Chapter 29: Digging People from All Sides

  "It's not satisfying enough!"

  In the second-floor development hall, he tried out "Gem Puzzle" and furrowed his brow. He could only let out a helpless sigh - the feel of using the joystick was much worse than when he used to use touch screens or mice.

  "Boss, what's wrong?" Dabieli, who had just been chosen as the leader of the "Gemstone Labyrinth" development team, saw Jester like this and thought there was a problem with his production, so he couldn't help but ask with some concern.

  "No."

  Jester shook his head and said, "It has nothing to do with you guys. I made a mistake from the very beginning of designing this game. I didn't notice that it's not suitable for operation with a joystick, which greatly reduces the sense of refreshment."

  "Really?" Davy looked at his boss with some confusion, this game had just been made and instantly swept the entire company, almost everyone who played it gave it a thumbs up. And there was something that made Davy very curious, from the tone of his boss's voice, he seemed to have played this game before? This is impossible, after all, they had just finished making the alpha version, did his boss make it himself beforehand?

  "It's just okay to operate with a joystick, this game is mainly testing eyesight, making judgments in the moment you see it, and then quickly selecting and eliminating, this can bring out the greatest pleasure of the game. But with a joystick, unless you have extremely fast hand speed, most people's control speed can't keep up with their eyesight." Jest muttered to himself, "I wonder if I could replace the joystick in 'Gem Puzzle' with a mouse?"

  The mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart, a 1997 Turing Award winner who was then working at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International), in 1964. However, it wasn't until recently that the mouse became widely known. This is thanks to Xerox Corporation allowing Steve Jobs to see their new system's technical demonstration. The demo left this century's greatest copycat in a state of utter shock, and he realized that the graphical operating system and mouse demonstrated by Xerox were the future of computers, while what Apple was doing was just a pile of worthless crap.

  After Jobs returned to Apple, the company that had been stagnant for thirty years with a tradition of copying, suddenly became extremely valuable and immediately poached over a dozen engineers from Xerox. Three years later, they produced their first mouse-based computer, Lisa.

  Xerox had previously released their own first computer with a graphical user interface and mouse, the Xerox Star 8010, which was also the first time ordinary people had access to a mouse, but due to its high price, sales were not good. Nevertheless, the mouse caused a stir due to its convenient operation.

  It was under such circumstances that Apple's Lisa was born, quickly occupying the market with its low price. After the upgraded version of Macintosh computer was released, it shocked the world and finally wiped out the shame of Apple II's defeat in the competition with Commodore 64.

  The success of the Macintosh is due to the combination of graphical operations and mouse, because these two are really too convenient to use together. You don't need to learn those complex operation languages at all, you just need to know how to click the mouse.

  Back then, Apple was basically synonymous with "dummy", and truly skilled programmers wouldn't deign to use an Apple.

  Of course, the times are developing, and bad money drives out good. In the era before Jestre's rebirth, Apple had already occupied the mainstream of fashion and became a high-end product that people flocked to.

  Things have turned upside down now.

  "Mouse?" Dabiri also heard his boss's muttering to himself, and he was simulating the scene of playing this game with a mouse in his mind. He had used Apple's Macintosh computer before, and the mouse was indeed very convenient and fast to use. This simple brain simulation made Dabiri extremely surprised, and he seemed to have found that his boss's proposal was excellent.

  "It seems all right!" he said.

  But Jester shook his head, the idea of a arcade machine paired with a computer was just too weird for him, as an aesthete he subconsciously rejected this design scheme that had no beauty to it, unless there was no other way.

  How about using pseudo-touch screen?

  The pseudo-touch screen means it's not a touch screen, and the specific technical details are not very clear. However, he remembers that Nintendo released a similar toy on the FC, where players could operate the game through touch control on a dedicated controller, which is actually the same effect as using a handle to produce electrical signals for control.

  To put it simply, can a 10x10 or 8x8 control panel be designed so that each small grid produces an independent electrical signal when touched, allowing the game program to identify and control the elimination?

  Jester simply told Davy about his own idea.

  Dabi is just a college student who has just graduated from university, and only joined Mars Entertainment due to his strong passion for electronic games. He is extremely skilled in programming, but like Jester, hardware is not his specialty, so he can't explain the pros and cons of this design.

