For Gu Biao's layout, of course, the subordinate scientific research dogs can't keep up with the rhythm of thinking.

Fortunately, they don't need to keep up with them for the time being, they are just responsible for executing without suspicion.

At least in two or three years, Gu Biao estimates that his ability to foresee the industrial pattern will not expire.

Because the wings of his butterfly are not large enough, and the business of tens of millions of dollars is not enough to affect the global industrial pattern.

However, if he is allowed to develop for a few more years and push up Atari, a former monopoly giant in a certain field in the world, Gu Biao will have to respect the decision-making team that works together.

Because by then, he himself has swelled into a market itself, and the accuracy of his foresight will inevitably be greatly disturbed.

The rapid expansion period of staking and the period of steady development of the position are completely different from the ability of the decision-making team.

“…… This is Nintendo's GAME-ATCH design circuit, let's have people reverse copy the board, but you can just take a look, what we want to do, and Nintendo's gap is very big. It's just to give you an idea of how to work hard. ”

Gu Biao first gave the technical information of Nintendo's GAME-ATCH circuit design copy board and even other cutting-edge products in the industry to the four R&D horses, and then continued to explain.

"At present, Nintendo is a global leader in the field of small handheld game consoles. The technical route they adhere to is a liquid crystal printing display game console whose screen itself does not emit light.

On the other hand, with the advent of GAME-ACTH at the end of last year, industry leader Atari is not to be outdone, and they have just launched a multi-purpose handheld game console concept composed of LED indicator dot matrix this year.

And according to my information, it is very likely that Atari will also simplify the side-scrolling shooter game of 'Defender', which is an arcade machine, and transplant it to this new platform - when the time comes, they can use a few lines of printed LED spots on the left side of the front of the fuselage to represent the small plane controlled by the player, and then use the LED beads in the central dot matrix to signal the enemy and the hostages who fly out after blasting the enemy. Players who have played the arcade version and the 2600 home version will definitely be able to understand it. ”

Gu Biao said as he took out the Atari demonstration verification machine he got from the United States.

A few scientific research dogs were tinkering again, and they felt quite brain-opening.

And the reason why Gu Xiao knew that Atari would develop this thing and pay attention to it in advance was also because this "nostalgic game console" was still quite famous in later generations, although Chinese had never played it - because in the nostalgic series of movies "Guardians of the Galaxy", the big-eyed little alien next to Star-Lord often used the handheld in the early 80s to fight "defenders" in addition to fighting enemies.

Like Star-Lord's Sony 1978 Walkman, it became a famous easter egg in the movie. So even if the Chinese haven't played it, they can recognize this thing by looking at "Guardians of the Galaxy" and "The Avengers", and even the director of Station B in later generations has interpreted it.

"In this way, if we want to do'general-purpose handheld', we can only follow Atari's technical ideas, and lay out LED lamp beads to form a display screen? ”

Lu Yunda, who was born in electronics, put forward his own views.

He wasn't wrong. Because Nintendo's historical cartridge GAME-BOY handheld was not released until 1988. Even if you don't consider the difficulty of cassette switching, it will take about 85 or 86 years to mature as an integrated machine and an early handheld computer with the same screen as GB.

Because the bottleneck of LCD screens that can display pixel-level clarity was not solved until around 1985. Nintendo is not developing its own displays, and can only follow in the footsteps as an application technology integrator.

If Gu Biao wants to launch a game console in 1982, he is destined not to use a pixel-level definition LCD screen, at best, he can only use a pre-printed lattice block LCD, just like a computer screen.

was explained by Lu Yunda, and the other three colleagues also thought so, feeling that the boss could only take Atari's LED dot matrix route, and their hearts sank.

How can there be hope for competing with Atari on the same track.

However, Gu Ao's next sentence suddenly brightened their minds.

"No, I'm not going to use LED beads to dot matrix, I insist on using LCD to achieve a universal screen - we make the printed LCD screen into a small square grid with a side length of 3 mm, just like a stroke on a calculator, or even a decimal point, but it is twice as long as the decimal point of the calculator.

Then, let's transplant 'Bomberman', a mature IP that can be displayed in cubes, to promote the first purchase desire of consumers when the time comes. Then develop two special small games for block display, and adapt to this handheld that can display the pixel style of blocks!"

The core idea of Gu Biao is that since the current LCD screen technology cannot miniaturize the pixels, the smallest is equivalent to the decimal point on the calculator.

So, he changed his thinking and developed a few block games that were suitable for large-particle pixel displays!

"This idea is okay, but the key to this is that when we develop a new body, we also have to develop a game that is destined to become popular on the new body at the same time. The risk will be very high, and there will be no chance of trial and error step by step. Lu Yunda pondered for a while, and then gave Yang Hao a look of "It's up to you if it's difficult".

Yang Hao could only smile bitterly: "This game is still designed by our software team from scratch?" ”

Fortunately, this time Gu Biao didn't plan to sell Guanzi, he directly broke off:

"I'll give you the idea to develop a game called 'American Cubes' and a 'Snake'. The display design of the game, I think it can be done like this. ”

Gu Biao said, took over two pieces of blank paper, and directly hand-drew them with a pen.

After all, the picture of Tetris is too simple for any soul painter without any artistic cells to draw it.

