"Gu, I said you'd regret it – you signed 15,000 units for your expected deliveries in May, and I'll admit, that's pretty impressive. But this is the last bloom before your demise, and I said that I would keep your June orders below 10,000 units, and I will do what I say!

I'll also tell you that your expected orders for July will be suppressed to less than 5,000 units! And then it will get lower and lower every month! This is what will happen if you don't hand over the porting license to Atari! I'll see how your company can support the million-dollar TV sales bill every month!"

Atari's vice president of Dardanelle, after getting the latest signing statistics, demonstrated to Gu Biao.

Of course, when he called, he pretended to be in the name of further cooperation, otherwise Gu Biao would definitely hang up the phone as soon as he heard his voice.

Gu Biao's reply was still calm: "Yes, then let's see." I only have one sentence: If you do too much injustice, you will kill yourself, and in order to suppress Tiankun Entertainment in a hurry, your company has even cheated the arcade hall owners who have cooperated for many years.

It's been less than a month since the arcade version was released, and you're leaving the home version, do you think those people will be deceived again in the future? Thank you for pushing those operators to my side. ”

Dardanelle laughed wildly: "What storm can a group of ants set off if they unite again? We have more than 85% of the total share of the video game market in the United States, and the rest of you are all united, less than one-sixth of Atari's."

As for arcade hall owners, a group of unskilled people will naturally join them, and as long as there are tens of thousands of dollars in start-up capital, everyone can be the owner of the arcade hall! They also deserve to be treated as adults? I'm afraid that you will know that you can't beat them, so you will break them into pieces and fight guerrillas. Dare to enter the U.S. market, this is the end!"

In the face of such arrogant remarks, Gu Biao had no choice but to hehe, and he didn't want to take advantage of his tongue anymore.

But he knew that the public opinion counterattack he had arranged was about to start.

It was even more favorable than he had anticipated – of course, only at the level of public opinion, not in terms of market share.

Judging from the real profits that have been made so far, Atari is clearly superior. Their shamelessness has made their market share advantage even greater, and all they have lost is word-of-mouth and business reputation.

It's just that, as a near-monopoly existence, Atari doesn't care much about goodwill these days, and doesn't feel the need to rein in the pace of making money for the sake of a good reputation.

The home machine versions of "Imitation Earth Defender" and "Imitation Adventure Island" have been distributed to millions of copies in just one week, and the subsequent dealer orders have been scheduled for the summer vacation.

Atari's single new game cartridge is priced at $30, and the "two-in-one" sells for $50. As of the end of the summer vacation, the expected orders for both the individual version and the 2-in-1 will sell about 2 million copies.

That is, it is equivalent to one out of every three American families that own the Atari 2600 game console, and one family will buy these two games, which shows the popularity.

In this rough calculation, the sales of the two game cartridges can exceed $150 million in four months—three times more than the sales of Gu Biao's arcade machines in a whole year.

In the face of such huge sales, it is not difficult to understand that Atari does not care about overdraft goodwill and reputation.

……

Just 5 days after Atari's "Imitation Earth Defender" and "Imitation Island" appeared on home aircraft.

That is, May 10, 1981, a Sunday and Mother's Day.

Two newspapers in the United States that barely ranked in the top 20 in terms of circulation were the first to publish articles on the quality of Black Atari products.

The two newspapers, the Chicago Sun-Times, with a daily circulation of 1.2 million copies, and the New York Post, with a daily circulation of 700,000 copies, are part of the conglomerate of media mogul Rupert Murdoch. (It's the Post, not The Times, the Times is much higher, and it won't be the vanguard of this kind of industry news)

However, what surprised Gu Biao the most was that the crusade on this was not authorized by Gu Biao's people, but came from the operation of a group of spontaneous people.

"A work with a splash screen - a review of the Atari 2600 game "Defenders" and interviews with pundits. (Note: "The Defender" is the name given to Gu Biao, the Atari copycat, "Earth Defender")

Recently, Atari released the arcade version and 2600 home version of "The Defender" within a month. Only a few days after the product was launched, the huge difference in the experience performance of the two versions has attracted strong attention from industry insiders......"

"The background map in the original arcade shows a very smooth refresh rate, frame by frame. After transplanting to the home version, the first thing consumers see is that the background terrain is extremely simplified, and all the bullying mountains and trees have been turned into abstract cuboid geometric patches.

