Konami is also a veteran of a video game manufacturer. Although there have been a lot of shooting games launched in the last two years, the company's revenue has reached a peak.

But.

Konami, which is now generally vigorous and unfocused, is not at all satisfied with its current results.

They don't want to just make video games, they want to make more game genres, they want to make more money.

And the world can create a new genre of games, but it doesn't mean that people are smart. Even if the human brain is very active, there must be an opportunity.

It is not only necessary to rely on one's own efforts, but also to look at the course of history.

In retrospect, whether it is Taidong's "Space Invaders" or Namco's "Pac-Man", it is a series of accidents that the probability is too small to be able to be released.

Even the originator of commercial video games, Atari, was able to become popular with "PONG", which is a very fortuitous thing.

You know, the two founders of Atari each contributed $250, a total of $500, but it only took a year to use the game "PONG" to make Atari's revenue exceed $3 million.

And why the game "PONG" is popular, not the "Virtues Odyssey" it borrows from, or the later games such as "Victory!" and "Ball!" are popular, is also a matter of luck.

And the whole development process of Atari is also full of accidents. Maybe it's because the capital is too small, and the market is expanding too fast.

Even if all their income is invested in making products, they can still only meet less than 30% of the market share.

And the way they do business is also very tightrope walking today.

How to build the most arcade machines with the least amount of money.

Atari's solution was that they first asked the supplier for bulk goods, first the goods and then the payment, and the longer the payment period, the better.

However, it is unlikely to be longer, usually only two to three months. The maximum is not more than one quarter.

When the parts arrived at Atari, Atari only needed three days to turn those components into arcade machines and PONG.

At that time, Atari's "PONG" was completely in short supply.

The "PONG" arcade machine, which costs $300 in components plus labor and shipping, doesn't even have to spend a week in the warehouse. It will be sold for prices ranging from $900 to $1,100.

And the cash sold by Atari was not used to repay the payment in a hurry, but was used for marketing, building a factory, buying new office equipment, and paying off the payment that had already expired.

Under such a dangerous development model, Atari managed to go from $500 in start-up capital to more than $3 million in revenue in one year.

But......

At that time, venture capital firms liked Atari a company that could generate more than $3 million in revenue, more than $1 million in net profits, and a thousand-fold profit in a year.

However, there was no rush to invest in Atari. Because for the investment companies in Silicon Valley at that time, they couldn't understand the projects run by Atari.

They couldn't figure out if a video game would be like a movie.

Although Atari's "PONG" looks very popular this year, maybe next year, in a few months, it will be like a movie, and after a few months, no one will watch it again.

After that, Atari's development was very unexpected, and the revenue in the second year easily exceeded 10 million.

By 1976, Atari was looking for more funding. Between going public and being acquired, the latter was chosen.

It was acquired by Warner Communications at the time, which was later Time Warner.

And before Time Warner's acquisition, it was like a boy gently saying to a girl that I only rubbed it, guaranteeing Atari's autonomy, but after it was really acquired, it all became.

The short management of Warner Communications slowly infiltrated and finally hollowed out the original management team. And the main business has also started from arcade machines to home machines.

The launch of the Atari 2600 console relied on an advertising campaign. It didn't take long to be a success.

As a result, in the following years, Atari's annual revenue exceeded the $1 billion mark, and in the best year, it even exceeded $3 billion.

Such an easy success, however, left Atari's Warner management feeling inflated.

They don't allow engineers to put their names in the games they make, and they cut down any project that doesn't make a big profit.

In their view, businesses that do not earn $30 million or 40 million are not worth investing.

However, if you cut down the sapling to death without even looking at it, how do you know if the sapling will grow into a towering tree?

Moreover, they also refused to upgrade the Atari 2600. Although, the Atari 2600 has been around for a few years, the hardware is already behind the times.

However, Warner's managers decided that instead of upgrading the hardware, they would use the money for advertising.

Because of the success, they decided to launch another 15 million Atari 2600 consoles to the North American market at Christmas 1982.

In addition, it also cooperated with Spielberg to launch nearly 20 million copies of the game using the hottest movie IP ".alien" at the time.

And at that time, the game market was actually saturated for the Atari 2600. The patience of the players has also been exhausted by one garbage game after another.

As a result, the bubble in the video game market, which had been inflated by the flow of commercials and films, burst.

The consequence of a large number of unsalable games is that a large number of video games are sold, and the sale cannot solve the problem, and in the end, the leadership of Atari thought of a trick, out of sight is clean, bury it is good......

The vast majority of Konami employees have some European and American plots, whether it's "Metal Gear Solid" or "Contra", you can find many elements of American blockbusters.

And the breakthrough work they thought of recently, the new work that broke through the curse of Konami only making shooting games, is still a game set in European and American culture.

The name of this game was finally determined to be "Castlevania".

It tells the story of vampires and vampire hunters.

And the gameplay of this game is to learn from Wanhu's work "Metroid", which is popular overseas.

Konami made this game not only to break through its image of only making shooting games, but also to make a pot of gold in the expanding overseas market.