That's it for Chapter 2!

  That's right, this game is none other than the world-renowned "Super Mario".

  The character of Mario was created by the greatest game designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, in the 1981 classic arcade game Donkey Kong.

  But this character is not the protagonist of this game, although Jumpman was used in last year's Mario Bros. as the theme of the game with his twin brother Luigi, but that was just a static screen clearance game, and this game can't be considered very popular, the gameplay is even somewhat outdated, so now Mario is like the gold digger in Gold Digger, just an unknown game character.

  But all of this will change completely after Super Mario next year.

  One of the most famous characters in human gaming history will be born.

  Shigeru Miyamoto designed an incredible game with his genius brain, and as soon as it was released, it swept the world instantly, whether in Asia, America or Europe, regardless of men, women, old or young, they were all instantly conquered by this side-scrolling platformer, thus becoming a loyal fan of this Italian plumber wearing a red and blue overalls.

  Even in 1990, a survey by American media found that Mario's influence was far greater than Mickey Mouse in the eyes of Americans.

  Mickey Mouse is Disney's logo and in the United States can be said that everyone knows him, he is a household name.

  But thinking carefully, it's easy to understand that this game has sold over 40 million copies on FES alone, with a net profit of tens of billions of dollars. This data is not only unmatched at the time but also in 2014, when Jest came from, there was only one game that broke this record.

  How big is this game? It's laughable to say, compared to the games of later generations that have capacities of dozens of G, this game is so small it doesn't even amount to their spare change, with a mere 68KB!

  Even in FC games, this game is not too big, the largest FC game "Fudei Meio" has a size of nearly 1M.

  It's hard to imagine how Shigeru Miyamoto managed to design so much playability within a 68KB capacity back then.

  Now it can only be described as a stroke of genius.

  For Jester, who also studied some FC-era small games from later generations, he even studied the code of several of the most famous ones, and even rewrote various fan versions of Mario himself. Now he can recite most of the code for Super Mario Classic Edition.

  Jester rushed back to his bedroom, which was cluttered with a long table holding a relatively new Matosh and an older IBM 5150, as well as a large pile of scattered electronic components and circuit boards all over the floor and tables.

  The Macintosh is Jobs' first masterpiece, and the name Macintosh or McIntosh may be more familiar to people in China. It was also the world's first personal computer to use a graphical user interface (GUI), and all subsequent graphical operating systems can be said to have originated from its creative ideas. This is a cross-era design, a computer worthy of being recorded in history books.

  As for the IBM 5150, it is the first truly meaningful PC in human history. Estel Ritchie, the greatest product manager in IBM's personal computer history, completed its design, which is also an undisputed masterpiece.

  The whole room looks very cluttered.

  From these scattered plastic shells, it turns out that these electronic components were actually removed from several Atari VCS 2600 consoles, as well as the VCS 5200 console which was announced to be discontinued just two years after its release and failed miserably. And also a VCS 7200 console whose release plan had been cancelled and whose final design had not yet been completed!

  But what surprised Jester most was not these, but there were two FC game consoles here!

  The impression of that classic red and white exterior was really too deeply ingrained in his mind.

  One is intact, and another has been dismantled.

  Next to it are Japanese versions of "Donkey Kong", "Excitebike" and other classic Famicom game cartridges.

  To know, now the hell of FC has not been released in the United States yet.

  It was on sale in Japan for less than a year.

  It's not easy to get an FC game console.

  But this was not a difficult task for Jester, not because of anything else, but just because his father's identity was somewhat special.

  Jester was actually quite satisfied with this mysterious game development system after understanding the memories of this body.

  It seems to have designed everything for itself.

  Although he has not seen what other special abilities this system has besides that task.

  But the system helped him choose this body's original owner who was indeed very suitable for entering the gaming industry.

  Jest Lee was an electrical engineering major at UCLA and had been interested in video games since he was a kid, and he was also a well-known programming whiz on campus.

  Moreover, his father was also a hardware engineer at Atari Corporation, responsible for the design of Atari arcade games, and there were these things in Jester's room, which naturally couldn't be separated from his father's credit.

  But now it's not like the glorious days of Atari a few years ago, the company is heavily in debt and struggling to stay afloat, and his father's recent days haven't been easy either.

