The richest man starts with a blind box

Chapter 721 Alien ET
There is nothing much to say next. Iron Man has directly entered the dominance mode, directly occupying almost all the movie rankings throughout August. The media's discussion on Iron Man is no longer about whether he can get 2 million US dollars. The box office is already gone, but whether Iron Man's global box office can break through 6 million US dollars.

For this reason, many media have launched a very heated discussion about this. These media seem to have forgotten that only two or three weeks ago, the main issue they discussed was the issue of the Jiangnan Group stealing mobile phone technology from the United States.

By the way, there is also the news of Atari's rebirth.

The rebirth of Atari was a big news a few weeks ago, but soon, it seems to have fallen into a state of silence. It seems that the rebirth of Atari is just a piece of news, and there is no other news at all. At present, all news media are paying attention The main focus of the movie is Iron Man, a movie that seems destined to go down in the annals of American cinema.

Even saying that someone found an interesting little easter egg in the movie can make the headlines of the news media.

This easter egg is in the early part of the movie. When Iron Man Stark was trapped in the base of the armed organization, there was a scene where Stark was making armor while playing games with his mobile phone.

There is nothing wrong with this picture itself, it is to reflect Stark's superb scientific research ability, optimistic attitude and so on.

However, some viewers who watched the movie repeatedly discovered one of the surprises, that is, the mobile phone that Stark is playing with in his hand is not another model, it is the Tianxing 5 mobile phone that was popular in Quanmi not long ago.

And the game running on that mobile phone screen was the game "Alien ET" that once caused Atari's world to be destroyed.

In a sense, this is also a game that has been recorded in history. At least among the many games released by Atari, there is no game that is more famous than this "Alien ET" .

Things go back to 1983.

At that time, due to the great success of the 1982 movie "ET", it achieved incredible box office achievements at the time, and the ugly and cute alien ET, the most popular image at that time, is still one of the most famous alien images. .

All in all, there was no American who didn't know the alien ET at that time.

Atari saw this business opportunity, and then reported to its parent company, Time Warner, that if it could develop a video game related to aliens, it would definitely sell well.

Knowing that Warner is also very confident in this, and then began to negotiate with Universal Pictures, hoping to obtain the exclusive game adaptation rights of the movie "ET".

Originally, the negotiation of this adaptation rights was completed in July, and Universal Pictures even stated in the quarterly financial report that the game copyright had been sold.

But the actual situation was that there was a problem in the copyright negotiation at that time. Originally, the two parties had agreed to buy the copyright for US$1 million, but Time Warner had a change of executives. The new executive thought that the US$000 million The price is low, and the game copyright can be sold at a higher price.

But the problem is, because the contract had already been signed, Atari began to promote content related to the Alien et game in July, and even directly told all users that the game would be sold before Christmas in December.

Because Christmas is the most prosperous time for people in the United States, and it must also be the time to buy Christmas gifts for their children. In the promotion of Atari, prepare a game of aliens et for their children , that is the best Christmas gift, no need to rack your brains to think about more problems.

As a result, Universal Pictures suddenly tore up the unsigned contract and demanded to restart negotiations. Naturally, Atari could not accept such a situation.

But from the very beginning of this mutual tear, Time Warner has fallen into an absolute disadvantage, because their publicity has already spread, and children all over the United States know that there will be a game of the same name from Aliens et on Christmas. , everyone is looking forward to this game.

Now you tell them that this game is gone, then Atari may be sprayed with blood in an instant.

Finally, in early October, Atari compromised and purchased the game adaptation copyright of Aliens et for US$10 million.

But at this time, there is a very important question in front of the Atari executives, that is, there are only 6 weeks before the Christmas holiday, and this is not a normal game development cycle at all.

Why 6 weeks?

从10月1号到12月24号，明明还有将近11周的时间嘛。

This is because after the game is developed, the game needs to be burned into the cassette, which also takes time.

At the same time, Atari has great ambitions. They plan to burn and print 1 million game cassettes directly in the first sale.

The time required to burn 400 million copies of the cassette is too long. In addition, it also needs distribution, marketing, etc., all of which take time, so the final game development time is compressed to only 6 week.

So they either choose to continue to skip tickets to delay the game's release period, or forcefully rush to produce the finished product within 6 weeks.

