Don't be surprised why Zhang Junyi knows Atari and his founder Bushnell so well, even though Zhang Junyi in his previous life was not born at the time of Atari's glory.

There is an ancient Chinese saying called reviewing the old and learning the new. Zi said: "Reviewing the old and learning the new can be a teacher." Source: The Analects - "Wei Zheng" was created in the Spring and Autumn Period. Confucius said, "By reviewing old knowledge and learning new understandings and experiences, you can become a teacher by virtue of this." ”

"Learn from the past" has four meanings. The first is to "review the old and learn the new", to review the knowledge that has been learned, and to gain new understanding, and the second is to "review the old and know the new": on the one hand, we should review the stories of the classics, and on the other hand, we should strive to acquire new knowledge. The third is to review the old and know the new. As I enrich my experience and improve my comprehension, I can always appreciate more things when I look back at what I have seen before. Fourth, and I think the correct interpretation, refers to the ability to foresee and solve future problems by reminiscing about history. This is what a true master should be capable of.

It may be more complete to combine these four solutions: within the scope of one's ability, read as many books as possible, ponder the meaning of them, and regularly review the knowledge that has already been heard, so that you can have experience and understanding, and try your best to absorb new knowledge, so that you can open up the field of human knowledge, and retreat can also give meaning to the wisdom of the sages. In this way, the integration of the old and the new, connecting the ancient and the modern, can be called "reviewing the old and learning the new, which can be a teacher".

From a general point of view, all historical and current cultural compositions are "therefore" that can be used by future generations.

"Therefore" itself does not produce newness, because the emergence of "new" depends on the subject's qualifications and the context in which it is located.

"Reviewing the old and learning the new" is a competency that everyone has, which can be explained by the following broad understanding of the relationship between the old and the new. Knowing the new is the use of the individual's existing experience or following, criticism, or creation when faced with a new time and space, a new object of speech, and a new event. If a person wants to know something new in the face of reality, he must use his existing experience, that is, he must review his past, and any review is a review of his past in a new situation.

Don't think that in the previous life, those beasts and experts were full of straw bags and didn't know anything, although most of the beasts and experts were afterthoughts, but even if they were hindsights, they had to have goods in their stomachs, how did these goods come about, and it was not to analyze the cases that had happened to interpret some problems!

In his previous life, as a senior financial editor of the website, how could Zhang Junyi become a qualified senior editor if he could not accumulate a large amount of development experience of major well-known companies and the life experience of their main creators.

As a classic case in economics textbooks, the Atari Shock (scientific name: Atari Shock) that occurred in 1983 has always been a joke known to a small number of economics students and people in the game circle. There are a lot of "look-alike" games and a lack of professional reviews.

The result is certainly not pretty.

As the "strongest game hardware and software manufacturer on land", Atari has nearly 10,000 games on the American market within a year under the policy of "quantity over quality" that will be implemented at the end of this year.

The large number of homogeneous garbage games completely discouraged American players, and eventually led to the market crash of Christmas 1982.

In the four years since, no one in the United States has dared to talk about the gaming industry, and the local console market has completely disappeared — until Microsoft launches Xbox.

However, there must be two sides to everything, after the collapse of the previous Atari game, Nintendo learned the lessons of this crash and established a "royalty system" on the famous "red and white machine" FC to control the quality of game software, and this seemingly strict game software quality management system has an impact on video games that continues to this day.

Reason 1: Bad work is rampant

It was in 1982 that Atari and Activision lost a lawsuit over third-party game development. Before Activision won the lawsuit against Atari, the console manufacturer was the only game developer on the platform, with the console manufacturer being the only game developer on the platform.

Atari's defeat caught the attention of many "gold diggers", and an unprecedented number of game developers and studios flocked to the market this year. Not only did Quaker Oats — yes, the Quaker you know — come out with 14 shoddy games. Mystique also released the infamous game Custer's Revenge. And this shoddy content was undoubtedly a rock for the video game industry, which had already begun to decline at that time.

However, Zhang Junyi knows that the most lethal thing is that Atari's parent company Warner spent 6 weeks to make "ET Alien", the most famous IP bad work in history.

During the 1982 Christmas season, E.T. Aliens sold 150 copies, and Atari prepared 4 million cartridges. Eventually, the extra 250 cartridges ended up in the Alamogordo Junk Town, New Mexico, along with some other unsellable inventory.

Ironically, Activision, a game development company founded in 1979, was founded by the departure of several top engineers who were dissatisfied with Atari's management strategy (treating programmers as ordinary employees, when programmers were also planners). And these four former Atari engineers were responsible for almost half of Atari's game production.

Reason 2: the impact of new markets

If it's just a lot of bad work, maybe Atari will still get a respite because of its "monopoly" of electronic entertainment. Unfortunately, since the '80s, the price of PCs has skyrocketed from more than $1,000 in the Apple II era to $200 to $500. And the best Atari 2600 console Atari sold at the time was $199.

Commodore is undoubtedly the most "lethal" of all budget PC manufacturers, with a series of advertisements that highlight the versatility of PCs and point out the disadvantages of consoles that can only play games.

And put up slogans such as "buy a computer at the price of a toy" and "buy a computer to prepare your child for college, but buy a game console but only play things and lose your mind". Even more unfortunately, this also coincided with the fact that Atari was on the radar of the American authorities for pornographic games. As a result, the American version of the "electronic heroin" theory began to profoundly affect the purchase willingness of many parents with purchasing power.

The low price and performance that is not inferior to that of game consoles have allowed budget PCs to quickly start to seize the home entertainment market. This "revolution" contributed to the later indifference of Americans to video games, and the long-term impact is incalculable.

