capital injection plan and began to sell the stocks in his hands.

At this moment, a guy named Hideyuki Nakajima appeared.

Hideyuki Nakajima is an American Neon man who joined Atari ten years ago.

At that time, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, who had just achieved success in the video game industry, wanted to open up the neon market, so he asked his lawyer to recommend a branch office that could be stationed in the neon area for a long time. General manager. That lawyer happened to be Nakajima Hideyuki's brother, so the two of them staged a drama of not avoiding relatives, and successfully made Nakajima Hideyuki the neon president of Atari.

However, due to serious mistakes in its business direction, Atari Neon fell into a situation out of control not long after it was founded. Because Nolan Bushnell had no money at that time and could not afford the high cost of overseas branches. investment, so he wanted to sell the branch.

The person who took over the deal at the time was also Namco, who wanted to enter the video game industry.

It was precisely because of this takeover that Namco tasted the sweetness. With its neon attributes, they could easily pry open the neon video game market. Therefore, when Warner wanted to sell Atari ten years later, they I can't wait to buy it, but I didn't expect that Steve Ross's methods are much better than Nolan Bushnell's. With just one move, he beat Namco to the point of indescribable suffering.

After Namco decided to withdraw, Hideyuki Nakajima, who had been in the gaming industry for more than ten years, bought 33% of Atari's shares, leaving the remaining 27%. , was repurchased by Warner Communications at a low price. If the matter ends here, then everything will be just a failure of Namco's investment. But at the same time as Namco's withdrawal, Nakajima Hideyuki sold 13% of his shares to Warner Communications made Steve Ross once again the largest shareholder of Atari.

When this fact emerges...

You don't have to be a fool to know that.

Hideyuki Nakajima is the man with the special code who belongs to Steve Ross!

From the very beginning, Namco was encouraged to enter Atari's business just to defraud them of their money!

And Steve Ross's behavior also made him a vanguard in the confrontation between the United States and Japan.

After that, his strong record of cheating Sony and defeating Panasonic made his name recorded in the glorious history of the confrontation between the United States and Japan, because when the Neon people clamored to sell Tokyo and buy the United States, Undertaker Rose only relied on One person took away more than three billion US dollars in cash from those Japanese companies.

But unfortunately, the legend that belongs to Steve Ross is not that he tricked Sony into acquiring Columbia, nor was it that Panasonic lost billions on Universal because of the support, but after tricking Namco, Shi Steve Roth beats Nintendo again with Atari.

After regaining ownership of Atari, Steve Ross discovered that Nintendo had become the king of the current entertainment industry. If they wanted to make money, they had to rely on Nintendo's entertainment platform and publish games on it. In the beginning, Atari was indeed doing business seriously, because after cheating Namco, they obtained the North American sales rights for a bunch of games from Namco, such as "Pac-Man" , as long as they port those games to the Famicom, they can make a lot of money.

But when Nintendo introduced the royalty system, firmly blocking Atari's cassette manufacturing rights and taking a large amount of profits into its arms, the unbearable Steve Ross, like countless others, wanted to lift the cassette manufacturing rights. Overturning Nintendo's rule, they began to try to crack the Famicom.

I want to develop my own chip that can run on red and white machines.

Perhaps because Nintendo really has some hard power, Atari's cracking work did not go very smoothly. Therefore, a group of lawyers from Warner Communications came up with a way to go directly to the U.S. Patent and Copyright Office to request Nintendo Intellectual property patent application form, view the machine design drawings and code source files submitted by Nintendo to apply for machine patents.

Because in America’s copyright laws, as long as a company feels that a certain registered patent may infringe on its rights, or that a certain patent will become key evidence in a lawsuit, it feels that it has been infringed. Or a company that will go to court can issue an application to the Patent and Copyright Office and directly view all the information about that patent.

And under the condition that they swear not to leak it, they can even make copies of those things and take them away.

Therefore, when there was a huge loophole in the US copyright protection law, Atari, controlled by Warner, directly bypassed the cracking work and obtained the design drawings and cartridge verification process of the Nintendo Famicom.

Then, they made a game cartridge that was exactly the same as the official one.

When this happens...

Warner can unscrupulously produce video games that can run on the Famicom!

Warner did the same thing, releasing games related to the Nintendo Famicom.

This situation made Nintendo extremely angry. Hiroshi Yamauchi even said that he would tear Steve Ross into pieces with his own hands. While Minoru Arakawa, the president of Nintendo of America in North America, came forward to sue, Steve Ross had asked Atari to counter-sue Nintendo. , saying that their royalty system is suspected of monopolizing the market.

Because there was someone behind Steve Ross, the California court actually issued an injunction, requiring Nintendo to prohibit threatening distributors in any way, including but not limited to charging high access fees and requiring sellers to sign exclusive supply contracts with itself. Agreements and exclusivity clauses.

Although Nintendo lifted the ban through appeal, Steve Ross still sold a large number of cartridges. In just three months, they made a profit of 40 million.

