December 24, 1982, the day before Christmas, was also Christmas Eve. For a Christian country like the United States, the status www.biquge.info of Christmas is equivalent to the Chinese New Year, and Christmas Eve is equivalent to Chinese New Year's Eve.

In recent history, merchants have also succeeded in transforming Christmas into a peak season for merchandising. Every year, Christmas is a carnival of the retail industry in the United States.

From the end of November to December, the retail industry in the United States sold about $400 billion in goods during this time, accounting for one-fifth of the total merchandise sales for the year.

The U.S. stock branch of Xinchuang Electronics chose December 24 as the release date of the Pangu host.

"The Pangu console is a high-performance and low-cost gaming computer, and of course, compared to the PC and Apple computer, it is even ahead in CPU and other performance. The flaw is due to the lack of support from software vendors, so it is difficult for this platform to be suitable for office ...... for the time being."

"We are more passionate about building a gaming PC than an office computer, and we find that the performance requirements of the gaming computer are higher, requiring better CPU, memory and video memory, and the sound requirements are more stringent than ordinary computers. On the PC platform, there are basically no big games, and in fact, its performance doesn't support better games. Therefore, in the professional game market, we are still confident that we will do better. ”

"The mainstream home game console market blindly pursues low prices and reduces hardware performance, and so far, the home game console market is still dominated by 8-bit consoles. This makes its performance compared to the PC even at a competitive disadvantage, blindly pursuing low prices, obviously not a smart strategy......"

"The Pangu console is not cheap among game consoles. However, our $199 and $399 models are definitely worth the price, especially some of the top titles, and only our platform can meet the conditions for them to run. The performance of other consoles is impossible to support masterpieces such as "The Legend of Sword and Fairy" and "Breaking the Sky......"

The North American branch focuses on the performance of the console and the quality of the best games.

It's also easy to make games that are basically high-quality - just don't let junk games hit the market.

The internal quality audit of the game independently developed by the new venture electronics company before going public is probably the most stringent audit. As a result, many of the company's R&D teams believe that the most difficult thing is not to face ordinary players, many players regard them as the gods of the game industry. However...... In the eyes of the company's game quality review committee, these game production gods are just bastards who have a bunch of faults but are too lazy to change. If it weren't for strict quality control, and the games full of garbage and bugs were brought back and redone, then the new start-up electronics company would be a company that is rich in garbage games.

"The 10,000 units of the beta version have all been sold. William, the sales director of the North American branch, took the report and handed it to Peter Zhang, "Head, the head office also looks down on the consumption power of our North American market, 10,000 Pangu hosts, not even enough for the sales of San Francisco and Los Angeles in one day!"

"No way!" Peter Zhang shrugged his shoulders and said, "In the case of limited production capacity, we can only let some markets be taken care of first." ”

"However, while Japan has a population of just over 100 million, the U.S. is a supermarket with a population of 300 million. William said regretfully, "Atari's garbage game company has occupied the U.S. market by relying on games that entered the industry earlier, otherwise, which turn will it be Atari to be the king of the game industry?"

"The boss thinks that sooner or later Atari is going to collapse. "At present, we need to be calm, observant, and eat Atari's corpse as quickly as possible when Atari collapses." ”

"It's disgusting. ”

"Okay, eat the cake. ”

"Atari is bound to crash, yes, as a competitor who needs to constantly study Atari every day, and as a result, is disgusted by its garbage games. So, I'm sure, it will crash, but the question is what. ”

"Who knows? However, the strategy of the North American branch is -- quality, word of mouth! Market share is not the first place at the moment, the most important thing is to establish the reputation of high-quality games in the minds of players, if players are disgusted by tens of thousands of garbage games in the entire market, but keep hearing voices - the game of new start-up electronics companies is an exception, it means that we will succeed. ”

……

On Christmas Day 1982, Atari's parent company, Warner Group, of course, also took it very seriously. Because, more than half of Warner's current profits are provided by Atari, which was acquired a few years ago.

Since '82, sales of the Atari 2600 console and games have been weak, but that's okay. Atari executives and Warner executives both believe that this is a temporary phenomenon, and as long as there is a need for increased promotional means, sales of game consoles and game cartridges will definitely return to growth.

Christmas '82 became the focus of Atari's marketing. In order to launch a masterpiece in time for the Christmas sales season. Therefore, Atari spent tens of millions of dollars in copyright expenses to buy the game adaptation rights of "ET Aliens". Due to the rush of time, it had to be released at Christmas, so there were only 6 weeks to make the game before it was released.

Since there are a large number of games on the market that have been made in a shorter period of time and are selling well, Atari has always won by quantity, not by quality. Therefore, Warner invested hundreds of millions of dollars, but it only took 6 weeks to make the game. There must be a problem with the quality of such a rush game, but the problem is that the executives of Warner and Atari don't understand games, anyway, they think that no matter how garbage a game is, as long as they increase advertising efforts, it will definitely be able to sell well. Therefore, before the game was released, "ET Aliens" had already produced 4 million cassettes, and it is predictable how high Warner's expectations for "ET Aliens" were!

However, after the game was released, it didn't take long for Atari to feel dumbfounded.

Within a few days of its launch, 1.5 million copies were sold. After that, "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" never sold again.

What's even more terrifying is that the player's reputation is extremely bad.

"What garbage game, ET the Extra-Terrestrial?!Atari will only launch garbage games!"

"Fooled, Warner is shameless, constantly advertising on its TV network, and thinking it is a good game, who would have thought, it's unimaginably rotten!"

"Isn't it?"

"Don't believe it, the game cartridge was given to you, if you're not afraid of being disgusting, you can play slowly by yourself......"

"ET the Extra-Terrestrial is unimaginably rotten!"

"Atari was originally a garbage dump, tens of thousands of garbage games, who played who knows. ”

Word of mouth among players quickly spread through word of mouth, as well as some reports from the game media. Since games are inherently highly topical entertainment, many players will also refer to other people's word-of-mouth evaluations and professional game reviews when buying games. The price of game cartridges is not cheap, and no one will easily buy a game that everyone says is bad.

So "ET Alien" suffered the end of seeing the light and dying, and before it was listed, many people were looking forward to it. After the launch, the reputation deteriorated rapidly, and the sales volume also froze rapidly!

Sensing that something was wrong, the dealer took a price reduction promotion, hoping to sell out of the game's cartridge inventory as soon as possible.

The game's cartridge, which was originally priced at $50, was reduced to $40...... The player is indifferent. $30, and the player still doesn't have the slightest desire to buy...... Even, the dealer found that the Atari 2600 console seemed to have no new orders for many days.

As a result, the game console, which was originally priced at $199, was discounted to $149 at Christmas and still could not be sold, and it was still difficult to drive sales growth.

The Atari 2600 is no longer the most popular holiday gift for Christmas, on the contrary, it is an obsolete product that does not sell.

At this time, the dealer has fallen into a panic, because the price has been reduced to this extent, and it cannot be sold, which shows a problem - it is not a problem of price at all, but this product, which has completely lost the market!

Some large dealers began to call Atari to discuss countermeasures, and when Atari encountered this situation, of course, it wanted to reassure the dealers, saying: "Peace of mind, this is a temporary phenomenon." The reputation of "ET Alien" is indeed ...... It sucks. We can recycle slow-moving game cartridges and never let dealers lose...... In the future, when better games come to market, sales will definitely improve. ”