Silicon Valley (si1inetVa11ey) is a conceptual name for the northern part of California and the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Alameda County, California, is part of Silicon Valley, where the famous University of California, Berkeley is located.

Not far from Berkeley, there is a villa with walls crawling with greenery, in the living room of the villa, there is no furniture, no appliances, only a few people, some leaning against the corner with their chests crossed, and some simply sitting on the floor.

"The current video game industry has entered a misunderstanding." Shen Chong crossed his waist, stood in front of the fireplace, and said to a few people who were sitting or standing: "The entire industry is affected by Sky Invaders, and I think this has no future. ”

"So what kind of game do we make?" Larry-kap1an did a couple of boxing moves, then raised his arms and made a swing and said, "Boxing, or baseball?" ”

Several people around laughed, and in the empty room, they were all the same as several partners at Activision Games, and one was James, a talker, who had promised to resign from Atari and join Activision.

When they stopped, Shen Chong continued: "You are all men, and you are men who make computers, and you will only stare at the machine and count the number of people, and ignore a simple fact. ”

James leaned against the doorway, playing with a leaf, and asked nonchalantly, "What facts?" ”

"Atari is a home video game console, home! Got it? Shen Chong took out a pen from his backpack, wrote the English word "home" on the white wall behind him, and then drew a horizontal line underneath, saying: "The meaning of home is that housewives and children are the main customers of the game console." ”

Tech nerds are too slow to respond to common sense, and Bob-hitehead frowned and asked, "How about that?" ”

"Space Invaders is too violent and unattractive to housewives, and Space Invaders is too difficult and too playable for children." Shen Chong wrote a few words on the wall again - this will be the office of Activision and will soon be renovated and painted - and then pointed to them and said, "Simple, intellectual, fun, this is the game we want to play." ”

"But no one wants to play a game that's too simple, right?"

"Whoever can boldly underestimate the wisdom of Americans will make money." After Shen Chong finished speaking, the whole room showed a knowing smile, because this sentence was often on the lips of Bushnell, the founder of Atari.

"But simple things, how can they be interesting?" Jim-Levy touched his chin and asked, he's a musician, the only one in the group who doesn't know how to code.

"Simple, it's not about the gameplay, it's about the rules." Shen Chong took out a Rubik's Cube from his backpack and said: "The simpler the rules, the easier it is to get started, such as this, disrupted, restored, very simple rules, two-year-old children will play when they pick it up, but if they want to play well, it is difficult." ”

James whistled first, and the rest of the people applauded - Shen Chong flew and turned the Rubik's Cube as he spoke, and after speaking, the Rubik's Cube was restored.

The Rubik's Cube is now popular in the United States, many programmers are trying to use computers to verify the "number of God" problem, many computer magazines have published papers on the Rubik's Cube, so it is particularly popular in the computer industry, these are computer experts, naturally have also played the Rubik's Cube, but while talking while recovering, and the degree is fast, it is the first time to see.

James threw away the leaves, walked over to Shen Chong, and asked, "So, we're going to open a Rubik's Cube game that we play on the Atari console?" ”

"This thing, it's only $19." Shen Chong tossed the Rubik's Cube in his hand and said, "Who do you think would spend $199 on an Atari and then $49 on a game cartridge just to play it?" ”

Embarrassed, James made a very exaggerated tongue sticking out motion, and then, in a gorilla walking position, walked back to the door, and everyone along the way laughed and punched him.

This guy is a living treasure......

"Let's make a game like this." Shen Chong changed a wall, drew a few schematic diagrams on it, and then explained one by one: "This is a rectangular virtual space, which is seven squares of different shapes, all of which are composed of four small squares. At the beginning, a random block will appear above the space and then slowly fall, during which the player can rotate the block in 9o degrees, moving the block left and right in grids......"

That's right, the entrepreneurial work that Shen Chong chose for Activision Games is the famous Tetris!

Historically, Tetris was designed and programmed by Soviet computer expert Alexei Pajetnov (Алekceй Пaжитhob), on June 6, 1984, the English name of the game was Tetris, which is a combination of the prefix "tetra" of the Greek number "4" and Pakittonov's favorite sport tennis "tennis", and in China, because it was Ming by the Soviet Union, it is commonly known as "Tetris".

Tetris can run on arcades, home consoles, handhelds, PCs, mobile phones and almost all other consumer electronic devices, and the number of licensed genuine games sold alone has exceeded 100 million copies, and pirated and copycat versions are even more, so it is extremely widely circulated, and it is the world's best-selling video game, and it will not fall out of the top three in any media selection of "The Greatest Game".

Such a masterpiece of the world, as long as it is made, it will be like a black hole in the market crazy to attract gold, and Shen Chong, who is worried about money, will naturally not let it go.

