Chapter 3 is called American Square

  Regarding this rumor, anyone who has learned about the history of video game development has probably heard it.

  It was also because of this incident that Nolan Bushnell entered the game machine industry without hesitation, which led to the prosperity of electronic games and the birth of the first giant in the history of the game industry, Atari.

  That was a summer in 1972.

  Bushnell had just gone through the failure of his first business venture, a coin-operated game called Computer Space, which was too complex for players. Bushnell and his partner then designed a simple tennis-like game called Pong.

  This can actually be considered one of Bushnell's experimental works.

  Now it seems like a simple game that can't be simpler, if you've seen its screenshots then you'll know what I mean.

  There are only three simple lines, with a symbolic net in the middle that spans the screen, and two short symbolic rackets on either side. A light point represents the ball moving back and forth between the two rackets, striking the light point, which is the ball. The player controls the racket using a simple joystick and button to hit the light point, or the ball.

  The two of them just kept taking pictures back and forth like this.

  Now it seems like this game is no fun at all, but surprisingly, this game achieved astonishing success.

  In fact, Bushnell didn't plan to sell this simple game console at first. His partner, Alcorn, was an excellent electrical engineer and computer expert but knew nothing about designing games. Originally, Bushnell wanted to make a car racing game he liked, but because of Alcorn's ignorance, he changed his mind and decided to teach him how to design a simple game as practice - this is Pong.

  As for why such a strange name was chosen, one reason is that "pong" can represent the sound of the ball bouncing off the paddle, and the second, and most important reason, is that the name "Ping-Pong" had already been taken.

  After completing the game, Bushnell, a high-achieving student in the University of Utah's computer science department, was uninterested in this childish and low-level game due to its simplicity. However, he didn't want his partner, Alcorn, to be disappointed with making games, so he deceived him by saying that General Mills had decided to distribute the game.

  In fact, he simply placed it in a bar called Andy Capp's Tavern in Sunnyvale, California, the location of their small company, Atari. The reason was that this bar also operated several pinball machines.

  It wasn't long before Bushnell received a call from Andy, the bar owner, saying that both of the strange machines he had sent over were broken and asking if he could come fix them.

  It wasn't until Bushnell took a look that he discovered the problem: so many people had played the machine that it was jammed with coins, blocking the coin slot.

  What happened next is well-known: Pong became a huge success in the United States, and it was like a money-printing machine for Atari, laying the foundation for their later dominance of the gaming industry.

  It was precisely because he thought of this story that Jester realized how similar the current situation was to back then.

  Not bad, at that time it was the barbaric era of electronic games, and even more straightforwardly, it was the blank period of electronic games. Atari was able to succeed later precisely because they were the first to take the risk.

  Isn't it like this now?

  The North American video game crash of 1983 was a disastrous event for the American video game industry, to give an imperfect example, it was like Pearl Harbor for electronic games.

  After this, no investor wanted to enter this industry.

  Additionally, the CBM's hard termination of Atari Inc.'s development of games for its own console, the Atari 2600, combined with the American public's disillusionment with video games, led to a period of dormancy in the North American and European video game industries.

  Temporary, to some extent, created a situation similar to when Atari just released Pong.

  The emergence of this blank period was due to the American people's aversion to repetitive games with no new ideas, rather than truly thinking that video games were meaningless.

  Of course, Americans today don't call this period in what is now known as the video game industry a temporary lull, but rather a crash.

  It wasn't until the following year that the NES, along with Super Mario Bros., arrived in America and swept the nation.

  But everything was too late.

  The video game industry then entered the era of Japanese dominance, first with Nintendo, Sega, and later Sony, until a full fifteen years later when Microsoft returned to the home console market with its Xbox at a cost of $2 billion in losses for the year.

  And itself can completely replicate Atari's classic success case of Yar's Revenge.

  Made a name with arcade games and got the first bucket of gold, relying on home consoles plus Super Mario swept the world.

  Of course, all of this is predicated on his needing a game that can rekindle the now-extinguished passion Americans have for video games.

  Even if it can't be done to this extent, at least it's a game that can sell super well.

  Such games are neither many nor few, but the problem is that those that can adapt to the current development environment are extremely rare.

  Super Mario is indeed such a game, and in fact, it was this game that accomplished this mission in real history.