  However, he still reserved his opinion and said: "This idea is not bad, but personally I think that the mouse you first proposed is the most suitable for operating this game, unless we can directly press these colored pixel blocks on the screen, otherwise it won't be more convenient than a mouse!"

  "Alright then, I'll go ask the hardware department in a bit. If it's feasible, we can each make a prototype to test the effect."

  Jiest also hesitated, not because of the mouse operation, but just because of its appearance. As a person from the future, he really didn't want to make a street machine with a mouse, which would give those online trolls an excuse to mock him in the future.

  But Jester didn't think much of his own idea either.

  Whether it's a hundred grids or sixty-four grids control panel, for players, it's too much trouble, which is contrary to his original intention of designing the game - simplicity and joy.

  Later, Jester also tried playing the alpha version of "Puzzle Bobble" and "Zuma", these two games that are essentially not much different in nature performed just as well on the arcade machine with a joystick as they did when he played them on his computer, the operation was very convenient, and the elimination was also very refreshing. However, these two games were different from "Gem Puzzle", which only required a fixed chessboard grid diagram, but these two required different levels.

  And the levels made by these new designers, after Jest played them, can only be said to be ordinary, not particularly outstanding. However, from the changes in several levels, it can be seen that they have made progress in design, which is also a redeeming quality.

  But fortunately, Jester's brain still remembers a lot about the levels of this type of elimination game, and selecting a dozen or so most representative ones is not a difficult task. Moreover, these types of levels have many common ideas in design, and I believe that as long as they see the new designs for themselves, these extremely talented designers will naturally be able to find shortcuts to designing similar levels.

  In short, Jester is still satisfied with the development progress of these three games and also very satisfied with the abilities of these newly recruited designers.

  As for hardware development, it's going very smoothly, especially with arcade machines.

  The initial eight-bit arcade motherboard also brought out samples, which are now being used in the game development department to develop those three elimination games.

  However, this is not the final product, but rather a castrated version of a universal baseboard they are working on. According to Jester's father, the final product will take about two months to complete, which is actually quite fast. The 8-bit arcade machine has already matured in design, and Jester's father has recruited elites from Atari and other arcade manufacturers, so it's not difficult to make.

  But a new motherboard requires very tedious debugging and many design compatibility issues need to be solved, it's already very fast to finish in two months.

  However, the development of home consoles encountered some difficulties. Everything else was fine, but Jester's requirement for a stronger graphics processing capability than the FC was a challenge for these hardware elites from Atari, not that they couldn't solve it.

  They can solve hardware compatibility issues, they can also solve circuit architecture problems, even if the processing power is twice as strong as FC's graphics. The problem is that this cost is too high.

  "What the heck is this quote from Intel?"

  Jester was also furious after hearing the response from Matthew Marcus, a former VCS 7200 project lead designer he poached from Atari.

  Intel's Lion opened its mouth, and Jester wanted a special PPU for graphics processing, which was an image processor. The R&D cost was $50 million, and each chip would cost $20. At least 2 million chips had to be purchased, but what Jester couldn't tolerate the most was that the copyright of this chip still belonged to Intel.

  "Can't you do a decent PPU without me?" Jester fumed, cursing the Intel engineers and then turning to Matthew Marcus, "What about the other chip makers? Texas Instruments? Motorola? Qualcomm?"

  "Texas Instruments, they are not very interested in our project and they are currently gathering elites to tackle some special projects, so they don't have time to help us develop it in the short term. If we insist, they said that the earliest possible would be at the end of the year, but this conflicts with your requirement of launching by the end of the year. Motorola is not interested in this either, but they agreed to do OEM if we have a design scheme, and the price is not high... As for Qualcomm you mentioned..." Matthew Marcus furrowed his brow, thought for a moment, shrugged and said "I've never heard of it."

  It wasn't until then that Jester realized, in the future, along with Intel and Texas Instruments, Qualcomm would be known as one of the world's top three semiconductor companies. But at this time, Qualcomm had not yet been founded; it wouldn't be established until July next year by Irwin Jacobs and his seven friends.

  Time is pressing!

  Jester knows how cheap the PPU is in FC of Hell's Gate.

  To get such a cheap PPU, Satoru Iwata signed a contract with Ricoh at the beginning of its development, for at least 3 million units. To put that into perspective, there were only 3 million home video game consoles in all of Japan at the time!

