Atari's decision to open the barriers to entry for its two generations of home consoles, the Atari 2600 and Atari-5200, was a delusional attempt to keep their consoles appealing to players with a steady stream of new games.

But the rampant presence of a large number of low-quality games is gradually destroying the image that Atari has built up among players over the years. When worse and worse word-of-mouth reaches a critical point, the market begins to crash. And the trigger was a middle school student who bought a cassette game called Comet Strike.

But the poor image quality of this game made him unbearable, so he went to the game store and asked for a return. But the owner of the game store refused, so in a fit of rage, he went home and took his ATARI-2600 game console and dozens of cassettes to the door of the game store and smashed them all.

Soon a second person followed suit, and within two days five Atari consoles were smashed in front of the game store. The news quickly made it to the lace news section of the Los Angeles Times. As a result, countless players seemed to have found an outlet all at once, and fragmented Atari game consoles that were smashed by hands, stepped on, and crushed by cars began to appear in front of countless game stores.

The outrage of the gamers led to a panic among the game store owners, who refused to purchase any Atari-related products, and even demanded the return of the consoles and cartridges in stock. The collapse of the sales channel directly led to the collapse of the entire Atari game industry chain.

Atari itself bore the brunt of the blow, and countless third-party companies that relied on Atari consoles to issue game cards also suffered a catastrophe. Even the sales of FC game consoles have been implicated in a slight decline. It's fair to say that all North American gamers have questions about home consoles.

And Oriental Games, which has been following the collapse of Atari on the side. Immediate action was taken to allocate $10 million in additional promotional expenses. The money was invested in a massive advertising campaign on television and newspapers across the United States.

In this advertising war, Oriental Games did not invite Hollywood stars to star. There is no shooting of warm literary and artistic promotional films, but simply and directly the FC game console and each game cassette. The sales figures for the past year are listed.

Everyone's choice is your choice, and the huge sales represent the quality of the full score. When there is a loss of confidence in the market, this kind of simple and crude advertising is the best way to win back the trust of consumers. In the first 11 months of 1982, global shipments of FC consoles totaled 9.75 million units. With nearly 10 million families voting a vote of confidence in FC consoles, what are you waiting for!

The vacant market after the collapse of Atari was quickly occupied by the FC consoles of Oriental Games. The trend of FC consoles dominating the home console market in the United States and even the world is still irreversible. In fact, because of the appearance of Li Xuan's butterfly, Atari's collapse this time was not as tragic as in another time and space.

In another time and space, 1982 was the year when Atari was at its most proud. The company's top management paid a sky-high price of $20 million to buy the game adaptation rights of "ET Aliens". But because the negotiations between Atari and Universal Pictures dragged on for too long, the company did not want to miss the peak sales season before Christmas.

As a result, the game developers were short of time and came up with a very poor quality game. However, Atari was bent on making a fortune from "ET Alien", and began mass production ahead of schedule without waiting for the sales of the game cartridge to come back.

As a result, the poor quality of the cartridges of the ET Aliens game sparked a huge outrage among fans. The countless game cartridges that were produced at full capacity in the early stage have become a backlog that cannot be sold. And these products around him consumed a lot of Atari's book funds, and eventually led to Atari's bankruptcy.

And now. Atari's glory has long been stolen by Oriental Games, and it can only survive by constantly releasing new games. Even Atari itself is not sure which of these new games will be recognized by players, so it has been implementing a strict sales-based production system.

So now Atari is in the home console market though. It was a near-devastating blow, but the large amount of cash on its books at least allowed the company to retain the opportunity to transform. It's just that in the future, it will be difficult for Atari to be qualified to become a competitor of Oriental Game Company.

Aikang's monopoly dream in the personal computer industry. It was first realized by Oriental Games Company in the home computer market. Together with Gameboy, which occupies almost 85% of the global handheld game console market, the Oriental Game Console Company showed its domineering dominance in 1982.

And the rout of Atari. It has also made countless third-party game development companies desperate and have accepted the recruitment of Oriental Game Company. Of course. Oriental Games did not put forward too harsh requirements because of their difficulties.

For the current Oriental game company, for a long time in the future, the only one who can defeat them is themselves, or the U.S. Department of Justice. As long as Oriental Games does not make arrogant mistakes, it continues to be modest and cautious in strictly controlling the quality, and continues to launch high-quality games. Other competitors will have a hard time breaking into the home console market.

Another aspect that Oriental Games needs to pay attention to is the antitrust investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. It is precisely because of this sword of Damocles hanging over their heads that Oriental Game Company needs to carefully exploit other third-party game companies.

To this end, Oriental Games has also set up a strong legal department in the United States, and has also invited well-known law firms in the United States as legal counsel. At the same time, all the terms of the contracts signed by Oriental Games and other companies have been carefully considered by professional lawyers, and they are resolutely not left with the US Department of Justice.

At the same time, one Atari fell, and other competitors of its own appeared. And the new competitors that have emerged this time are actually old faces in the PC market. Before the ABC-1 computer was launched, Kemodo swept the entire low-end PC market with a VIC-20.

And this time it also offered a low-cost magic weapon, the slogan of the newly launched Kemodo-64 computer is. You can learn and play games at the same time. Spend the same amount of money. Do two things!

And this new Kemodo-64 computer is the same as the ABC-1 computer, using a 6502 processor as the core. But it's only available for $595. It's nearly $100 cheaper than the ABC-1 computer, which has been cut in price several times.

It can be said that the company is using this computer, and it is competing with the FC game console and the ABC-1 computer at the same time. In fact, the FC home game console of Oriental Games Company does not feel a lot of pressure. For starters, the FC console retails for just $199 in the U.S., which is only one-third of the price of the Grammodo-64 computer.