After explaining the basic rules of Tetris in detail, Shen Chong asked, "What do you think, you can find it in Atari Vnetbsp; "Sounds like fun." James first feedback, "Such a simple picture and action, with the performance of Atari's machine, is not a problem at all." ”

"It's so much fun, I can't wait for it." Larry Kaplan walked to the wall, took a closer look at Shen Chong's messy graphics, and then said, "There is no difficulty in the algorithm, I think it can be made in about two weeks." ”

"Almost." David Craine nodded in agreement, having previously been the head of the Atari game opening department and was very familiar with Atari's game, "The key to the game is design, and the design of this game is already perfect, and it is not difficult to implement. (Note 1)

"By the way, what's the name of this game?" James jumped out again to brush up on the zài sense.

"Let's call it Tetris." Shen Chong originally wanted to call it an electronic Rubik's Cube, but after thinking about it, he gave up, so he used his original name, which can be regarded as leaving a memory imprint of his previous life.

After staying with this group of engineers in Silicon Valley for two days and explaining all the details of Tetris clearly, Shen Chong stepped on the plane to Boston.

The development of Visica1c is going smoothly, because Shen Chong provides a good hardware environment, Briklin and Frankston don't have to wait until night to go to school every day, and the research is much faster, and an imperfect BeTa version has been made, according to the two estimates, the official version can be completed in July, about 3 months earlier than in history.

Shen Chong now has plenty of money, so he no longer picks on the door, and puts the remaining $80,000 investment into the account of the three-person joint venture software art company (soft-art) at one time, and then takes the design documentation of Visica1c and the BeTa version of the floppy disk, and goes straight to the most famous Crane Shaw law firm in Boston. (Note 1)

Shen Chong is going to make an act that will be stinking for 10,000 years - to Visica1netbsp; In history, on May 26, 1981, a programmer named Parr designed an algorithm software to monitor temperature and successfully applied for a patent, which led to the biggest controversy in the history of computer software and laid the groundwork for the patent war between IT companies in later generations.

If Shen Chong is a geek, he will definitely not apply for a patent, but unfortunately he is not, he is a pseudo-IT man, this kind of profitable way to make money, no need to use it in vain - spreadsheet is a necessary part of office software, as long as the patent application is successful, no matter which company opens oFFIce office software in the future, it has to pay patent fees, and Shen Chong just needs to sit on the ground and collect money.

The matter of litigation is resolved by its own lawyer, and the American lawyer is world-renowned, and after Shen Chong submitted the necessary materials, he went to Dan Felestra (dan-F1ystra).

Felestra was originally a merchant of Visica1c in history, and became a multimillionaire with Visica1c, but during the Spring Festival, after Shen Chong took Bricklin's contact information from his mouth, his fate completely changed.

Felestra also graduated from Harvard Business School, opened a personal software company (persona1-soft), and lived by selling some board games running on computers.

In the history of computer software, it was this guy who came up with the first software sales agreement, completely separating research and sales, and providing a model for the future exhibition of the software industry, Visica1c can become the first "killer" application in the history of computer software, in addition to the software itself came into being, in line with the needs of the times, Felestra's personal ability also played a great role.

So Shen Chong took Bricklin on the first day during the Spring Festival, and entered the door of his personal software company on the second day.

In the era without the Internet, the sales of every software or game are inseparable from the support of merchants, Shen Chong intends to build a sales platform similar to Suning Electric Appliances in the future before the industry explodes.

There are two advantages to this, one is that the software industry and the game industry have just emerged, no one realizes that this is a big cake, and now the cost of building a sales platform is very low, and once the scale is formed, it is difficult for latecomers to compete with him, so as to firmly pinch the neck of software and game merchants before the emergence of the Internet, and earn a lot of profits.

The second is that Shen Chong's energy is limited after all, and the main battlefield is in Hong Kong, so it is impossible to stare at Silicon Valley every day.

This plan is the most expensive project that Shen Chong has ever traveled, and in more than two months from the Spring Festival to the present, nearly one million dollars have been invested to instruct Felestra to establish a chain of software sales stores in major cities in the United States.

Felestra has a good ability, and in two months, nearly 2o chain stores have been built in 11 cities, but now Visica1c has not yet been listed, and the chain stores can only operate hardware concurrently, barely maintaining the situation of not losing money or making money.

After finishing his expedition in Boston, Shen Chong went to New York.

Although Shen Chong knew that because of the Iranian Revolution, the price of oil would rise sharply, but he did not know when it would rise, and according to the information inquired, at present, only the New York Mercantile Exchange in the world traded oil futures, and only heating oil was an oil commodity.

Even if oil futures are not profitable, he must go to Wall Street to open an account, get acquainted with some financial experts, and prepare for making money in the future.

After staying in New York for 3 days, Shen Chong got on a plane and rushed back to Hong Kong the day before the Qingming Festival.

……

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Note 1: The above people, except for James, are all founders of Activision Games.

Note 2: The name of the law firm here is apocryphal, derived from the two main characters in Boston Law, Danny Crane and Alan Shaw. Software Art Company, a company founded by Bricklin in history, was later acquired by Lotus.

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