  But now he can't do that, Super Mario Bros. He certainly has to make it before the underworld, but absolutely not now.

  It's not time yet, he doesn't have a game platform equivalent to FC.

  So he thought of another masterpiece that could achieve this effect.

  A masterpiece in every sense of the word.

  In almost all of the end-of-year game awards, there are only two games that can possibly compete for first and second place, one of which is Super Mario.

  And another one is Tetris - Russian Blocks!

  Thinking and doing has always been Juster's style, and Tetris is not a particularly complex game, but its special algorithm makes this small game so popular.

  In the world of the soul in Jester's body, he had carefully studied the algorithms of many Tetris derivative games, and for the original version of Tetris, that not-so-complicated code program was at his fingertips.

  This was, after all, a static screen game, far from the complexity of a side-scrolling action game like Super Mario, but after Jestertim spent more than two hours typing away on his computer, a simplified version of Tetris that could run on his IBM 5150 was complete.

  Run the program, Jester operates his first game written in this world with ease, watching them run perfectly. With Jester's agile hands, several Russian block patterns on the screen quickly descend and then form rows of connected blocks at the bottom of the screen to eliminate successfully.

  The numbers on one side of the scoreboard were also jumping up continuously.

  "Flawless!"

  After repeating the game for more than a dozen times, trying out the five difficulty levels he set, Jester couldn't help but have some genuine admiration for the programming skills of the original owner of this body.

  It's really a strong and powerful mess, no need to mention surpassing the past self, even if it's the best programmer in one's own era, may not have half of the original owner's programming ability.

  "No wonder my friend who is extremely good at programming always says that even now, the best programmers in the world are still those trained with KB-level memory in the 70s and 80s. Their logical writing ability is simply too powerful, they can do things that would take dozens of lines of code in later generations with just a few lines."

  Tetris itself remembers the code of Russian Square is written by later generations, although it's the same logical algorithm, but later generations have no memory constraints, so many codes are not concise enough. However, in this era, you should know that IBM 5150, which has just been introduced, is already one of the most advanced personal computers, but its memory is only 16KB! As for Atari's classic host, Atari 2600's memory is only 2KB!

  To make a game run perfectly on such a machine, due to memory constraints, it is necessary to achieve extreme brevity and concision in the program.

  This process has been given a special name in later generations, called optimization.

  Luckily, Jester is a master of programming and can simplify the complex code he remembers to make it usable now; otherwise, Jester might really have no way out.

  After finishing his first game development, Jester was left with how to promote this game.

  He has decided to use the Bushnell method from that year, placing arcade machines loaded with this game in public places and causing a sensation within a certain range.

  For this method, Jester also has an unparalleled advantage.

  His mother ran a medium-sized supermarket in the city, where there were several Atari arcade machines. Jester had gone to see them when he was idle, and those arcade machines were also affected by the Atari shock, which had been operating poorly recently.

  But he believed that as long as his own Tetris arcade machines were made and put in his mother's supermarket, it was impossible for the business not to be booming.

  Because this is something history has proven.

  As long as it caused a sensation, then there is no worry about finding people willing to come and buy his arcade games.

  This is Tetris, one of the greatest games ever created by humans. Even in the 100th issue of EGM magazine's selection, this was removed from the list.

  As for the original name of this game - Tetris, this name from Greek "four" was too abstract and not suitable for promoting to Americans with average IQ.

  It is worth noting that China's name for this game at the time was very thought-provoking.

  The name Tetris could not be used, first of all, this game has nothing to do with Russia or the Soviet Union, and secondly, in America, calling this game Russian Squares was not a good idea.

  It is now in the midst of the Cold War, and Reagan has begun to implement his Star Wars program, at the most intense time of East-West confrontation.

  "But Tetris is indeed a good name, easy to understand..."

  Jester's eyes lit up at this thought.

  Why not call it American Blocks instead of Russian Blocks?

  It is worth noting that the American people also attach great importance to national honor, otherwise MacArthur's classic speech at West Point Military Academy about responsibility, honor and country would not have caused such a stir in the United States.

  "American-style! American block! This name is pretty good!"

  Jester wrote down this name on paper.

  In addition to blocks, diamonds also have another meaning.

  In Jester's eyes, this game will inevitably be like a dazzling diamond that shocks the entire United States.