Maybe it was because he hadn't met Huaicai for too long before, Will White didn't hesitate for too long after feeling Zhang Lexing's appreciation of his game, and quickly agreed to Zhang Lexing's request and promised to go to Hong Kong to set up his own game studio, but Will White still put forward a condition - to return to the United States for three months every year, of course Zhang Lexing has no objection to this, "As long as you get on my ship, there will naturally be a way to make you like the ...... of the East"

Although the details of the investment have not yet been negotiated, Will White said: "Mr. Zhang, as an investor, would you like to name the upcoming studio?"

Zhang Lexing pondered for a while and said: "It's better to call it Maxis Studio, and when it grows in the future, the company's name can also be Maxis." ”

……

Happy times are always short-lived, and the party is coming to an end. After leaving San Mateo, Zhang Lexing returned to his Blue Dragon studio (a PC game development studio) because there was good news here.

In the past two years, PC technology has developed rapidly, and the graphics card has developed from the earliest CGA to EGA and VGA graphics cards, and the R&D strength of Blue Dragon Studio has slowly transitioned from EGA to VGA, and has begun to study the application of VGA display technology in games. The development team also used the previous research results to develop the racing game "Top Racer" based on EGA display technology and the adventure puzzle game "Crazy Mansion".

Zhang Lexing had already learned from the phone before he came that both games had been completed and would be on sale soon. This time I came to the Blue Dragon Studio Zhang Lexing mainly to see what the final result looked like, but after a look, I found that the greater the expectation, the greater the disappointment, EGA's picture is still very simple in Zhang Lexing's opinion, especially the racing game that pays attention to the picture effect is particularly obvious, on the contrary, the adventure game made Zhang Lexing a little surprised.

The plot of "Crazy Mansion" is old-fashioned and simple, about Doctor Mad kidnapping the protagonist's girlfriend for an experiment, and in order to save his girlfriend, the protagonist and his friends go to the building where the doctor is located to rescue. However, there are still a lot of innovations in the game itself, first of all, instead of the previous adventure games where only the protagonist walks around alone, players can choose two of the protagonist's friends to go on adventures with the protagonist. Then the game control is operated by the mouse, the player first selects the command at the bottom of the screen, and then clicks on the item in the screen to interact with it, and can complete the push, pull, pick up, close, open and other actions of the item. The EGA display processing technology, which has matured since CommanderKeen, adds a smooth on-screen scrolling effect to the game, a first for an adventure game. In order to make the game look better, the development team also added beautiful hand-drawn cutscenes.

Not to be outdone, the R&D team showed the application of the latest VGA display technology in the game, although the demo screen is not smooth enough, but the richer colors or higher resolution pictures are very different from the previous game screens. In addition to the display technology, the R&D team also showed the sound effect of the game based on the sound card in the experiment, and the beautiful melody made Zhang Lexing feel a little like listening to the game soundtrack in his last life.

After visiting the Blue Dragon Studio, Zhang Lexing received good news from the investment manager who was sent out to contact Lucas, and Lucas finally relented and agreed to the Red River Fund to invest in Industrial Light & Magic and Skywalker Sound, with the specific conditions being: Red River Fund contributed 130 million US dollars to obtain 42% of the equity of the two companies. In addition, another additional condition - to support the newly established computer animation production department of Hong Kong Kunpeng Animation, Lucas also gritted his teeth and passed, and it seems that he is facing a lot of financial pressure.

In the days that followed, in addition to paying attention to VisualSystem's operating system and key game development projects, Zhang Lexing also began to pay attention to the turmoil of the U.S. stock market and economy.

In August, the stock market began to have some turbulence, with a sharp increase in stock trading volume and increased market volatility.

In September, due to the relaxation of the U.S. government's financial market regulation and the stimulus of tax cuts on stock investment, huge amounts of international travel capital poured into the U.S. stock market, and the stock price of the New York Stock Exchange continued to hit new highs. Riding on this trend, VisualSystem completed the final reduction of its shares.

At the beginning of October, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by nearly 400 points for two consecutive weeks, and the dollar has been sold off in the foreign exchange market since October 14. In the morning financial program on October 18, Treasury Secretary Baker said that the dollar could fall further. All sorts of bad news followed, and a dark cloud swelled in the hearts of people who had been optimistic about the US economy.

At 9:10 a.m. on an ordinary Monday morning on October 19, after the opening bell rang as usual, the Dow Jones index was already down 67 points as soon as it appeared on the screen. Zhang Lexing, who arrived in New York two days early, sat in his suite at the Hilton Hotel in the heart of Manhattan, quietly watching the stock market information beating on the TV. David Graham, who was in charge of the operation next to him, paced slowly, occasionally looking at the curves and numbers beating on the screens of several microcomputers lined up in the room, and occasionally giving different instructions to the assistant waiting for the phone.