  Last year, Atari folded in front of Japan's FC, and domestically due to the lack of sincerity, rough manufacturing, and large quantities of identical third-party games. The release of "E.T." ignited outrage across America. From a pure profit of $2 billion two years ago, occupying most of Warner Communications' profits as a super money-making machine, it turned into an almost bankrupt enterprise that loses tens of thousands of dollars every day.

  Just recently, Atari completed their infamous burial plan and now they are facing a collective boycott from almost all gamers.

  This resulted in them selling almost no consoles and games throughout the year.

  Some shopping malls and retailers even sold Atari consoles at a discount of one or two yuan, but still no one asked for them.

  Finally this year, Warner Communications, unable to bear it any longer, sold Atari's consumer electronics division to CBM.

  CBM may be unfamiliar to many people, but the Modor 64 computer they produced is a name that players who truly understand gaming history must have come into contact with. This is the first true gaming computer in history.

  Of course, if you haven't heard of it, that's okay. All you need to know is that the Commodore 64 outsold Apple's Apple II by a factor of four in its heyday, and that will give you an idea of just how great this computer and this company were.

  While Jack Tramiel, the CEO of CBM, had no interest in game consoles and even thought that video games were dead, he froze almost all VCS 2600 self-platform game development at Atari, stopped selling the just-released two-year-old VCS 5200, and even indefinitely delayed the release of this year's planned 8-bit mainframe VCS 7200.

  It is said that when Jack Tramiel coldly announced the news in front of everyone, almost all Atari engineers were outraged.

  It's their blood and sweat, making games is their dream.

  But it's all in vain.

  Although Jester's father worked at an Atari facility in Costa Mesa, Orange County, Los Angeles.

  Also engaged in the development of arcade games, has nothing to do with home console projects, but recently, due to the bad news on the home console, and the US game industry is almost in a state of collapse, the headquarters also received the news that the arcade department will be sold.

  The future prospects are unknown, and Jest's father, who has been wandering in confusion, has also been frowning recently.

  Only Jester knows, the fate of Atari's future has been sealed.

  They abandoned the game console market, but after seeing the success of Intellivision, they returned two years later, in 1986, with an improved VCS 7200. However, due to their prolonged absence from the market and the poor reputation caused by the Atari shock, almost no third-party developers created games for them.

  It is well known that a third-party game platform is worthless.

  After this, Atari never recovered.

  Jester shook his head, driving out the jumbled thoughts and carefully recalling the code for Super Mario Classic from memory.

  Not using Matos, but chose to use doc system's IBM 5150.

  On the green screen of IBM 5150, lines of code appeared one by one with Jester's typing, then Jester frowned and deleted the previous line, and re-entered a new one.

  He is writing the program of Super Mario based on this IBM 5150 computer.

  Suddenly, Jester's movements paused for a moment, his eyebrows furrowed again, as if he had thought of something, then a look of regret appeared on his face, one fist clenched tightly and slammed onto the table, producing a loud bang.

  "How could I have forgotten something so important!"

  Just now, Jester realized that except for the FC in hell, he couldn't find any 8-bit game console on the market that could run Super Mario perfectly!

  The Atari 7200 was originally supposed to be it, but its release plans were terminated indefinitely.

  What about MSX?

  This piece of junk isn't even worth mentioning, the ROM capacity is so small that it can't even display two bullets on the same screen, and its platform market share is very low, especially in the US.

  What about other 8-bit hosts?

  Atari's VCS 2600 had a high market share, but it shared the same shortcomings as MSX, and even more severely, its graphics processing capabilities were far inferior to those of the FC with an additional PPU graphics controller.

  In other words, the Atari 2600's image processing capability is extremely poor and can only handle some pixel blocks that cannot be distinguished at all.

  In other words, you can't tell from Atari 2600 whether it's a man or a monkey.

  Playing some low-end games without graphics might be okay, but Super Mario is clearly not suitable.

  What about game consoles developed by other manufacturers?

  Hehe, now Americans think the game industry is on its last breath, no one would be willing to invest in developing an advanced 8-bit console.

  Although the development difficulty of this 8-bit host is not great, even some small factories in Hong Kong and mainland China can almost perfectly reverse-engineer and shanzhai FC game consoles.

