Reborn America, this is my time

Chapter 156 "Fate Cube"

Anyone who has experienced the baptism of the computer age, witnessed the development of the Internet age, and embraced the arrival of the mobile Internet age should know that the game "Northern Tetris"...

That is God!

Needless to say!I understand everything!Just blow it up and it's over!

As one of the greatest video games since the birth of video games, "Northland Tetris" is different from other popular video games.Like "Snake", that is to eat the dividends of Nokia's era of world domination; The first application-style exploration of artificial intelligence in the field of science and technology not only opened the eyes of the public, but also made the academic circle pay attention to it; and "Northern Square"...

It has neither enjoyed the dividends of the times——

Because before it came out, there were puzzle-type video games.

It didn't reach the extreme heat either—

The one that can subvert an entire industry like "Star Wars" is called "Avatar".

It also doesn't have a topic that can make academic circles talk about——

Well, there is, but the research effect it produced is something that happened after the game became popular for many years, and it did not attract the attention of many parties as soon as "Pac-Man" was launched.

The point is, it also has a background that is not good for publicity——

The nationality of game inventors and the place where games are born have been resisted by the West.

But even so, it still occupied the whole world with a devastating momentum!
This kind of success is really hard-won than all other games!
As for why it works...

To be honest, Ethan didn't know either.

In Ethan's memory, he should have seen the game "Northern Cube" when he was in elementary school. When he saw the game, his first reaction was to utter simple words with his immature mouth——

"Hang! What game is this?"

Since many years have passed, he can no longer remember the people and events at that time, but he can still recall the feeling when he saw the game for the first time. The game method of manipulating and eliminating seems not as refreshing as fighting and killing, but it can always make him feel itchy.

When playing games, he will be delighted by the success of elimination, rack his brains because of gaps, excited by breaking difficulties, and even disappointed by Game Over.

Even though he is a human being in two lifetimes, Ethan can't tell where the real charm of the game is, but the fact that it has been popular year after year is constantly proving one thing to the world——

"MFxxk!!! Ethan! — This is the new game you came up with???"

When Ethan took two hours to make the extremely simple game overview and game interface concept map of "Northland Tetris", Evelyn, who saw the inspiration, almost gave up the blueprint in her hand!
The girl raised her head abruptly, her beautiful eyes staring like copper bells.

The astonished gaze was like a sharp knife, as if it wanted to dissect the boy in front of him.

Ethan, who was sitting on the reception chair in front of the desk, rubbed his hands with a smile, then crossed them, and said, "Yeah~ This is the new game I want~"

"How about it, am I a genius?" He blinked his eyes and asked cheerfully.

"Genius? Is this something that a genius can think of?" The girl shook the draft paper in her hand, and said loudly: "Oh! Sxxt! Why do you have such an inspiration?"

"Do not--"

"You can be inspired like that!"

"But how can you come up with such inspiration continuously!"

The girl at the moment is very puzzled!

She was very curious about how the guy's brain grew!

Although in the past few years, she only doubted the source of his inspiration when he played games with Ethan for the first time. At that time, Ethan had just been fired by Mi Luohua, so she worried that "Snake" was Mi Luo's inspiration. Hua already had ideas.And after Mi Luohua would rather bomb them with a patented nuclear bomb than claim that "Snake" was their idea, the girl completely dispelled her doubts about plagiarism.However, this does not mean that she can accept Ethan's ideas endlessly...

In the past three years, she was really going crazy!

She regards "Snake" as the product of Ethan's flash of inspiration;

Considering "Pac-Man" as a variant of "Snake" and an extension of the gameplay, although she herself does not know why a game like "Snake" can become "Pac-Man";
And the source of inspiration for "Star Wars" is also relatively clear in her mind, because they watched the filming process of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" together, and the movie "Star Wars" does exist;

But even so, when she saw the game marked "Fate Cube"...

She still found that she could no longer make up a reasonable reason for Ethan!

Now she feels that Ethan's brain is a black hole!
Pick it up and shake it, maybe you can shake out countless gold!

And when the girl stared at Ethan in surprise, almost holding a knife in her hand, and wanted to dissect him, the boy who was staring at her shrugged.

"No way, Evelyn."

"There are many things in this world that ordinary people cannot do in their lifetime."

"Among them is the head-up god."

He pointed to himself.

He continued: "Many times, I squat down to communicate with you from a head-up perspective, and doing so will not only make me feel physically tired, but also make me feel mentally tired."

"So at some point I will also relax appropriately, stand up and look down for a while."

"Like now."

He pointed to the inspiration draft in Evelyn's hand.

The look of that stinky fart made Evelyn's face darken.

After looking at Ethan for a moment, the girl suddenly raised the corners of her mouth and smiled sweetly.

She threw the manuscript paper in her hand on the table, folded her hands and leaned back.

"Then it's your show time."

"What?" Ethan didn't understand, and his eyebrows were slightly frowned with a look of confusion.