  In the US, labor costs are several times higher than in Japan, so it's impossible to get a price lower than that of mainland China. Therefore, they must surpass it in terms of performance, so the original VCS7200 didn't meet his expectations.

  Jester left the hardware development department and returned to his own office, thinking all the way, even the initial project plan for "Snowman Brothers" that he was about to do wasn't done.

  Now his mind is all about how to solve the ppu problem he wants.

  A game console's image processing capability is of utmost importance, without exception. If this issue isn't resolved, everything else is pointless.

  "If there were NVIDIA or ATI now, it would be great... and I wouldn't have to worry about the graphics processor..."

  As he thought about it, Jester suddenly slapped his forehead and stood up from the chair. He suddenly remembered that Nvidia was founded in 1992, and its founder, Huang Renxun, a "two bombs and one star" military expert, should still be studying electrical engineering at the University of Oregon this year, just graduating, while ATI's creator He Guoyuan...

  Still an immigrant in Canada who can't find a suitable job!

  Jester recalled the series of books about top Chinese entrepreneurs he had read, which detailed many stories of Chinese entrepreneurship. The story that left the deepest impression on him was that of He Guoyuan, who came from a poor background and built his company, ATI, from scratch, eventually turning it into one of the world's best graphics chip companies.

  In 2006, ATI Technologies was acquired by AMD for $5.4 billion.

  In Jester's memory, Ho Kwok Wing was a Hong Kong immigrant who couldn't find a satisfactory job until 1985 when he got married and, in a fit of anger, set up ATi with his friends.

  Why don't you go look for him yourself?

  He should still be looking for a job in Toronto. As I recall, when He Guoyuan was the general manager of Wong's Computer Company in Hong Kong in 1980, his annual salary was $500,000 USD. However, because this salary was too high, he couldn't find any satisfactory work in Canada. At that time, it was impossible for a Chinese person without any background to receive such an extremely high salary as a professional manager in a white-dominated society.

  It was against this backdrop that Ho Kwan-yuen took out one-third of his savings, a total of $300,000 Canadian dollars, to start his business.

  Now that we know he's in Canada, and his name and Hong Kong immigrant status, it's much easier to find him - once found, the problem of our own image processor will be solved, and we can also have a company that will dominate the world graphics display chip industry for at least twenty years, what's not to be happy about?

  All that's left is to give the headhunting company a call. Professional matters should be handled by professionals, no one can excel in all ten aspects, this has always been Jester's point of view.

  Putting aside the matter of his home computer PPU for now, Jester pulled out a stack of papers from the desk, densely filled with many lines of text and numerous rough sketches. This was the design draft for "Snowman Brothers" that Jester had been working on these past few days, including character designs, gameplay mechanics, story background, and level layouts.

  Still only two snowmen, red and blue, without adding more optional characters like in "Snowman Brothers 2". After all, Jester needs to save some new things for the sequel, can't use up all his ideas on the first one, or else how will he cheat fans out of their money later?

  After reviewing the entire design draft from start to finish, Jester found no major omissions and picked up the phone to call Dabiri of the design team. He asked him to select ten outstanding members to form a small design group to work with him on a brand new game, a big game.

  Davy was thrilled to accept, having already heard rumors about the people following Mark Cerny and hearing some information from their mouths. According to them, Mark Cerny is making a game that is unprecedented, great, and milestone, but they are all tight-lipped, and no matter what they ask, they cannot get any specific news from their mouths.

  But every time they see their smug applications, it's enough to make people like Davy grit their teeth.

  This made Davey extremely jealous, although his boss Jester Lee's three impromptu designs for a match-3 game similar to Tetris during the speech were also very creative and fun, but they were just small games, which can be seen from the size of the game, while Mark Cerny is designing that one, from the mouths of those colleagues who inadvertently heard the news, it's at least 200KB!

  Dabi Li hasn't seen a game as large as 200KB before, even the so-called epoch-making "Defender" wasn't that big.

  And this time, even his own boss said that he wants to start a big game plan. In the eyes of his boss, the big game will definitely not be worse than the one planned by the development director.

  What an extremely rare opportunity it is! Dabi thought so.

  "Starting a company is one thing after another, there's simply no time to do anything else." Jester hung up the phone, complaining nonstop. Now he was still facing the most important thing for his own company, which was that he didn't have his own distribution network yet.

