Gu Biao bought a game console and cards to take home, read the manual, connected the cable with the TV, and then began to taste ET aliens.

He hopes to finally confirm that the ET aliens on this plane are as bad as they were in history.

The TV in the next bedroom was also on, and it was just making a little noise, so no one was watching. However, the occasional advertisements that suddenly became louder during the intervals of soap operas still lifted Gu Ao's spirits.

“atari！”

In the early 80s, the popularity of this logo voice sung on TV was basically similar to Intel's "Oh~Oh~Oh~".

After the logo sounded, a friend appeared on the TV screen, who was asked to sleep under the quilt by his mother.

A few seconds after the child fell asleep, there was a holy light outside the window, and the door of the house was blown open by the wind and snow. A guy dressed in a big, mopped-up Santa Claus garment enters the house obscenely, tiptoes into a gift box on the Christmas tree, and when he unpacks it, a game cartridge of the ET alien is revealed.

Even the family's golden retriever shook his tongue and watched in a friendly manner, and did not stop it.

Then, "Santa" pulled down his hood, rolled up his sleeves, and took the cassette and plugged it into the game console - it was clear that this "Santa" was ET.

The picture ends with the child being woken up by a surprise sound effect and then looking at the TV in a fit of fascination.

“jttiftas~happyysfroatari~”

The voiceover is heard, and the ad ends.

In the past few days, Gu Biao has tuned to almost any channel, and he can always see this advertisement.

Undoubtedly, this was the main source of Atari's $15 million advertising dollars.

The advertising incitement effect and the IP art cover image are really good, but that's about it.

The corners of Gu Biao's mouth mocked again, and then sat back in front of the TV playing games in the living room.

Clicking on the game to start, after only a few harsh electronic sounds, the relatively exquisite and highly restored Kaichen only flashed, and Gu Biao began to use the joystick to control the game character.

"Hmm, it's not the same as what I saw in the archaeology videos of my last life? ”

This is basically a game of walking around and eating, but the map is very messy, there are no rules, to put it bluntly, it is ten times worse than Pac-Man or Snake, but Atari dares to sell a cassette for 40~50 dollars.

Gu Biao was slightly worried that this game was not bad enough, or that it was not rotten enough to completely bury Atari's country, so he patiently endured the nausea and played more than half a diagonal and reopened it three or four times - mainly because the map of this game is randomly very messy, and sometimes there will be bugs, if the random map is wrong at the beginning, it may never be cleared.

And if you're lucky, the fastest record on station B in the future is to clear the customs in 1 minute.

In other words, this is a game that introduces random patchwork maps, but there is no guarantee that the generated maps will be cleared, and the random mechanics have not been tested at all.

If you're unlucky and start randomly with four squares in a closed loop, you'll be trapped in these four squares for the rest of your life, and you can only restart the game.

40 minutes later, Gu Biao finally randomly entered a cave with easter eggs when he was randomizing the map.

He laughed when he saw which line of easter egg subtitles on the screen.

It was the name of Howard, the production programmer, and some swearing.

It seems that although Howard, a coder, has a slightly different method of harming the boss in this time and space, his desire to take revenge on the company has not changed.

This is the total outbreak of the hidden dangers that Atari has accumulated so far.

Since 1980, because the stock of the Atari 2600 game console on the market has exceeded 10 million units, and after the listing of Atari Company, the stock structure has changed, and more people have come in to the top who want to make quick money.

Companies generally have a new way of thinking: R&D is not important, and the reason why the game cartridge development dogs can sell is because the game console itself has already been distributed so much.

It's impossible for players to bear to buy a game console and sit there to eat ashes, wouldn't that be a loss? So, whatever cassette Atari develops, it can be sold. Selling well is because of good marketing, and it has nothing to do with technicians. R&D dogs get the minimum salary, and then there is no overtime pay and day shifts, and if you don't like to do it, you can get out.

And Gu Biao also saw an even more disgusting contradiction in the cursed easter egg text left by Howard: that is, Atari has strictly restricted software developers from having authorship rights in recent years.

It can be analogous to imagine that if a copy is published, even if the copyright is sold, the author's name must still be signed, and this authorship cannot be changed or sold. It is impossible that after Mo Yan's copyright is sold to the publishing company, he will not write "Mo Yan-author" when it is republished.

In the same way, no matter how the music copyright is sold, the name of the lyricist and composer cannot be changed. Movies and TV series are even more likely to have a list of production staff subtitles at the beginning and end of the film, who is the director, who is the screenwriter, and who is the protagonist, the supporting role, the lighting props, and the stage beauty

In the United States, if a crew dares to refuse to name a person who participated in the work of artistic creation, they can sue you for violating his right of authorship and making him unable to become popular.