At the same time, Steve Ross, together with Milowa and other companies, launched a class action lawsuit against Nintendo, saying that Nintendo had infringed on their game operation, color coding, memory chips, video conversion and other patents.

In order to travel lightly and not want to delay too much time on such frivolous lawsuits, Nintendo reached settlements with those companies very quickly and lost a large sum of money.

Because if those patent infringement lawsuits are not resolved, then Nintendo will not be able to prove that its machines enjoy complete patent protection, and it will not be able to sue Atari for infringing its patents.

After dealing with the disaster caused by Steve Ross, Nintendo was finally able to send Atari to the dock. However, as soon as their indictment was issued, Steve Ross, who was backed by the CBS Network, again It set off a storm of public opinion. Almost all the media in the United States called Nintendo a fraud group, saying that they had brought spiritual addiction to countless teenagers in America.

Even the U.S. Congress, under the pull of Steve Ross, directly intervened to investigate Nintendo's monopoly behavior and designated Nintendo's operations as a monopoly without holding a hearing. Force Nintendo to pay compensation to Nintendo players across the country and promise to abandon its harsh censorship system.

When things came to this point, Nintendo's monopoly in America no longer existed. At Nintendo's insistence, Atari, who was the first to break the rules, also received due punishment. Their behavior of stealing Nintendo patents was A federal court ruled it was illegal.

To ordinary people, Steve Ross's behavior of working hard but getting nothing is simply to accompany his wife and lose the army, but in fact... On the second day after being ruled illegal by the court, Tianyuan under the name of Atari The company, the puppet company that caused the tsunami, declared bankruptcy.

At the same time, all the drawings for the Nintendo Famicom appeared around the world.

Yes.

Steve Ross directly published Nintendo's patented code and machine design.

Since then, piracy organizations with high quality have really emerged in the video game industry.

…………

When Ethan recalled these facts, he knew what Steve Ross and his group wanted to do. They want to go beyond themselves and directly produce games that can run on Johnson's home console, thereby embarking on the fast track of not paying royalties.

And this kind of thing...

"Ethan, I suggest suing directly." Archmage Barbara, who rushed back to California, suggested: "We have to nip the whole thing in the bud and never let them launch the game."

"Because once a product that can bypass authorization appears on the market, countless merchants will be tempted to take shortcuts. Now, the reason why Johnson home consoles are not pirated is because everyone in the industry knows that going against you is a dead end. One, but if Steve Ross starts this..."

"Even if he is killed by us in the end, other people will have other ideas."

"They will definitely commit crimes if they want to make quick money."

Barbara had no problem with that.

Because the bottom line cannot be easily broken.

Now, no one in America dares to offend him. That’s because when he goes crazy, he attacks anyone he sees. No one can accept the reshuffling of the industry order in Hollywood and the trampling of industry processes in Wall Street.

But once someone takes the lead in charging, standing in front and attracting firepower...

The other guys will definitely swarm you.

Not to mention anything else, those like Philips, MGM, Disney, and General Tire who have a grudge against their destiny game will definitely take the opportunity to steal the chicken.

Therefore, nipping the danger in the bud is what Ethan must do.

But now...

"Do you have a good solution?"

Ethan, who was leaning on the sofa, tilted his head and looked at Barbara.

This question made Barbara stunned.

Because everything at the moment is their guess.

Before Taidong, or Steve Ross, officially took action, they really couldn't prove that these people had violated their interests. As for the U.S. Patent and Copyright Office, there are loopholes in implementation?

That involves legislative issues.

It's a confrontation with the Federation.

Not the key to the moment.

so……

"We are civilized people, right?"

"We can't attack people with assumptions, right?"

"Furthermore, Taitong is a neon company. Even if they get the design drawings of our company's products and we want to sue, it will be a transnational lawsuit."

"And before they have no illegal facts..."

“How do we implement transnational litigation?”

"Do you think the courts in Neon will accept it?"

“Where did the litigation evidence we submitted come from?”

Ethan smiled.

He looked at Barbara calmly.

Although Ethan was indeed angry for a long time after learning that Steve Ross had flipped the table, but when he calmed down, he knew that the current crisis might be the last battle between them.

When Steve Ross began to use the power of rules without respecting martial ethics, he actually had no options, let alone an escape route. As long as he was killed directly, the conflict between the two parties could be completely resolved.

Therefore, Ethan calmed down instead.

And his words also made Barbara scratch her head. After discovering that what Ethan said was true, the great mage who had helped Ethan many times said immediately: "So you just want to wait like this?"

"Waiting for everything to happen gradually?"

"But that would be very detrimental to us."

The answer made Ethan laugh out loud.

"Who said I have to wait?"

"Isn't Hiroshi Yamauchi still in Palo Alto?"

"Since he dares to tell me about this matter, it proves that he has a solution."

"So, now we should listen to his thoughts."

"Give him a chance." (End of chapter)