Age of Empires was officially released on Christmas Day, and sales once again broke the record for PC games.

Originally, including Jester and Mars Entertainment, it was expected to be able to sell three million units in a year, which is already a very good number.

But, obviously, they miscalculated the enthusiasm of the players.

On the first day of release, more than 800,000 units were sold in North America alone, and as a PC game, there had never been such a second game other than Quake.

For example, for example, Sid. Mel comes across the altar of Civilization.

This incredibly rich game has been on sale for almost two years, and the cumulative sales have just exceeded one million.

Moreover, it will be released in Europe the next day.

The sales of "Age of Empires" have increased by 600,000, you know, although the population of Europe is more than that of the United States, but in terms of game consumption, they are based on their previous experience, that is, they have the United States, but it is hard to believe that they have exploded with unimaginable enthusiasm for buying the game "Age of Empires".

Even in Europe, there are many media outlets that have reported on this grand occasion.

Because of the release of Mars Entertainment's "Age of Empires", it has caused Christmas traffic jams in many places, because Christmas is already heavy traffic, and there are many people queuing up to buy at stores or game stores, traffic jams naturally appear.

At that time, a BBC reporter interviewed a young man in his twenties who had been queuing since Christmas Eve, a young man at the University of Exeter, who had arrived in London by train a day earlier, hoping to get his hands on Age of Empires as soon as possible.

"Excuse me, this gentleman. Why should you buy this game? ”

"I'm a student of history, I'm very interested in ancient history, I've been a fan of the Civilization franchise before, and then I heard about this game, which was developed by the development team of Civilization and is led by Jester. Lee, you probably don't know him if you don't play games, he's the best game designer in the world, and the previous reports that Age of Empires will be a realistic simulation of the historical conquest of empires, so I can't help but be excited. I want to be the first to play, so I'm going to line up! ”

A lot of people have one reason or another, but I'm all drawn to Age of Empires as a game.

By the end of December, Age of Empires had sold more than 3 million copies worldwide, approaching the PC game record of 4.4 million copies sold by Quake.

Jester was in South Korea at the time, and he knew the news in South Korea.

However, Age of Empires did not have a Korean version at the beginning. There is also no Japanese version, and the Japanese version will be delayed by a month.

Later, the Japanese version of "Age of Empires" hit the shelves, and the final sales were not very good, selling less than 100,000 copies in a week. Of course, as a PC game, this kind of sales are already very good in Japan.

When Jester returned to the United States and looked at the sales records and statistics. The hot selling period of "Age of Empires" has passed, and the total sales have stopped at more than 3.5 million units, and the sales rate is now slow. According to the previous experience in game sales, the same curve as before.

It is generally certain that within two years, it is possible for "Age of Empires" to break through four million, but there is not much hope of breaking the record of "Mjolnir".

And, in the recent debriefing of the game's progress, John. The development of Carmack's "Quake 2" has entered the accelerator, the new 3D engine is very powerful, Jester came to see Carmack's new engine at the first time, although it is much worse than the engine designed by Carmack in the original history, in the mid-nineties when developing "Thor's Hammer".

After all, there is a gap between the times, after all, there is four to five years less.

A lot of things that are no longer a problem in software are still impossible to do in hardware.

But the engine is much stronger than the original DOOM of the same era, in fact, in this world, when the first game of "Quake", the engine was already much better than the real first first-person shooter in history, and it was also Carmack's work "Assassination of Hitla", only slightly inferior to "DOOM".

And by the time of the second work, the original "DOOM" was completely incomparable.

With enough time and funds from the development team, after all, after the determination of the three changes, Carmack's understanding of the 3D engine has reached a higher level, and the production has come out that in this world, at least in two to three years, it is impossible for anyone to imitate a new 3D engine.

Originally, Jester also wanted to continue the name of the Unreal series.

But John. Carmack put forward a different opinion, he felt that this engine development was also a rare experience and sublimation for himself, just like a silkworm chrysalis that had lost its skin, so he wanted to change the name.

However, he lacked the talent to choose a name, and he was not very satisfied with a few of them.

After hearing this, Jester naturally agreed.

He is naturally the best at choosing a name, he doesn't need to choose it himself, he just needs to find a few better names from his memory, and let the other party choose it.

"Frost, what do you think of the name?"

Frost is the name of an engine in Jester's memory, developed by EA specifically for Battlefield, and is very suitable for the development and production of FPS games.

Of course, Carmack's brand new engine has nothing to do with EA's frost engine decades later.

Hearing Jester's name for the new engine, Carmack frowned and thought for a while, although it was more profound than the original Unreal Engine, it was still a very good name, and more importantly, the name that his boss casually said was much better than what he thought before.

Eventually, Carmack nodded, "Okay, it's called Frost." ”

"By the way, "Quake 2", when will it be completed?" After the name of the engine was confirmed, Jester continued to inquire about the game, although Jester also participated in the design of a small part of "Quake 2", but the first person of this game was already John . Carmack.

"Soon, when I was developing the engine, my team actually started to work on the modeling needed in the game, so our procedural work was very fast, and now it's almost complete, probably in April, or May, and we will be able to get the alpha version."

John. Carmack said with confidence.

"That's what I thought, do you know about the Battle.net hypothesis before?" Jester thought for a moment, then asked a question in a deep voice.

"You know, it seems to be for the massive rollover of Age of Empires? But when I heard about it, I thought it would be a perfect fit for Quake's arena mode, and if you think about it, you can play against players from all over the United States! A Los Angeles mouth cannon can fight with a New York gun god, who is better than whom, and there is no need to brag on the forum, just do it......"

Hearing Jester's question, John. Carmack's eyes lit up, and he said excitedly, obviously, he also saw the most important gameplay of "Thor's Hammer" from Jester's battlenet building.

"Huh."

Jester confronts John. Carmack was obviously excited and didn't look for anything about this passage, but just smiled: "You have thought too much, now the battlenet is still being built, to finish the battlenet, I estimate that it will be in June, the initial test plan is only about two thousand to three thousand places for "Age of Empires", as for "Thor's Hammer", ...... It can only be said that first-person shooter games have much greater requirements for network conditions than RTS games. ”

After a slight pause, Jester saw John. There was a disappointed look on Carmack's face, but he continued: "So, in a short period of time, at least a year and a half, I won't think about the idea of adding Quake to the battle network. ”

"And ......"

With that, Jester stood up and stretched.

"It's going to be a very long process to build and test Battle.net, and I didn't want to see what I could profit from all at once, because I knew that this was the way the game was going in the future, and it would definitely bring me a lot of profit in the future."

With that, Jester reimagines how powerful Carmack will be when he expands a battle.net into a platform for the game.

"John, you can imagine that in 10 years, or 15 years, or even 20 years, we will have a platform that is the largest and most technologically advanced gaming platform in the world, and he will be able to provide this opportunity to all the companies that are willing to sell and play on this platform."

"It's not just our own company's game on this platform."

"It's a lot of companies' games, we just provide a platform like this, so that everybody, can play online through our platform, and at that time, when players get used to our platform, what do you think we can get?" (A good event for pie in the sky, cool mobile phones are waiting for you!) Follow from ~ Dian/Chinese network public account (WeChat add friends - add public account - enter ddxiaoshuo), participate now! Everyone has a prize, now pay attention to ddxiaoshuo WeChat public account! (To be continued......) R1292