Evelyn raised her chin and tapped a few times on the table, "Don't you call yourself a god?"

"Then how to turn inspiration into reality is your own business."

"In the past few years, if you didn't make games by yourself, I will treat you as a gamer who is too lazy to do it."

"Now that you've stopped pretending and revealed your identity, then..."

"You can do it yourself."

"Oh, by the way, you can make the design of the home console yourself."

"I quit!"

Saying that, the girl got up with a smile and walked out of the desk.

He slightly bowed and made a gesture of invitation.

Seeing that the corner of Ethan's mouth was twitching and still not moving, she stepped forward and took Ethan's arm.

I just want to take Ethan behind the desk.

"Hey hey-don't pull me, don't pull me-I'm joking-"

"Really? I don't believe it."

"No—what's so hard to believe? I'm obviously bragging—"

"I think you can."

"Oh Evelyn - oh my dear sister - I was wrong - don't push me -"

"Who pushed you? I am asking you to take the position of chairman of the company in a friendly manner! From now on, you are the chairman, CEO and president of the company, and I... quit~"

When Ethan sat on the seat that belonged to her under the half push of the girl, the view blocked by the data drawings made Ethan feel the girl's work perspective for the first time.

Turning around, the girl's left hand was on her hips and her right hand was propped up on the table, half leaning there to beckon him to hurry up, the overseer's appearance made the boy dumbfounded——

"Okay, Okay, I got this idea yesterday."

Ethan surrendered and said, "Didn't we go to see the farmland we own yesterday? When you told me that our land stretches from Los Gatos to Cupertino, my mind went A huge map appeared, a strip-shaped map..."

"On that map, there are areas of different colors, white, red, and black."

"The white ones are our land, and the red ones are public lands owned by the government. As for the black ones, those are other plots that can be traded..."

"At that time, I was thinking, how great would it be if I could buy all those lands?"

"So, I had a dream last night. Under our purchase, those lands continued to spread, and eventually filled the entire map."

"When I woke up, I was shocked by my great idea, and I decided to make a game of filling the map, but after thinking about it, just filling it doesn't make much sense, so I slapped my head and decided Change the way the game is played, and then..."

""Fate Cube" also appeared..."

Although Ethan didn't think about the shock that the game "Northland Tetris" would bring to Evelyn before he came, he even thought that Evelyn should have accepted his Tinkerbell attribute long ago, so he did not think about it at all. He didn't find a source for his inspiration, but when Evelyn was eager to know how he designed the game, he was still able to make up a story in a short time.

Eh--

no way!
Who made him rely on lip service in his previous life?If those investors were not made happy, how could those guys willingly open their pockets to him?
And his words made the corner of the girl's mouth twitch.

"Too fake." She gave her own evaluation with a look of disgust.

"You might as well say that God entrusted you with a dream." The girl said.

"That's what the old man entrusted to me in a dream!" Ethan knelt quickly.

"..." Such shameless behavior almost choked the girl to death.

Staring at the serious nonsense guy, Evelyn panted and shook her head, raised her hand and gave Ethan two punches, then sat directly on the desk, picked up the idea and continued to read.

Although she was still a little out of breath, Ethan knew that the girl was no longer obsessed with the source of inspiration, and after Evelyn looked carefully, the delicate face continued to gather seriousness.

"What's wrong? Is there a problem?" Ethan thumped in his heart.

"Yes." The girl didn't joke anymore, and slid off the table directly.

Spread the drawings on the table, pointing to the seven squares drawn by Ethan and asked: "Ethan, in your imagination, this game is a elimination game, right? There will be seven kinds of squares from top to bottom. Appearing in the game interface, the player needs to manipulate the cube and place it in a suitable position, when a row in the interface is filled, the filled row will be automatically eliminated, right?"

"Yes. What's the matter?" Ethan was puzzled.

The gameplay of Northland Tetris is as simple as that.

It is precisely because it is easy to use that it can kill all ages.

This minimalism is actually the real reason why a thing can quickly become popular.

When a game can bring the simplest happiness to the world across the barriers of language, race, and even civilization, then it will definitely become a classic.

Of course, this kind of thing is easy to say, but extremely difficult to do.

And following Ethan's nod, Evelyn also bent down and opened her desk drawer.

I copied a MOS 6502 chip from it and threw it on the table.

"The game can do it, but it can't support it."

"What do you mean?"

"It's simple."

Evelyn, who was in the working state, spoke very quickly. She pointed to the printed characters on the MOS 6502 chip and said: "The chip we are using now can no longer support your inspiration. The MOS 6502 we are currently using is 1.79MHz. 1 megahertz is equivalent to 1000 kilohertz, which is equivalent to ten to the sixth power of hertz, and 1.79 megahertz means that it can complete 179 million computing cycles per second."

"When I got it two years ago, I found that its performance was not comparable to that of Intel and Motorola, but because it was cheap, and the games we made were... simple? So I didn't care." The girl almost bit her tongue when she said the word 'simple'.