  But still nobody is willing to invest in it, and no one noticed that FC was a sensation in Japan and Asia. In the eyes of Americans, what are Japan? Asia? They're just barbarian lands.

  Video games? That's what we play with our leftovers!

  Video games are dead. That's it. With Atari crashing almost overnight and all the players dying off, that's what most Americans think now.

  In the eyes of modern Americans, the video game industry would be relegated to a corner of the 21st century encyclopedia as a former hot topic that was eventually forgotten.

  As for the second reliable 8-bit host after FC, it wasn't until Sega's Master System in '86, but if we had to wait until '86 to release this Super Mario, what would be the point?

  The Huanghua vegetable has all been refrigerated.

  A multitude of thoughts flashed through Jie's mind in an instant, but he vetoed them one by one. Super Mario was a game that he absolutely could not give up on, and as someone from the future, he knew its value all too well.

  As for providing this game to FC in hell?

  Jester sneered, not to mention the upcoming rights and interests system in Hell, but a game that no matter how profitable it is, 60% of its profits will be taken away by Hell, which he cannot accept at all.

  Moreover, after making a game for Nintendo's FC, except for the six major third-party companies under Nintendo, other game developers can only release five games per year and are prohibited from developing games for other platforms within two years.

  This made it even more unacceptable for him, as he knew that there was no way he could become one of the six giants under the banner of Hell.

  But he has more than fifty classic games in his mind?

  Moreover, Super Mario's FC version sold over 40 million copies, which is a sales revenue of tens of billions of dollars, with profits in the tens of billions of dollars!

  This is several tens of billions of dollars before 1990!

  Can buy the whole of Shanghai Pudong and still have some left over!

  What's more, this is the "Super Mario Classic Edition", which has been corrected countless times by players over 30 years and is even more fun and playable than the original Super Mario.

  In other words, this is a more outstanding game, which is written by the wisdom of all players in the past 30 years, and almost exhausts the design potential of this game to the limit.

  Knowing that Super Mario would be a huge success, he still joined the hellish project, which was something he was unwilling to do.

  What's wrong?

  Thinking of the task in his mind and Super Mario coming out next year, Jester felt a splitting headache.

  Although there was no deadline for that task, Jester thought with his toes that time would definitely be a condition affecting the final evaluation.

  Especially if they didn't make Super Mario first, then when Enix released their game the next year, Enix would have had an unbeatable advantage with Mario as their trump card. For the next decade, until the appearance of PlayStation, no one would be able to shake their position.

  This is not a jest, but the real Super Mario is like this.

  The top four best-selling games, the Super Mario series occupied three positions, which are first, second and fourth respectively, namely Super Mario, Super Mario 3 and Super Mario 2.

  Sega's MD machine was so strong, Sonic was so classic, but in the face of SFC's "Super Mario World", it almost had no resistance at all, and was beaten to a pulp.

  That's Mario's power in the gaming world.

  Mario is out, and the outcome is already decided.

  It can be said that Mario is a nuclear bomb in the game world, with cause and effect.

  There isn't a game that can match him, and it's not an exaggeration to say that even if you were to tie all the other games in the world together, they still wouldn't be able to catch up with Mario's influence in the gaming industry.

  Because Super Mario saved the video game industry which was already dead.

  This difficulty is like pulling the already sunken Titanic out of the sea and making it sail normally again.

  The feat of completing Super Mario has transcended the game itself and become a culture, legendary is no longer enough to describe it, because it is the legend itself.

  If we do it ourselves, apart from FC, there will be no other platform that can release this game in the next two years. What's the difference between not doing it at all?

  Jester gazed around in a daze, scanning the circuit boards and electronic components on the ground one by one. Suddenly, an extremely bold idea popped into his mind.

  Since there wasn't a suitable home console platform available to release Super Mario on, why don't I make one myself?

  Even Jester was startled by this sudden idea.

  At this time, without considering Mario as his first game, Jester also came up with a more suitable game for now, and he even thought about how to promote the game.

  He recalled a classic story about game consoles from Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari.

  What he thought of was the new game Tetris, and as for the promotion method...

  At the thought of Bushnell's story, Jester couldn't help but crack a smile.

  Because of this story, it's really too familiar for game enthusiasts.

  This is the story of Bushnell and Pong!