A normal person will probably choose the former, but a qualified capital will definitely choose the latter.

After all, if the ticket is skipped at this time, it will definitely offend those customers who are looking forward to it. Second, it will lose the most important consumption schedule of Christmas. The last is the most important. , What are you doing with $2 million?
Is it not good for me to break my promise?
So Atari made a decision that looks very stupid, but in fact the ass determines the head, and there is only one correct answer, which is to make a game in 6 weeks.

If there is any situation that is worse than this, it is probably that there is only one real R&D staff in these 6 weeks.

Atari, a company that has always been very repulsive to third-party game manufacturers, has to develop all games by itself, but the problem is that Atari has great ambitions, and it manufactures many games at the same time, but the benefits shared by employees are very small. few.

So one after another, many Atari programmers chose to leave Atari.

In 1979, such a thing happened, that is, four Atari employees left from Atari, and then established a company called Activision.

This company later made famous games such as Call of Duty and Prototype, and later merged with Xueleshan and Blizzard to become the well-known Activision Blizzard in later generations.

In 1979, these four Atari employees who left their jobs didn't have any dreams. They simply chose to copy the games of their old club to start their business, and then obtained a lot of profits by selling pirated copies.

Atari was very angry about this, and then started a lawsuit with Activision, but because there was no detailed law at that time to restrict third-party copyright issues, this caused Atari's lawsuit to end without losing or winning. able to reconcile with each other.

Then it was over. A large number of Atari employees saw that nothing would happen if they did this, so they discovered ways to make money one after another. All of them left the company with the dream of getting rich, and then developed games by themselves. , make pirated copies by yourself, sell them yourself, and get all the benefits yourself. Isn't this much better than receiving a little pitiful dead salary in Atari?

As a result, Atari lost more than 1983% of its employees throughout 60, and the newly joined employees were unable to master the ability to make games proficiently in a short period of time... Even Yatari itself was somewhat resistant to recruitment New employees, because they are afraid that these new employees will become those damn third-party pirates after mastering the technology.

This directly caused Atari's employees to be in a state of extreme shortage. Almost everyone had 2 to 3 games to make, so it was possible to let a programmer come out alone and make a game alone in 6 weeks. , this is definitely the top treatment in Atari.

To sum up, when so many factors come together, it is conceivable what the alien ET will be like in the end.

Of course, many players in later generations will defend this game, saying that this game is actually quite fun, and it is still the prototype of an open world game, because all terrains in the game are randomly generated, and there will never be exactly the same map.

This sounds very good, but the content of the whole game is just to control a pixel monster, while avoiding the pursuit of two NPCs, while looking for three parts in hundreds of ever-changing maps.

Once all three parts are found, the spaceship can be summoned directly, escape from the earth, and complete the game.

If this is just an ordinary game, then there is no problem, this is the level of normal games.

But if this is a game that spent 2 million US dollars in copyright fees and more than 500 million US dollars in advertising, it is carrying the Christmas dreams of tens of millions of children.

But in this game, I can't find any elements related to the movie Alien et... The only relationship is probably that the protagonist is ET, but the problem is that the alien in the game not only does not look like ET , but it looks like a pile of shit, which is very embarrassing.

Well, dog shit means literally, it really looks like dog shit.

Although Aliens ET once sold 260 million cassettes, the final return volume was as high as 80. 400 million cassettes were produced, but 280 million were unsalable and turned into inventory.

This made Atari's first loss in its financial report, and then its reputation fell to the bottom, and then it lost money year after year, and died completely in the early 1s.

Of course, in the eyes of economists of later generations, it is impossible for a game to really destroy Atari.The essential reason for its death was that piracy was rampant in the game environment at that time, and all kinds of garbage games with different skins emerged in an endless stream, which hurt the players who love games.

If Atari cheers itself up and guarantees the quality of the games sold through its own official channels, this is an opportunity to monopolize the market.

But the problem is that Atari itself started to sell badly, only pursuing all kinds of marketing, indifferent to the quality of the game, thinking that as long as the product is well advertised, even rubbish can sell at sky-high prices, and finally voted with their feet by unbearable users .

And Alien ET is just a breaking point to destroy the trust of users, because users can't imagine that a game that Atari spent 2 million US dollars and purchased copyright can be so bad. This Atari has absolutely nothing to look forward to.

(End of this chapter)