From Atari's play, it sounded a big alarm for Zhang Junyi, that is, any company will face the twilight apocalypse, even if it is his own righteousness, that is, quality determines life and death.

Quality or death!

Quality is related to the life and death of everyone, and quality is related to the survival of the enterprise!

In the previous life, when many large enterprises and well-known enterprises regarded quality as life, as an endless pursuit, and as the core competitiveness of enterprises, some enterprises still did nothing, and even committed crimes against the wind.

Zhang Junyi has witnessed too many ups and downs in his previous life, and the answer he came to is: quality.

An enterprise can be revived because of quality, or it can be destroyed because of quality, an enterprise can stand out because of quality, or it can die instantly because of quality, and a business war can be won because of quality, or it can be defeated because of quality......

In the previous life, all the large enterprises and longevity companies in the world relied on quality to win the world, guard the world, and look down on the world.

Quality is the pillar of life of an enterprise, the source of profits, and the weapon of business warfare! The future business era is an era that tests enterprises and entrepreneurs even more.

When the global economy lacks bright spots, product innovation is weak, when the market is becoming saturated and sales reach a bottleneck, when the price of production factors rises, and when the cost cannot be cut. The strength of the enterprise is based on the quality of every member of the enterprise, every product and every service.

Zhang Junyi remembers that a certain entrepreneur who did a very good job in his previous life said that quality is the key to success or failure in everything? When the business era is developing towards a diversified and multipolar world, what can be invincible in the world? Answer: It is quality!

Quality problems are by no means trivial, but a major matter related to the life and death of an enterprise.

Zhang Junyi knows that even if he has the golden finger of the memory of his past life, but his business will inevitably face more uncertainties in the future, many challenges from all aspects, and many powerless situations, the only thing that can be grasped at this time is to sharpen his knife and grasp the quality of the product, as long as he does this well, he will be invincible!

Atari is a very typical negative textbook, with the comprehensive fermentation of a variety of factors, in the next year of the previous life, that is, in 1983, the Atari collapse finally arrived.

Although there are still a lot of bad games on sale this year, the public has long since stopped buying it, and there are only a lot of games left for merchants that can't be sold. Consumers are reluctant to buy games, and developers are unable to develop new games. Eventually, the vast majority of studios that developed games for Atari – regardless of the quality of their games – declared bankruptcy.

In the face of inflated economic interests, human beings will always make the same mistakes, but can the market withstand such mistakes? The embankment of a thousand miles is destroyed in the anthill, and the detours taken by the predecessors are what the younger generations need to avoid improvement rather than not wanting to forge ahead. This is also the most precious warning left by the collapse of Atari in the previous life to Zhang Junyi.

Of course, Zhang Junyi is not a saint, as an inspirational pure businessman who aspires to become a world-class businessman, although he knows that Atari is about to usher in the largest collapse in history next year, but Zhang Junyi will never be stupid to remind Atari of anything, after all, it is a big collapse for Atari but it is definitely the best opportunity for himself to acquire Atari ever.

Therefore, Zhang Junyi will only choose to watch from the sidelines, and even add a fire to Atari when necessary, so that he can win this famous game company in the world at the minimum cost.

If Zhang Junyi is not mistaken, in his previous life, without his own intervention, after the acquisition of Micro Exbury in 1984, Hasbro became the largest toy company. This deal from a previous life combines the strengths and robustness of one of the world's most beloved toy companies with the strength and steadiness of one of the world's most respected gaming companies. In addition, the acquisition of Micro Experian was accompanied by the acquisition of Chicago's Carrebox, which opened the door for Hasbro to enter the international market.

Zhang Junyi believes that this life has its own involvement, and there is no need to wait for two years later, and I believe that if Atari can merge Hasbro and Atari next year, the results will definitely be no less than Hasbro in the previous life, not to mention the existence of Nintendo's killer feature!

Of course, even if he knows that Atari will usher in the final loneliness, why will Zhang Junyi still insist on acquiring it, as the saying goes, a skinny camel is bigger than a horse, after all, Atari is one of the top game companies in this era, and its foundation is still there.

If nothing else, let's just say that the Atari 2600, arguably the most successful console ever made by the Americans, would have had the legendary console's market life not been interrupted by the subsequent depression, even on par with Nintendo's red and white consoles.

Many of the landmark games and some of the first game concepts were inspired by the fact that the Atari 2600 was not only a huge hit in the United States at the time, but also maintained a significant sales of game cartridges and consoles even after it was exported to South America.

However, whether it is Atari or Nintendo, Zhang Junyi feels that it took nearly a day today to understand the information of these two companies and the main creators, and the most important thing he gained was the lessons and warnings brought by Atari in his previous life.

The failure of Atari in his previous life showed Zhang that the vast video game empire could also be based on a bubble and fall apart in an instant.

History has always been like this: if Zhang Junyi does not learn from the failures of others, then others will learn from their own failures.

Even in the 21st century, when China was in its heyday, Zhang Junyi knew that there were not many games in the domestic stand-alone game industry that could be exported abroad and earn foreign exchange from foreigners.

Mario, The Sims, Warcraft, Glorious Three Kingdoms, Nobunaga's Ambition, Age of Discovery...... Zhang Junyi is familiar with these foreign games.

But on the other hand, the classic Chinese games such as Fairy Sword, Swordsman Love, and Monopoly are almost unknown in foreign countries.

The reason for this is that in addition to the fact that domestic game developers are not good at marketing and publicity, I am afraid that their quality is not enough to compete with foreign games.