At the same time, a surge of sell orders quickly poured into the trading channel, and the index had fallen 104 points in less than an hour after the market opened. During this period, the number of futures trading and stock selling orders that poured into the stock market was very large, which seriously slowed down the calculation and matching process of the trading system, and as a result, more than an hour after the opening of the market, there were still 11 index stocks that failed to show the trading price, and the Dow Jones index on the big screen could no longer truly reflect the actual price of the market. Most people who originally had a wait-and-see attitude also began to panic, and there was only one voice left in their hearts, "We must find a way to sell all the stocks in our hands." Panicked people flocked to the nearest phone, desperately dialing familiar numbers in an attempt to contact their stockbrokers, and after the trading system, the NYSE's phone system began to come to the brink of collapse.

The New York Stock Exchange has a total of 200 microcomputers used to process stock transactions, which once brought fast trading speed to the New York Stock Exchange, but today it is finally unbearable. When the stock transaction data flocked to the computer, these 200 microcomputers had no time to process it, and the processing speed of the information system lagged far behind. Less than an hour after the market opened, the computer was already 20 minutes faster than the actual trading speed. By noon, the lag time had widened to 75 minutes, a large number of stock trades were not executed, and computer systems were almost paralyzed. And those stockbrokers who were originally in front of the terminal, elegantly answering the phone and pressing the keyboard, most of them turned into iron-blooded fighters, pulling their throats one by one, holding paper and pen, trying to use the most primitive methods to save themselves and their customers' losses.

Before the market opened in the afternoon, rumors of the closure of the exchange quietly circulated among the people, and traders who were worried about the failure of their stocks were forced to dump their stocks frantically, and the excessive stock turnover made the already overwhelmed computer trading system even worse, and the computer system was already 100 minutes behind the actual trading speed not long after the market opened. Even if the officials of the Securities and Exchange Commission came forward to clarify after discovering that something was wrong, the people who had already fallen into a complete frenzy turned a deaf ear, and it was impossible to reverse the general trend of decline under the huge inertia. After a brief ascent, the index continued its downward movement of 3,000 feet.

By the time the Dow closed at 4 p.m., it had fallen 508.32 points, or 22.6 percent, the highest one-day decline in history, and even far higher than the previous 12.8 percent decline on October 28, 1929, and other indices that dragged the stock market down, with more than $500 billion in paper wealth wiped out in one day.

On this day, it was inconvenient for VisualSystem to make a move, but Zhang Lexing used Graham's secret operation to use the short positions established in advance to gain a lot in this huge downward market. After the U.S. stock market closed, Graham did not sit idle, but remotely controlled some traders who were squatting overseas through the phone, and continued the harvest feast in the stock markets of other countries. The world has circled, and the secret funds of more than 800 million US dollars prepared by Zhang Lexing have rapidly swelled more than ten times with the help of Graham, deducting dividends and the natural loss of reverse operation of funds, Zhang Lexing has gained almost 6.8 billion US dollars in this trip.

The next day, the time came for VisualSystem to make a move, led by Ballmer, the company's spokesman, who confidently announced on the morning financial show that VisualSystem would buy back shares in Microsoft and other publicly traded companies, and would soon make more high-quality investments. At the same time, more than 600 listed companies have publicly announced that they will buy back the company's shares from the open market, and more importantly, from the head of the Federal Reserve, who reaffirmed that they will guarantee the liquidity of the financial system. Subsequently, major U.S. commercial banks lowered interest rates. With a lot of good news, after the opening of the market on October 20, the stock index began to rise gradually.

Of course, VisualSystem's more than $3 billion in cash will not be hoarded for share buybacks alone, but will target companies with high potential for future stock price growth (such as BBY), blue chips with large declines (such as General Motors, Coca-Cola, etc.), Small companies with promising development prospects, through these goals can increase the patent technology reserve for VisualSystem, but also obtain greater medium and long-term investment returns, through the previous reduction and repurchase, not only strengthen the control of its listed companies, but also leave a lot of cash for VisualSystem, greatly enhance the company's strength.

In the aftermath, many experts were a little puzzled by the sudden crash, because there was no major financial news that could have caused a surge in sales, only the fall of the dollar in the foreign exchange market and the expectation of a fall in the dollar did not play such a big role. In the end, experts unanimously identified the computer trading system as the main culprit of the crash, because on October 16, there was a capacity problem with the handling of an 80 billion pension fund, which led to the suspension of the trading system, and no one is interested in knowing the real reason behind the crash. In order to avoid similar incidents in the future, the New York Stock Exchange asked SIAC, the company that provided the computer system, to upgrade the processors, storage, disk capacity and switches in the system as soon as possible, and to adjust the control and processing software so that it could process the increasing amount of transaction data in a timely manner. Thanks to the efforts of everyone, the confidence of investors began to gradually recover.

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