"Is this the game?"

Jester's father still spoke in that suspicious tone.

The computer screen in front of him was a rudimentary picture, with a rectangular frame and a small box next to it, and below the small box was what appeared to be a score number, and now the number above it showed zero, and below the string of numbers was level-1.

At this time, the game has not yet started, and there are no various blocks falling down, so it is impossible to see what kind of game it is.

"The game is just a rough finish, and there are still some additions to the game, but it's ready to play...... This game is like this......"

Jester was not a good storyteller in this life or in his previous life, so he simply started the game, and while operating, he explained the game to his father and Mark Saini.

The gameplay of Tetris may not be a big deal in the eyes of later generations, and can only be regarded as a small game that can kill time, but in the eyes of people in this world, this game is almost a masterpiece of creation.

Anyone who loves video games can't resist it**.

“…… That's it! ”

Jester demonstrated the game as he spoke, casually turning his head to look at the two beside him.

Unexpectedly, his father looked at him in disbelief, and Mark Seni's eyes lit up, as if he had discovered something extraordinary.

"I'll try!"

Mark Saini's tone of genius game designer turned out to be a little impatient, and he moved so fast that Jester had just gotten up from his seat, he sat down first, and then started the game at almost flying speed.

In the beginning, Mark Saini was not very skilled, and even a little clumsy, often ending the game in a few minutes.

But after trying a few games, after all, he graduated from USC at the age of 17, and he is also a very talented and talented game designer, so he immediately found the trick of this game and became more and more proficient in playing.

By the time he had accumulated two thousand points, the falling speed of the blocks in the game had increased dramatically, and this instantaneous change made Maxeni a little uncomfortable.

But he still tried his best to control the blocks that kept falling, and he couldn't stop at all.

Jester was a little bored watching from the sidelines, after all, he had played this game I don't know how many times, and he was watching it with relish, and even glanced at his father who was eager to try it.

His eyes flashed, and he remembered that when he wrote this game, he added a two-person versus mode, which allowed two people to play at the same time and play a match.

That's why he wanted to make Tetris into an arcade machine, which is extremely confrontational.

To be honest, Tetris is a game, the most suitable platform is a handheld machine, followed by an arcade machine, and as for home consoles and PCs, it is not very suitable for this game.

"By the way, I also designed a two-player mode for this game."

Hearing Jester's words, the two of them turned their heads to look at him in unison, with excited looks on their faces, obviously, they were both deeply attracted to this game.

"Can you still play in two?!" There was even a hint of surprise in Mark Saini's tone.

Shrugging his shoulders, Jester called up the duo mode and told his father how to control zhì2P.

Jester's father, who had been waiting for a long time, hurriedly moved a chair and used the other side of the keyboard to play with Mark Syney like a child.

At this time, Jester realized that although his father was much older than Mark Seni, he was much better than his opponent in terms of talent for playing games, and after several games in a row, the final winner was his father.

And Mark Seni did not show the slightest impatience and did not want to play, but challenged Jester's father again and again with high morale.

The two of them even forgot about the time.

Jester could only watch boredly, he really wanted to remind the two of them that he was hungry, he hadn't eaten for most of the day, and that you had both been playing for more than an hour!

But seeing the child-like expressions of the two of them, the innocent smile on their faces, he thought it was better to let them continue to play.

That's the beauty of video games.

Maybe it's a little inappropriate to say that a middle-aged man and a young man have innocent smiles, but Jester really can't think of a more appropriate modifier to describe the expressions on their faces at this moment.

Until......

Jester's father's stomach was the first to growl, and then Mark Saini's stomach made the same sound.

At this time, the two looked at each other and laughed.

“Amazing！ Amazing！ Jess! I can't even think of any words to describe it! Masterpiece! In every sense of the word! I feel like I'm back to my childhood when I played Space Invaders on an arcade machine at the mall and forgot to get home, and thankfully, now my mom doesn't beat me in the ass for that reason! ”

Who would have thought that the first thing Mark Seni did when he stood up was to give Jester a bear hug directly, he trembled with excitement and hugged Jester tightly.

At the same time, Mark Seni continued to speak loudly in Jester's ear in his loudest voice, so fast that Jester could only hear a rough idea.

"This game is fantastic! It's the best game I've ever played! It's true! It's true! A hundred times more fun than Space Invaders! I love it so much! ”

Jester struggled to get out of Mark Seni's embrace, seeing his father look at him like he never remembered.

It was a look of shock and disbelief.

It seems like looking at a stranger.

"Jace, it's incredible! How did you come up with it? This game ...... Oh my God......" By the end, Jester's father's tone was even a little choked, so that he couldn't continue with his excitement.

He was so excited, he never thought that his son would be able to make such a great game.

As an arcade designer, he has played countless games, but he has never been so addicted to a game, not even Pong! None of them.

And this game is so simple, but so wonderful, just a simple pattern of seven squares, under the random patchwork, can evolve into such an unbelievable appeal.

It's incredible.

"Dad, I just came up with this idea by accident, it's not a big deal, it's just a flash of inspiration...... Everyone's hungry, let's eat first, I have some ideas to tell you. ”

Jester smiled a little embarrassedly, after all, the two people in front of him, one was the father of this body, a senior hardware engineer of Atari Arcade, and the other was a real genius game designer, and he was only able to show his might in front of them by relying on the prophet and the copycat, but of course he knew how many pounds and taels he had.