  People from later generations know that a game company without its own network can only be called a game studio, and cannot be called a game giant at all.

  Nowadays I can still rely on the quality of the game to force the publisher, but what about in the future?

  The resurgence of video games is inevitable, even if there was no Atari crash, at that time, publishers and players would have countless choices, and the situation with "Pitfall!" this time would never happen again - this game development company relied on the enthusiasm of players to buy, using those sales companies in the midst of the Atari collapse struggling to support the difficulties, in such a blank period of video games, staged this almost empty-handed operation.

  In essence, this operation of mine is a reversal of the normal order of things, with all the favorable conditions coming together, which will never happen again in the future.

  So, it is necessary to set up its own distribution company, so that the fate of their own tightly grasped in his hands, but also can earn the biggest profit in the game industry.

  As he thought of this, Jester's eyes became more and more determined, his fists clenched tightly.

  It is necessary to establish its own distribution network.

  Let the right people do the right thing, this has always been Jester's principle of doing things. In marketing, he may have seen some cases in later generations, but he is not good at it in essence. He doesn't know how to market or analyze users' general psychology and so on. But he knows that there are many people in the world who are good at these things, what he needs to do is just find them out and let them work for him.

  Of course, in the United States where business competition is extremely fierce, there are specialized agencies that do this kind of thing, so you don't have to worry about it yourself, and these are headhunting companies.

  Juster had previously called a well-known headhunting firm on the West Coast, asking them to help find He Guoyuan in Toronto, Canada and Huang Renxun who had just graduated from college in Oregon. This time, Juster dialed the number again.

  The person who answered the phone was a middle-aged man with a very patient voice.

  "Best are young, passionate, brave to challenge difficulties, good at marketing, and willing to come to a not-so-big but promising company to co-create the future. Marketing experts, if really outstanding, I can offer them partner treatment."

  "Are there any requirements for education and gender?" The middle-aged man asked some questions that were not mentioned in the previous conversation with Jest.

  "No." Jester said bluntly, he knew that marketing didn't require high academic qualifications or a specific gender, he knew many female marketing experts and even CEOs of famous companies with only middle school education, they were all very good at doing marketing, in this field, talent was more important than anything else.

  "Alright, we will fax the list you need as soon as possible," said the middle-aged man. After asking Jester again if he had any other requests and getting a negative response, he bid farewell and hung up the phone.

  Jester, who had just finished all this, didn't have any free time either. He still had a lot of things he needed to do.

  For example, two of its first-party launch titles for the Famicom - Super Mario Bros. and Contra.

  His home console is still unfinished, let alone a development kit based on the home console. In essence, he is fundamentally unable to make these two games.

  But he can still do detailed pre-design for these two games like he did with Snow Bros, and judging from the parameters of home console he gave to the home console development team, there is no problem at all in achieving the effects of these two games.

  And if the PPU that one wants can be completed, then the picture quality will reach the level of Sega MS, this kind of picture is completely crushing FC.

  What I want to do is make a better, more fun and interesting Super Mario and Contra with even better graphics!

  However, just as Miyamoto had finished designing the first level of Super Mario on graph paper, the fax machine in his office suddenly sprang to life with a loud "Bzzt".

  Jester walked over and took a look at the fax. It was from the headhunting company he had called earlier, and they had sent over their initial list of candidates.

  There were dozens of names on the list, each followed by a brief description of the person's age, education and experience.

  Jester roughly scanned from top to bottom, to be honest, he didn't know who to choose among so many people. Looking at the introductions of these people, they were all great, each one was a marketing genius, but he knew that he couldn't just make his decision based on the evaluations given by the headhunting company, he didn't know how much water and half-truths there were in this.

  Suddenly, Jester's gaze stopped on two names. He looked at these two names as if they were somewhat familiar, and he seemed to have heard them somewhere before.

  Both are women, not very old, one is only thirty years old, a master's degree in marketing from the University of Maryland, now working as a project manager at AT&T, the other is only twenty-six years old, but has a master's degree in economics from Harvard University, currently working as a management consultant at Bain & Company, both are middle-level managers in large enterprises.

  "Margaret Whitman... this is... Carly Fiorina..."

  Jester muttered out the two names in a low voice, then his eyes suddenly lit up as he remembered who they were.

  PS: Give me some recommendation votes, thank you.