Secondly, the real core competitiveness of FC consoles is those good games. At the same time, the FC game console is positioned as a home game console, so it is easy to operate and can be used when connected to a TV.

And the Kemodo-64 is positioned as a computer that can play games. If you want to play the game, you must at least learn to control the computer proficiently. This leaves a large part of the users of the console, teenagers and children, out of the equation.

In contrast, Aikang felt much more pressure. Previously, the VIC-20 of Kemodo was positioned in the low-end market and did not compete with Aikang's products. But this time, the new release of the Kemodo-64 computer is clearly aimed at the mid-range market.

The price butcher of the Kemodo company, the retail price of the new computer of $595, directly disrupted the market order. What's more, the management of Kemodo is indeed very resolute in its attitude towards this price war. In order to reduce the cost of purchasing parts for new computers, they directly acquired Zilog, the manufacturer of the 6502 processor.

If Aikang company follows the price reduction. The ABC-1 computer went into the low-profit mode. As a result, Aikang is already considering gradually reducing the production of ABC-1 computers, and is slowly withdrawing from sales except for the educational computer market. Then put more energy. Concentrate on the more lucrative ABC-2, ABC-3, ABC-P4 and other models of computers.

There will be no shortage of competition in any market, and Dongfang Electronics has never been afraid of competition. None of these things affected Li Xuan to bid farewell to 1982 with a full good mood. Step into the brand new 1983.

In the first week of the new year, the U.S. semiconductor industry ushered in its first heavy transaction. Oriental Holding at a price of $300 million. Took over Fairchild Semiconductor from Schlumberger of France.

Schlumberger spent $350 million on Fairchild Semiconductor in the summer of 1979 and left the market for $50 million in just three and a half years. In fact, the U.S. industry was generally not optimistic about this deal at the beginning. No one thinks that a foreign company in the oil services industry has the ability to save the aging Fairchild Semiconductor.

The acquisition of Dongfang Electronics Company has also caused heated discussions in the US semiconductor industry, and there are many differences of opinion. Many people think that Dongfang can play with digital chips, but not necessarily with analog chips. But more people believe that Dongfang Electronics, the newly rising semiconductor dark horse, can inject fresh vitality into Fairchild Semiconductor.

It is normal to have bullish nature and bearish outlook, and every acquisition is actually a risk. And Li Xuan's several heavy acquisitions so far can be regarded as relatively successful. Another thing that makes him happy is that at least no one in the industry believes that Dongfang Electronics is not qualified to buy Fairchild Semiconductor.

You must know that two years ago, when Schlumberger acquired Fairchild Semiconductor, it was overwhelmed with doubts from the industry and the media. There are even extremists who have written to the White House asking the president to intervene to stop the French from tarnishing the US semiconductor industry.

But now, relying on the ERM architecture and MIPS architecture, Dongfang Electronics has successfully established itself in the American semiconductor industry. In the field of high-tech, technological innovators are always admired.

Dongfang Electronics has qualified to become a heavyweight player in this competitive game. What Dongfang Electronics lacked most before was technology accumulation, and after the completion of the acquisition of Fairchild Semiconductor, Dongfang Electronics made up for a lot of shortcomings.

According to Li Xuan's combing of the development history of Fairchild Semiconductor in the past ten years, it is found that the company's mistake in the first half of the company lies in the parent company's continuous blood drawing. At that time, the profits of Fairchild Semiconductor were not used to continue investment and research and development, and further consolidated its advantages when it was in an advantageous position, but stagnated and was constantly caught up or even surpassed by other opponents.

In the second half, Fairchild Semiconductor was lost in catching up with others. When the memory market was booming, it began to invest in memory research and development. When the processor market began to explode, it turned to processors and even developed a game console product.

This changeable way of thinking not only did not bring any change to it, but made it lose its advantage in the field of analog semiconductors step by step, and finally degenerated into a mediocre company.

What Fairchild Semiconductor needs most now is not change, but persistence. For example, after the acquisition of Fairchild, Schlumberger of France invested a lot of money in the field of artificial intelligence. Li Xuan will not cut these projects, but will set up an independent intelligence research institute under Fairchild. We will continue to invest a lot of money to carry out research on intelligent industrial machines and lay the foundation for entering the field of automation in the future.

Fairchild's focus in the semiconductor field has shifted back to the field of analog semiconductors. In addition to the field of semiconductor discrete devices, where Fairchild still has advantages, it focuses on the two subdivisions of amplifiers and power supply ICs.

At the same time, with the support of the Oriental Research Institute, Fairchild Semiconductor will also carry out research on digital-analog hybrid semiconductors. Li Xuan did not ask how much profit Fairchild could contribute in the short term, but first formulated a forward-looking long-term scientific research plan.

With Li Xuan's strong financial resources, he doesn't care about the losses of Fairchild Company in three or even five years, as long as he can regain the lead in technology, he will not worry about no profits in the future. Taking power IC as an example, with the advent of the era of electrical intelligence, power IC has an extremely broad market in the future of computers, home appliances, automobiles and other fields.

Li Xuan believes that the only thing that Fairchild Semiconductor needs to change now is the recognition of the value of technology R&D personnel. This is also a stubborn problem of Fairchild, which cannot give R&D personnel a salary commensurate with the value of the zào they create, so that the talent continues to lose.

Although the name of Silicon Valley's "West Point Military Academy" is an affirmation of Fairchild's technical strength, it is not a kind of irony. Fairchild is a commercial company, not a public school, and should not be tasked with developing talent for other businesses.

Therefore, the only change that Li Xuan has to make after taking over Fairchild is to comprehensively adjust the company's salary setting standards, keep up with mainstream companies in Silicon Valley, and give strong R&D personnel generous treatment. (To be continued......)