One must first have self-knowledge.

The three of them saw that it was close to two o'clock, and it was too late to cook it at home, although Jestertong Guò remembered that his father had a good hand at Sichuan cuisine.

Although Jester and his father are Chinese, and Costa Mesa, a small town with an 8.2 percent Chinese population, has a dedicated Chinese neighborhood, the family lives in a white, well-maintained neighborhood.

However, the place where they live is very close to the Chinese restaurant that Jester and his family frequent, and they don't need to drive, and the three of them just walked for ten minutes to reach their destination.

It's a Chinese restaurant called Ju Fu Lou, right next to an upscale Chinese community.

Jester's father knew the owner of the area so well that they grew up wearing a pair of pants.

Jester's father even called the owner of the restaurant a senior brother.

There is a reason for this.

The Jester family immigrated to the United States when his grandfather was his grandfather, and his grandfather, Li Yaoguang, was once a general of the Anti-Japanese War, participated in the Battle of Wuhan, the Battle of Changsha, and won the Baoding Medal.

At that time, after the end of the Anti-Japanese War, his grandfather expected that a civil war was very likely to break out, and he did not want to fight a civil war, so he took his family across the ocean to the United States in 1945.

Before joining the army, Jester's grandfather's family had a family of cooking skills, and there was a big restaurant in the famous town of Sichuanxi.

Li Yaoguang has practiced good cooking skills since he was a child, and later after the 918 incident, Li Yaoguang, who heard the bad news, was furious, and he was still a young man in the second middle school at the time, so he enlisted in the army with full of enthusiasm, hoping to fight the Japanese.

Later, when he came to the United States, Jester's father had just been born, and Li Yaoguang's family also had to eat, so he opened a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco with good cooking skills.

Relying on the inheritance of family education, Li Yaoguang changed the practice of spicy Sichuan dishes to make them more suitable for the sweet and greasy taste that Americans like, but he did not expect the business to get better and better, and now he has opened more than a dozen branches, and now it is a famous Chinese restaurant on the West Coast, with a turnover of nearly 10 million US dollars a year.

And the owner of this Jufu Lou was an apprentice who followed Lee Kuan Yew at that time, and later came here to open this Chinese restaurant, because the craftsmanship is authentic, good at Chinese taste, can make authentic Sichuan cuisine, but also good at American taste, can make improved Chinese food, so the business is quite good.

The three of them came to the store, the decoration was very Chinese-style, found an empty table and sat down, and within two minutes, the restaurant owner who had received the notice from the waiter in the store walked out of the kitchen, with a warm smile on his face.

Jester knew that this fat-looking man was called Li Guobin, and when he saw him coming, after all, he was his elder, so he quickly got up and called Uncle Li.

Li Guobin nodded with a smile, and then said with some complaints: "Xiaojie, you haven't come to eat with me for a long time." ”

Jester could only smile and refrain from responding.

Jester's Chinese name is Li Jie, so Li Guobin will call him that.

Only his grandfather and his uncle would call him that, but not his father, whose father was born in the United States and received an American education, while his mother was a white man, and it was for this reason that his father fell out with his grandfather, and he did not even inherit the family business, so he simply left San Francisco and came here.

Jester's father introduced Li Guobin a few words, asked him to cook a few good dishes, and originally wanted Li Guobin to have a few drinks together, but because the restaurant had too much business, he couldn't get rid of it.

Mark Seny's taste is no different from that of ordinary Americans, and he likes sweet and greasy food very much, and in order to take care of his taste, Jester's father specially instructed his brother to cook more sweet dishes.

While waiting for the food, Mark Saini couldn't help but talk about the previous game again, full of beautiful words.

Even Jester's father did not hesitate to praise the game and his son.

"If it weren't for this shock, not many people would still be playing games now, otherwise, this American Cube would definitely be worth tens of millions of dollars!"

Inadvertently, Mark Saini's words of regret silenced Jester's father.

Oh, yes! If it weren't for the damn Atari shock, the most conservative estimate would have been that the game would have sold half a million units, or even a million copies, which would be $20 million to $40 million in sales based on a $40 a cartridge.

According to Atari's share of the distribution, Jester can get at least a few million dollars from it.

But now that Atari doesn't even develop new games of his own, and the new owner has no interest in home consoles, there's no way they'll be able to help you launch the game.

Moreover, the market response is so lukewarm that no one knows what will happen to this game after its release.

Sometimes, when the market crashes, even a good product can't be sold because the market is gone.

It's just that Mark Seni knows that in order to redeem the prestige he lost before, Atari quickly came up with several well-made works after the Christmas boycott, but players who had had enough of it didn't buy it at all, and sales were extremely dismal.

"Huh."

Seeing the reaction of the two, Jester just smiled softly, and his laughter was full of disapproval.

Mark Seni and Jester's father looked up at Jester at the same time, both of them were a little puzzled why Jester could still laugh, didn't he understand that he had just passed by a million dollars?

"Father, you're an arcade designer, Mark, you're a great game designer......" Jester looked at the two of them, mentally sorted out his words and tone, and said calmly and slowly.

"I just want to ask you now, do you really think that video games are dead?"

This extremely simple, but to the essence of the question, like a bolt of lightning, struck Jester's father and Mark Seni in their hearts, making them stunned for a moment.

Oh, yes! Are video games really dead?

Of course not!