Chapter 129: Volder, Cell Phones, and Consoles
Chapter 129: Volder, Cell Phones, and Consoles
After the action RPG project meant to replace Diablo had its setting made more concrete and refined, it was given the title Volder.
[So it’s basically a cosmic horror-type existence, right?]
The person passionately asking Insu questions over the cell phone was a new recruit who had joined the Volder team this time. His name was Eli Mercer, a sound designer, and he was very interested in this kind of setting.
“Yes. It’s an existence humans can’t fully understand, and it appears in a distorted form through those who come into contact with it.”
Diablo simply presented its enemies as demons. The problem was that because they appeared directly as enemies, once the player grew stronger, they became relatively weaker and eventually got slaughtered every few seconds. Because of that, they failed to give the feeling of transcendent beings, and after repeatedly being sealed and escaping, Blizzard ended up becoming obsessed with corruption to give the story plausibility.
So in this game, Insu set the enemy as something that never appeared directly, always existed beyond the other side, and was fundamentally impossible to understand.
Volder was an irresistible existence, but the power and phenomena appearing in reality came through those who contacted it, so they had limits. This allowed the game to maintain fear while not completely abandoning hope.
[Ah! Then the reason those who receive baptism turn into monsters is that, in the process of Volder granting power, the emotions and thoughts of those who contacted Volder are endlessly amplified and distorted?]
“Yes. Yes.”
Volder had no particular intention of creating monsters, but it was such an enormous existence that simply being exposed to a baptism it granted with something close to goodwill caused people to warp and lose themselves.
Only after talking for quite a while did Insu finally manage to hang up.
Whew.
Enthusiasm was good, but he wished they would only do this when he was in that development room if possible. Right now, he was in the TLF Online development room. Having two projects under his responsibility definitely left him no room to think.
In truth, he was not that short on time, but having two things to care about made his head feel chaotic.
After that, Insu handled TLF Online-related work for quite a while. Although he had let go of much of it, it was still a project that had begun from his vision, so he had to direct its course, present ideas and plans, and check the progress of development and bug fixes that followed.
It was no easy workload, but compared to the time when he had been fully devoted to this side, it was nothing. After all, this was mostly checking rather than developing directly.
Thinking about it, I can probably do this checking work smoothly because I was so deeply involved in development before.
If he were a simple executive or manager without technical knowledge and experience, it would have been difficult to process work this quickly. He would not be able to check the technical side directly, so he would have to listen to other people’s advice and cross-verify that advice.
Moreover, he would not be able to provide solutions directly, so it would inevitably take even longer.
Anyway, since the work here was mostly finished, he picked up the cell phone he had plugged into the charger earlier so he could return to the Volder development team.
Lithium-ion batteries had not come out yet, so call time was only about an hour, meaning he always had to charge it.
(Translator’s Notes: Lithium-ion battery — Rechargeable battery technology later dominant in laptops, mobile phones, smartphones, and portable devices.)
Still, it’s developed a lot.
It was far better than before. Not only the battery, but also the performance and design had noticeably improved. In particular, this StarTAC was the first folder phone, and even by Insu’s standards, with his memories of 2025, it was quite stylish and light.
(Translator’s Notes: StarTAC — Motorola StarTAC, released in 1996, widely known as one of the first clamshell or folder-style mobile phones.)
Most earlier cell phones were rectangular bar-shaped devices, like bricks. In a way, later smartphones could also mostly be considered this shape.
Its performance had improved quite a bit too. It had an address book, displayed the caller’s phone number, and connected that with the address book to show the caller’s name on the display.
In 2025, this was an utterly obvious function, but at this time, being able to check who was calling was a fairly innovative feature.
Even so, its computing power is still far too low.
With a low-performance CPU on the level of an 8-bit computer, memory in the tens of kilobytes, and flash memory that was also only in the hundreds of kilobytes even though it used flash, phone calls, limited texting, an address book, and an alarm function were basically everything this hardware could do.
The reason Insu felt disappointed by cell phone performance was because of his memories of the future.
Even if making a smartphone is difficult, once it reaches a certain level, I could create a platform like an app store and use it as a console.
Originally, Insu had focused only on PC games. He had already liked PC games to begin with, and MMORPGs, which were his vision, had started and become successful on PC first, so that was only natural.
But now that he had achieved a certain level of success, he had some breathing room.
Moreover, these days, the great console war was in progress, so his gaze naturally turned in that direction.
Devices corresponding to the PlayStation and Sega Saturn had already come out in 1994, and this year, the Neo 64, almost identical to the Nintendo 64, came out. Not only that, there was also the Neo Geo, 3DO made by EA, and various other consoles competing in the market.
(Translator’s Notes: Nintendo — Major Japanese gaming company and creator of the Game Boy platform.)
But Insu had no intention of competing with these main consoles.
Honestly, I’m not confident.
The competition was already too fierce, and the business carried high risk. If one fought, won, and monopolized the market, huge money could be made, but it required enormous investment and had low chances of success.
Portable consoles were not all that different. However, because Insu had memories of the future and had seen smartphones function as the world’s largest platform, he could think this way.
Of course, making such a high-performance device immediately was impossible. But something did not have to be high-performance to function as a platform.
All devices keep developing anyway, and there was an enormous difference between the latest phones of 2025 and the earliest smartphones.
Of course, it had to reach at least a certain level. If its level was too low, the programs it could run would also be low-quality and limited in type, and it would be hard to satisfy users’ standards.
Right now, Insu was already servicing an MMORPG and developing Diablo. No matter how portable the device was, asking people to play something like Pong would be unreasonable. Of course, there would still be people who could enjoy that, but it would not sell very well.
