Return to Singapore 1995

Bao Yueqiao asked doubtfully: "Director Li, why do we still want to build an online literature platform?"

At the end of last year, Chinese-American William Zhu founded the country's first Chinese-language literature portal "Under the Banyan Tree".

On March 22 this year, Tsai, a ruffian from Taiwan, posted "First Intimate Contact" on the Internet and caused a stir. It ignited the first fire of Chinese online literature and made the term "Internet Literature" a smash hit. Literature began to enter readers’ horizons.

"Mr. Bao, I wonder if you have ever played the MUD game "Eastern Story 2 Celestial Empire", "Quake" or "Legendary War of Overlords", which are very classic games nowadays. The story backgrounds in these games are very grand. . I predict that in the future, in addition to card games, massively multiplayer online role-playing games like "Legend" will be very popular. My plan is that we build an online literature platform that encourages the creation of martial arts, fantasy and Western fantasy content, create a VIP charging model, and encourage more young netizens to use their unbridled imagination and creativity to our Use the online literature platform to write and prepare for the future development of our own massively multiplayer online role-playing game..."

When Li Xiaofan said these words, in his impression, by around 2003 in his previous life, Lianzhong had become the largest online game entertainment website in the world at that time. It has more than 200 million registered users and 15 million monthly active users, occupying 85% of the market share.

But in the summer of 2003, Tencent QQ Game was released. With its strong traffic and promotion advantages, it quickly rose to the top and seized most of Lianzhong's market share.

At that time, Korean online game companies began to enter the mainland. South Korea's NHN Group acquired 50% of the equity of Lianzhong for US$100 million, successively introduced the games "Lingyouji" and "Xiongba", and launched the self-developed game "Jingwu World". The company entered the Korean market. The era of domination.

However, at that time, the online game market was filled with fierce competition. Lianzhong's performance was poor. In 2009, its total revenue was only more than 20 million yuan and its net loss was more than 10 million yuan.

In the previous life, there is no doubt that Lianzhong was the first to become famous among domestic game websites and had a large number of loyal players. However, they were too focused on chess and card games and ignored the rise of large-scale graphic online game software, which allowed Shanda to gain Chances of success…

The MUD games mentioned by Li Xiaofan are the general term for text-based online games. They are also the earliest online games. They have no graphics and are all composed of text and character paintings. They are usually martial arts themes, such as the famous Fengyun, Shujian, Heroes, etc.

The 1UD game "Eastern Story 2: Celestial Empire" was launched four years ago. This game can be regarded as the first MUD game with a martial arts background.

However, in addition to the original content of martial arts, this game also adds a lot of fantasy elements.

This game made Fang Zhouzi, who was studying abroad, very dissatisfied. This was not the martial arts arena he wanted. After that, he gathered Master Xiang, Shikong, Ding, Grass Carp and others to form a team, developed another text MUD game "Xia Ke Xing", and operated it in North America...

Bao Yueqiao thought for a moment and said: "Director Li, after you said this, I have played a MUD game called "Beida Xia Ke Xing" before."

Two years ago, Fang Zhouzi's server for "Xia Ke Xing" was attacked by a hacker and all the programs were copied away...

After discussing countermeasures, Fang Zhouzi and others decided to simply open source the source code of "Xia Ke Xing".

Soon, this string of code spread to the country, and a series of MUD games based on the knight behavior template were derived. In this wave of MUD, "Beida Xia Ke Xing", which is installed on a server at Peking University, has become the leader.

At that time, accessing the Internet was still a very luxury thing. Text-only MUD games have become a beacon in the wave of online entertainment, igniting the passion of the older generation of netizens. By using up to hundreds of commands instead of simple key operations to control the characters for play, and using pure words to create a soul-stirring picture of the world in the player's mind, the MUD game "Beida Xia Ke Xing" was once the first It is very popular among contemporary netizens, and Jin Yong's style of writing ignited their martial arts dreams.

In a previous life, there was a saying among college students in Beijing universities who had access to the Internet: You may not have heard of the President of the United States, but you must have played Knight Rider!

…

Time flies, and the New Year's Day of 1999 is here in a blink of an eye.

After New Year's Day, Li Xiaofan noticed that the National Internet Network Information Center CNNIC released the third "Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet": As of December 31, 1998, there were 750,000 computers with Internet access in China and 2.1 million Internet users. , the number of domain names registered under CN has reached 18,400, and there are about 5,300 WWW sites.

In January of this year, China Telecom and the Economic Information Center of the State Economic and Trade Commission jointly held the "Government Internet Project Launch Conference" in Beijing in conjunction with the information authorities of more than 40 ministries and commissions, and initiated the launch of the "Government Internet Project". The main site is open for trial operation.

At the same time, the satellite backbone network of CERNET, the national education and scientific research computer network, was fully operational, greatly improving the network's operating speed. In the same month, China Science and Technology Network CSTNET launched two satellite systems, completely replacing the old system and connecting to more than 40 cities across the country using high-speed satellite channels.

Looking at these data, Li Xiaofan knew that the domestic Internet boom was beginning!

In early January 1999, a tavern in Shichahai, Beijing.

It was snowing heavily that day, and a group of people were drinking and crying, and in the end they sang "Real Hero" together.

After singing "Real Hero", the short boy with red face in the lead said to everyone in tears:

"Last time, when I left Beijing, I didn't allow others to go back to Hangzhou with me. But now I want to tell you: I brought you to Beijing before, but this time I want to go back to Hangzhou and start a new business again. ! Now, what I want to say is, first, you can stay in Beijing, you can join NetEase, you can join Sohu, I can call you for recommendations, it should not be a big problem, and the salary will be very high; second, you can If you stay and work in a big agency in the capital, you will be very stable and the salary will be good..."

"There is one last option: you can follow me back to Hangzhou to start a business. The monthly salary for each person may only be a few hundred yuan. There may be no rest days in the first year of starting a business with me. After returning to Hangzhou, the office where we work will only It can be in my home. We may not be able to rent an office for a while. At first, we will Very poor. But if it succeeds, it may be a great undertaking that has never been done before! Give me ten months. If it fails after 10 months, we will go our separate ways. If it does not fail, we will continue. Go ahead, please think carefully for three days and let me know if you decide!”

At this time, a tall boy suddenly came in and shouted to the short boy with red face: "Teacher Ma, I will not let you suffer poverty!"