With a few strokes, Gu Biao gestured to seven combined blocks representing the J/L/T/S/Z/O (square)/I (bar) shapes, each with an area of only four square pixels.

Then he described the basic rules of Tetris, such as "eliminate all the spaces in each row, the more rows you delete at once, the higher the score, and because the I-word bar only has four squares, you can theoretically eliminate four lines at a time, and it will get faster and faster as you level up".

As for the greedy snake, it's even simpler, Gu Biao just said that at the beginning, give a "snake" with a length of only 3 squares, and then there will be random small flickering squares on the screen, and the length of the snake will increase by one block after eating, and one day if it hits the wall or his own tail, it will be considered dead, see who can eat longer.

These two games are simply verified by history and perfectly designed for the special LCD technology window period of the square screen. Among them, Gu Biao didn't plan to add too many obstacles to the snake part, and the bells and whistles of various improved versions of the snake in later generations were completely erased, leaving only the most authentic design - because Gu Biao knew that the CPU in 1982 could only handle such a game, and no matter how complicated it was, the game console would collapse.

"It's as simple as that? Can this thing be sold? This is not a home machine for changing game cards, it's a flashing handheld machine, and you can't change the cassette in your life. Can the 'American Cubes' and 'Snakes' alone make people interested in playing for two years? The warranty period of the handheld is at least two years. After listening to the game design concept, Yang Hao felt very incredible.

He couldn't believe that in an era when his peers had developed such awesome game consoles and game displays were becoming more and more fancy, Mr. Gu actually returned to the basics and was ready to push two such simple block games.

The other three developers were equally skeptical.

"This is my money, and I have the final say -- if I do it technically, and the market can't be opened, it's all mine! I'll tell you, Snake and American cubes are enough for American children to play for two years. ”

Gu Biao chose to cut off the subway entrance without doubt.

He said so, and his subordinates naturally would not object again.

Gu Biao took advantage of the situation to unify his thoughts: "Actually, originally, the game of 'square' doesn't need to be called American square, but we have to take care of the cultural superiority of Americans, after all, they are still responsible for cultural export on the earth so far." It's better to make Americans' money by taking that name. Even if it is exported to other countries in the future. I heard that this is a new trend developed by American fathers, and it is easier to pay.

As for the image of the developer, we will promote it a little more legendarily at that time, saying that it was created by a few grassroots graduate students at Stanford University. In this way, others will not ask about the nationality of the student, but will only feel that this success is the embodiment of the 'American dream', which makes Americans feel more immersed."

As for the intellectual property rights of the software, of course, according to your commission agreement, it completely belongs to the American company of Tiankun Entertainment. Even if the background of Chinese capital is deeply investigated, it can also use Tiankun Entertainment's 'sponsorship of poor students to realize the American dream' to promote and dilute media hostility. ”

Everything, Gu Biao had already thought about it when he sponsored these commission trainees and built his own regular R&D team.

From publicity to technology to public relations, it can be said that it is watertight.

Of course, some of the less confidential parts, that is, the operation links other than the game creativity, Vice President Schulhoff also helped Gu Biao with a lot of ideas.

At that time, Gu Biao basically skipped the content of the game, stood on a hypothetical standpoint, and asked Schulhoff how to structure it, and the other party designed it for him.

Even the American-style cultural superiority is taken into account - the causes of national identity and nationalism in the world can be mostly divided into three categories, one is called "Lao Tzu can fight", the other is called "Lao Tzu is rich", and the last category is those who can neither fight nor have money, and can still sell "cultural superiority".

For example, in history, the three great powers of Britain, France and Germany belonged to the British who were proud of their wealth, the Germans were proud of their bravery and good at fighting, and the French were beaten and had no money, so they emphasized that they had poetry and distance. When applied to the United States and Japan in the Asia-Pacific region, it is roughly British and American, German-Japanese, and Chinese-French.

Therefore, Lao Mei also has a strong national identity, but the source is a little complicated.

After Yang Hao brushed up the key points of the design, he considered his statement: "Snake and American Cube, the program is logically easy to implement. Because it's a block dot matrix display, you don't even need an artist.

Our development progress is still better from soft and hard, I will write out the basic program logic first, Xiaolu they optimize the design of hardware according to the principle of the easiest to implement, it should be better - if it can be relaxed to the second quarter of next year or even later shipments, such a design process is the most performance. ”

In the development process of a game console, whether the game comes first or the hardware comes first, has a great impact on the optimization of game performance. Most companies can't make the machine work with the software, which also leads to the more powerful the machine, the lower the performance when supporting the game, and the hardware performance of the desktop computer in the future is certainly far inferior to the professional game consoles such as PS/XBOX.

But when it comes to the block and snake projects, it can be done in reverse for the first time, because this kind of hardware will only play these kinds of games for the rest of its life, and the soft and hard are especially suitable for the weak hardware performance in 1982, and it can also save material costs.

"Yes, let's do it, it's no problem to put it into production in the second quarter of next year, we are not in a hurry, the smoothness of performance and quality stability are the most important. When R&D, don't work behind closed doors, fly a few more times to the Special Economic Zone, and discuss the quality control of the production process with Guo Taiming's supporting factory——

You know, this is the first time we're targeting the average consumer, who doesn't have the quality and patience of an arcade owner. If there is a slight quality problem, all the signboards that Tiankun Entertainment has played in the past few years will be smashed!"