What's even more fatal is that these geometric patches, which would mean 'urban buildings', are not refreshed from the right side of the frame one by one, but jump out every few frames, which is very abrupt. ”

"What's even more lethal is that in the game, as long as the player clicks the fire button, even the fired bullets can't be displaced, but instead jump and teleport. If the player fires at high speeds, resulting in two or more flying bullets in the same scan row, the frame rate of the screen will be crushed. The small plane controlled by the player itself will flicker and disappear until the number of bullets on the screen decreases, and it will not reappear until the number of bullets on the screen is reduced, which is simply not a game experience......"

After describing the symptoms of the performance of spicy chicken, these reports consulted some authoritative experts in the field of electronics, and then the expert opinion is as follows:

The reason for this is obviously that the Atari 2600 home console was designed with hardware from 1977. When this model was designed, the best CPU on the market was only Intel's 8080, while Atari's choice was only MOS6502, and the maximum capacity of the supported game cartridge was only 10KB.

Such CPU and cassette recognition capacity obviously cannot support the porting of the latest cutting-edge Motorola 68000CPU arcade game four years later. To be precise, the Atari 2600 platform can only be equipped with a full-page screen-cutting refresh game, and it will never be possible to make a contribution to a frame-by-frame scrolling reel game, and forcing it to do so can only harm the consumer experience......"

This expert's opinion is quite pertinent, and it is not considered to have been bought out.

At that time, in the market in 81 and 82, with the popularity of horizontal scroll games, Atari would have chosen to adapt as much as possible, but found that the old function of the 2600 game console could not support the horizontal scrolling, so it was changed to "After the player character flew out from one side of the screen, he directly cut the whole page to another map, instead of moving it one by one".

If you don't understand it, you can go to some early versions of the FC game "Castlevania", which is a representative of the whole page cut. If you haven't played "Castlevania", you can also watch "The Hottest Chicken Game in History" SQIJ narrated by Director Ao.

If the current Atari really does this, it can actually delay the life of the 2600 game console at the design level. It's a pity that now they are forced to be a little angry by Gu Biao's crossing the line, so they choose to counterattack head-on and ignore the consumer experience.

In addition, in addition to these technical truths, the report also includes the opinions of some medical experts at the end of the report:

“…… To this end, this newspaper interviewed experts from Mayo Presbyterian Hospital, a top research hospital in China and a cooperation with Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Professor Erich Adella, director of the ophthalmology department at Mayo Presbyterian Hospital, said: According to the current graphics of the Atari 2600 platform "Defenders", if underage players play this game, their eyesight will deteriorate rapidly. If you have to play, make sure to shoot a single shot and don't let more than two bullets exist in the same row on the screen at the same time. ”

When Gu Biao saw these reports, he was directly happy.

He could fully imagine that it was probably a group of arcade hall owners who had done a relatively large business and were cheated by Atari to stuff some red envelopes themselves and send similar negative news to the newspapers.

Of course, the purpose of these arcade hall owners to resist is definitely not to help Gu Biao get ahead.

They are counting on the advice of home machine consumers who have not yet bought the Atari cassette: keep your eyes open to identify bad goods, don't go into the pit, and pay 25 cents to play in the game hall if you want to play, so as to have a good experience and protect your eyesight.

"It's almost time, and the effect will be maximized by carrying the banner with rhythm at this juncture. Gu Wei secretly thought, and then dialed the contact information of some people inside the Fox News Channel.

In fact, Gu Biao fully knows why the Chicago Sun and the New York Post, which are subsidiaries of Murdoch's News Corporation, were the first to jump out and dare to publish such news - because Gu Biao now spends millions of dollars a month on TV shopping on Fox Channel 5, and Fox TV also belongs to Murdoch's News Corporation.

Gu Biao chose there in the first place because the faction of Fox and even News Corp. did not take much of Atari's advertising, and Atari's propaganda in the media industry has always relied on the power of its major shareholder, Warner.

Therefore, now that the Fox department can black the Warner system, of course, it has spared no effort.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

"Mr. Rubens, aren't you busy?" Gu Biao called.

"Oh, dear Gu, are you going to increase the advertising time again?"

"No, no, no, I have a short footage, I think you relevant personnel will be interested, please introduce me to the real power editor and director of a commercial channel, I have some fierce information here. ”

"Can you give us an overview of what it's about?"

"It's the language of the business negotiations about how Atari has arrogantly disregarded consumer rights and blatantly stated that it wants to infringe on the consumer experience. Rest assured, I know the rules other than pure news. ”

Of course, Gu Biao knows that it should be sent as paid news.

"Okay, we'll get back to you shortly. ”