Because she knows, whether it's Pac-Man or Star Wars, it's not easy.

But this is not important. After quickly uncovering this stubble, she continued: "In fact, when developing "Pac-Man" and "Star Wars", I already felt that the 6502 was reaching its limit."

"If it weren't for the fact that the 6502 doesn't use microcode for sequencing, but uses programmable logic devices for instruction decoding and sequencing, so that the chip has some overlap in fetching and executing, I dare say that this chip is as good as "Star Wars". Can’t even make a game.”

""Pac-Man" is just a four-threaded search, plus four powerful pills at most, and "Star Wars" is a spaceship that constantly attacks the player in a dynamic search. Now, you let me make seven squares The random operation of... this... I think it needs at least 4MHz speed..."

"1.79MHz...you are embarrassing the chip..."

Ethan understood what the girl meant.

After personally experiencing the fact that the GTX690 tactical core graphics card was eliminated overnight by Leather Yellow, he certainly understands how important computing power is in the game industry.

In other words, without video games, the computer industry would never develop crazily, because the gaming industry’s demand for performance is never-ending. The performance output can be quickly eaten by the game.

Although the society has always had a certain prejudice against people who "stinky play games", if players who do not play games pay, and nothing else, Lao Huang can't wait for the day when he will use computing power to slaughter the world. After all , Nvidia makes artificial intelligence money...

That's contributed by gamers all over the world!

The results of it?
Are graphics cards getting more expensive?

Special code!
However, hardware issues were not a problem for Ethan.

No way, who makes him a small hardware manufacturer now?
Hehe ~
"Oh, is that so? Then I'll call Chuck Paddle."

Ethan said: "Let him customize a chip for us, that should work, right?"

Ethan felt that the problem could be solved by touching his mouth, but Evelyn shook her head and said, "Customized chips can indeed solve the problem, but it will also create more problems."

"First of all, the first question is how do you want to release this game?"

"If it's still an arcade way, then there is no problem with custom chips, because it can be designed individually, but if it's a home game machine way, then my previous drawings are all for nothing."

"I designed the machine according to 1.79 megahertz, and now you suddenly change the machine standard to 4 megahertz, then everything has to be done again."

"Then the second question, although you have a stake in Chuck Pidro Chip Manufacturing Company, and MOS Company has a good relationship with us, but the increase in chip computing power will definitely increase the cost. Home game consoles Everything has to be redone, including pricing."

Evelyn looked at Ethan with her hands on the table.

A few strands of blond hair that came out of the rubber band dangled in front of the two of them.

'Fuck! '

Ethan cursed in his heart.

'How did I forget about this? '

His sister's reminder made him frown slightly.

Making a home console game is not the same as making an arcade game.

The former is a conditional proposition composition.

The latter is a divergent novel that can be imagined infinitely.

When machines have functional limitations, all games have to be produced under limited conditions. If not, there will be no concept of next-generation games in the world.

No one can break this threshold unless——

Host manufacturers themselves have to replace it.

Although Ethan can ask his sister to redesign it at will, and Evelyn will probably just beat him up and then expose the matter, but... the increase in cost will bring trouble to the pricing of the machine.

"Our current list price is $199.99?"

Ethan asked: "A machine with two joysticks and two games?"

"I designed it according to this standard."

Evelyn replied: "Two games, a single game is 109.99 dollars, the cost here is 6502 dollars, and the sales cost is 15.00 dollars, and the rest I can use is only [-] dollars. If we continue to use [-] for twelve dollars a piece, I can control the cost at about [-], which means that our profit for the first single machine is [-]%.”

"This profit is already very low, much lower than that of arcade machines."

"Although we can earn back by selling games later, but—"

"If the price of chips is raised, we may be selling at a loss."

"Unless the price is increased, or games are reduced."

This fact made Ethan purse his lips.

He thought for a while and said, "We can't raise the price."

"$199.99 is the limit."

"Games can't be reduced anymore. Even if our games are fun, people will feel that they are losing money if they sell a game for $199.99 per machine."

"So?" Evelyn tilted her head and looked at Ethan.

At the same time, she also gave her own thoughts.

"So we still make this game in an arcade way?"

This proposal made Ethan lean back, a little tangled.

　Note: ① The scientific community has researched on "Northland Square", but the official research was done in 1994, and its influence in the academic circle is indeed not as great as that of "Pac-Man". ②Atari used the oldest version of 6502 to make "Little Bee" and "Pac-Man", but "Northern Cube" was really impossible to make. I found out that the chip equipped with "North Cube" is The Zilog Z80 used by ZX Spectrum is also an 8-bit chip, but its computing power is 3.5MHz, and I checked it, and the performance of "Northland Square" on it is relatively poor.When Nintendo, the most stingy in the industry, launched "Northern Square", the Game Boy used a 4.19MHz chip. This kind of near-real infinite game is still different from the game of breaking through the level.

　　
　
(End of this chapter)