The Game Boy is still selling, so the minimum standard should at least be around the Game Boy.
(Translator’s Notes: Game Boy — Nintendo’s handheld game console released in 1989. Its link cable communication feature allowed Pokémon players to trade and battle with each other.)
The Game Boy, released in 1989, was only around 8-bit, but since it was optimized for games, even RPGs like The Legend of Zelda and Pokémon could run on it.
Of course, to run that on a cell phone, it would have to handle phone functions such as calls and messages while also running games, so it would need somewhat higher performance. But seven years had already passed since the Game Boy’s release.
According to Insu’s research, a low-power 40 MHz-class, 32-bit AP had already been developed in 1994. It was the ARM7TDMI, and compared to the Game Boy, its simple clock speed was about ten times higher, while its overall performance was roughly twenty to thirty times higher.
(Translator’s Notes: ARM7TDMI — 32-bit ARM processor core introduced in the 1990s and later used in many embedded and portable devices.)
It’s not even on the same level as the Game Boy. It’s almost 386-class.
In truth, in simple performance, the ARM7TDMI was actually better than a 386, but because it was mobile, it was likely somewhat lacking for gaming.
And a 386 was enough to run Doom. In the future Insu knew, there were multiple cases of optimized versions of Doom, though not the original, running on ARM7TDMI-based devices.
Of course, 586 machines were already becoming widespread now, proper 3D games were being released, and games were becoming increasingly flashy and complex. But that was only the story of the latest computers and the latest games. On the other side, games with 386 as the minimum requirement were still being developed.
So a 386 could be considered good enough to run games that would not disappoint gamers by current standards.
No, honestly, if people think it’s running on a portable device, they’d probably be satisfied even with 286-class games.
Not only in underdeveloped countries like China or the Soviet Union, but even right here in America, there were probably plenty of people somewhere enjoying games on old 286 computers.
And although portable devices of this time used nickel-metal hydride batteries due to cost issues, lithium-ion batteries themselves had already been commercialized. Since those were the batteries used in smartphones, using them would secure not only usage time but also about eight megabytes of memory.
(Translator’s Notes: Nickel-metal hydride battery — Rechargeable battery type commonly used in electronics before lithium-ion batteries became dominant.)
However, flash memory was still in the early stage of commercialization, and even high-end models were only a little over ten megabytes, so putting games in internal storage would be impossible. He needed to consider external storage devices like cartridges.
Of course, using multiple chips would increase capacity, but this was something that had to be used in a cell phone. Size and power restrictions were severe.
And a touchscreen was also impossible. Resistive touchscreens had already been commercialized and were being used in PDAs, but compared to the capacitive touchscreens used in smartphones, they were inconvenient and less accurate.
(Translator’s Notes: Resistive touchscreen — Touchscreen type that detects pressure. It works with fingers or styluses but is generally less responsive and precise than capacitive touchscreens.)
(Translator’s Notes: PDA — Personal Digital Assistant. A handheld electronic device used before smartphones for schedules, contacts, notes, and limited computing.)
(Translator’s Notes:Capacitive touchscreen — Touchscreen type that detects electrical properties of the human body, later standard in modern smartphones.)
No, leaving that aside, the resources used for it were too great. Both the computing resources needed for control and the battery consumed by a large screen and response system were far too much for hardware at the current level.
In the end, if I make it, it’ll be something shaped like a feature phone but with stronger hardware performance.
And even if he somehow created a device capable of playing games, the problem was implementing the app store, which could be called the core of the smartphone platform.
The app store program itself could be made, but right now, 2G had only just begun commercialization. And in America, it would still take quite a while for 2G to spread, so data transmission through cell phones itself was impossible.
(Translator’s Notes: 2G — Second-generation mobile communication standard, enabling digital voice and limited data services.)
There’s no Wi-Fi yet either.
(Translator’s Notes: Wi-Fi — Wireless local area networking technology based on IEEE 802.11 standards.)
As Insu remembered it, the first wireless LAN standard would appear next year, and actual commercialization would take several more years after that. Moreover, early Wi-Fi cards were the size of credit cards. They were usable for laptops, but not the right size to put into cell phones.
(Translator’s Notes: Wireless LAN — Local wireless network technology that later became standardized as Wi-Fi.)
They’d probably consume quite a bit of power too.
So to realize an independent app store for cell phones, he would still have to wait another five or six years. But an independent app store was not the only method.
In the first place, current console games operated by selling packages offline without any ESD like that, and this would remain true even ten years later. Only around the mid-2010s, another ten years after that, would ESD become mainstream on consoles. Moreover, even by 2025, packages had not completely disappeared and still accounted for 30 percent.
So if he turned a cell phone into a console, game distribution would be possible even without an app store, using small card-shaped cartridges or something similar.
But then the barrier to entry gets a bit high.
Selling physical packages required a physical distribution network, demand forecasting, and production facilities. Unlike PC, this would require dedicated cartridges, so the cost would be even higher.
But now I’m going back to physical distribution after ignoring it because I wanted to make Steam?
Of course, when the situation changed, the response had to change as well. Even so, considering that Wi-Fi and wireless data communication networks would eventually appear within a few years, the shelf life of cell phone game packages would not be very long.
And in the first place, even if he tried to create and spread such a cell phone, he did not know how long that would take. If he set that period a little longer, he could simply release it with Wi-Fi.
There was also the method of linking it with PCs. USB had also been announced this year, and it would likely spread in about two years. Of course, it would be more limited than using an app store directly on the cell phone itself, but since PC penetration was also quite high, it would be enough as a temporary method.
(Translator’s Notes: USB — Universal Serial Bus, a connection standard introduced in the mid-1990s for linking computers and peripheral devices.)