However, Atari has banned developers from signing names in any sincerity, whether in games or in English, packaging and manuals since four years ago.

The reason why Atari did this is of course obvious: they want to turn the R&D personnel into "gunslingers" who have no reputation in the industry, just like some of the great god studios in later generations.

In this way, they can prevent R&D personnel from taking advantage of "excellent historical performance" as a bargaining chip to negotiate terms with the company, and also prevent R&D personnel from using "one of Atari's best-selling projects was developed by me" as a promotional selling point, and jump ship to a competitor's company with a high salary.

It sounds very similar to the entertainment agency in later generations who are afraid that the other party will change jobs after becoming popular, so they no longer praise a single artist, but a combination ♀ that can attribute the fame and benefits brought by marketing to this group, rather than a certain person, so that even if the more bullish individuals in the group jump ship, he can't take the name of the group away, and he can also change people to add it.

The intangible assets and reputation value of those IPs will always belong to the company.

The reason why the company dares to do it so resolutely is, in the final analysis, that "Atari has monopolized the market since its ugly and subsequent profits should be attributed to marketing, not technology, and technology has no credit."

It's a pity that in the case of squeezing the technology so badly, the company has not yet created a set of mechanisms such as the research and development of dogs, just thinking that "if they really dare to stab Lou Zi, then deduct their wages and the year-end bonus of the year", relying on such a simple and crude method to manage the technical team.

The only extra defense they think of is that the star project should not be developed by those barefoot newcomers who are not afraid to wear shoes and are willing to wear drums. Because these newcomer code farmers may have no nostalgia for that broken salary, and there is no year-end bonus to deduct.

And Howard, the coder who was selected as the ET alien R&D team this time, is because he developed a star game for the company at the end of last year, and there are still a lot of year-end bonuses in the company's hands this year.

The Atari top brass naively thought that with the money as a hostage bargaining chip, Howard would definitely do his best.

Who knows, people are willing to give year-end bonuses, they want to take revenge on those marketing dogs⊥ and make enough money with the gunman, that is, to expose the employer's old bottom, disclose the identity of the gunman, and want to make a name for himself in the world.

This is the total eruption of contradictions and grievances between Atari's internal technology and marketing after more than two years of accumulation.

After confirming all this, Gu Biao went back to sleep very safely.

In the next few days, ET aliens were still selling well because of the publicity offensive in the early stage.

Because the advertisement is so fierce after all, players will continue to enter the pit until they hear about the bad reviews⊥ even if they are deceived, the fact that the ET alien cassette has been sold cannot be changed.

In this era, the laws related to consumers and product quality in the United States have never supported the idea of quitting games.

Who knows if you will return it after you get tired of buying it home, of course, entertainment products will not be returned once sold.

Within a week, Atari sold a full 500,000 cassette tapes, and the capital returned to $20 million, which has actually written off 40 million IP and half of the total cost of advertising.

Atari's top brass is still unaware of the problem of bad character.

At Atari headquarters in San Francisco, President Dardanelle looked at the sales data of the frontline anti-radium and smiled from ear to ear.

Although, there is some not-so-good news today - for example, the first blood of the competitor was released, and at the premiere, the distributor also took a bit of a hit, pretending to be questioned by reporters and leaking his mouth, announcing the development plan for a new generation of home console games.

"Hmph, don't you want to go the way of buying popular IP adaptations to rub traffic, it's exactly the same as our Atari⊥ and you still want to overtake?

If Gu Biao could hear this, he would definitely retort contemptuously: We are different.

It's a pity that he can't hear it, so he can only let President Dardanelle run rampant for a while.

Gu Biao was paying attention to the premiere results of the first drop of blood at the moment, he specially got out of school early and invited Ye Kun to watch a movie together, just in Watsonton.

Everything that needs to be done has been done, and it's harvest season.

"You just invite me to watch this kind of movie of fighting and killing!" Ye Kun complained.

"Sorry, not next time. Gu Biao apologized skillfully, and then watched the atmosphere in the theater left and right.

The seats were full, and today was another weekend, so they were just full.

If the seats start to fill up gradually a few days after the movie is released, it means that the movie itself is of good quality. But if it is full on the first day of release, it must not be expected that the quality of the film will be meritorious, but the distributor's pre-publicity will be done well.

This is also an important bargaining chip for the distributor to share in full with the theater chain and the producer in the future, so the distributor is particularly concerned about the premiere data.

"Harvey is a hype genius, at least on par with the head of Atari's advertising department. can sell the first wave of fire without the audience knowing what the product is like," Gu Biao sighed slightly in his heart.

It's a pity that behind Atari's advertising department is a technical team that wants to smash the pot all the time, so their fate is destined to develop in two directions with Tiankun Entertainment.