Chapter 85: Strengthening Network Development Capabilities and CDs
Chapter 85: Strengthening Network Development Capabilities and CDs
But ironically, after continuously searching PC communications boards and seminars for a server programmer, they ended up meeting one through a resume submitted in response to a job posting on PC communications.
“Mr. Clayton Reer?”
“Yes.”
He was a somewhat overweight man who looked to be in his mid-twenties, with a gentle impression and a smiling face. In terms of first impression, he felt like someone worth giving extra points to.
But Clayton’s career was more impressive than his appearance.
“You developed a MUD?”
“Yes. I operated one called EchoVale for about a year.”
Clayton was clearly someone who could be called a genius. From his teens, he had written parts of an operating system kernel by himself in C, and in his early twenties, he had even developed his own independent MUD server.
(Translator’s Notes: Kernel — The core part of an operating system that manages hardware resources, memory, processes, and communication between software and hardware.)
Based on that, he had developed the aforementioned EchoVale and successfully attracted several hundred users.
“At first, it seemed to run well, but there were too many things to pay attention to. My friends helped a bit, but in the end, I couldn’t handle all the requests piling up, and things started creaking apart. Before I knew it, it had failed.”
Clayton scratched his head with an expression mixed with bitterness and embarrassment.
Afterward, he said he was shocked and shut himself away for a while, but then he thought he could not keep wasting time like that. He also believed that if he entered an organization, he could make up for the areas he lacked, so he applied.
“This is the weight I gained back then.”
“Ah. So you weren’t originally that heavy?”
“I was always a little chubby, but not to this extent.”
He grinned as he said this, and there was no sign of darkness in him. It must have been fairly difficult at the time, but seeing no shadow from it made him seem mentally resilient.
After talking with him for a while longer, Seongcheol sent him back for the time being, saying he would contact him later.
But inwardly, he had already decided to hire Clayton. Unless there was some disqualifying issue, there was no particular problem, and more than anything, Clayton was exactly the kind of talent Parallel Soft needed right now.
In this era, people with experience building servers were extremely rare. Yet this was someone who had actually created and operated a game service.
For Seongcheol, who had been prepared to hire an ordinary experienced programmer and force his way through from scratch if they could not find a server programmer, this was unexpected luck.
Afterward, through Clayton’s introduction, Seongcheol recruited a network programmer named Rick McLaren, and through a university bulletin board, he also found a database designer.
After signing employment contracts, they had to undergo Parallel Soft’s unique baptism.
“This is Kim Insu, Parallel Soft’s main developer and team leader.”
“Nice to meet you!”
“Ah. Yes.”
Clayton stared somewhat blankly at the small man, who was not even five feet tall, and shook his hand.
What is this? I’ve heard East Asians look young, so is that it? But even so, he looks way too young. His voice too. He seems like he’s just in his early teens. But does that even make sense?
Seeing Clayton fall into confusion, Insu maintained a smile on the outside while inwardly letting out a sigh of relief. At least because he had grown quite a lot, people now doubted him without becoming certain because of the situation.
Insu’s current height was around 145 centimeters.
Back when he had first accepted team members in Korea, no matter how anyone looked at him, he was clearly a little kid, leaving no room for doubt. But now, because of racial differences, the company environment, his position, his plausible outfit, and the other developers treating it as natural, people could at least imagine one more possibility: that perhaps he was simply an unusually small person.
Of course, if Clayton had simply encountered Insu outdoors, he would have immediately concluded that he was just a child.
Insu did not bother correcting his confusion. He did not intend to keep lying forever, but proving every single time that he was truly the team leader was exhausting. So his plan was to let them work with him for a while, accept him as team leader first, and only then tell them.
After that first time, he dealt with the next two new hires with a more confident attitude, and those two also moved past it without becoming certain that Insu was a child.
Among them, Rick kept watching Insu with suspicious eyes, but that was actually what Insu wanted.
After all, anyone who observed him for even a little while would inevitably confirm his development ability and understand his competence as team leader.
“First, please implement the basic network engine.”
Insu decided to simply leave the network side to Clayton. He only knew very rough concepts in that area, so there was almost nothing he could directly do.
Of course, he gave Clayton documents summarizing what kind of MMORPG they wanted to make and what functions were needed. Needless to say, Clayton was also allowed to read the full planning documents.
“Yes. Understood.”
Clayton looked slightly burdened. It was only natural. This was an era with no commercial engines, so they needed to develop everything themselves, starting from TCP/IP-based communication modules.
They did have the system created for TLF2’s multiplayer, so Insu gave him the source code, but whether it would help was uncertain.
Clayton’s old MUD server might actually be more useful instead.
In any case, Clayton would now create plans and designs based on the materials, and they would need to check and adjust those as he went.
Still, I’ll have to somehow recall the systems from games I saw in my previous life and raise the completion level as much as possible.
He did not know much, but as he had felt many times while developing games, even fragmented experiences could become powerful clues. He did not intend to completely leave his hands off it.
Afterward, when Insu looked at the plans Clayton brought, he suggested ideas for a log system, crash dumps, a system that separated the database from the main logic and stored it separately, and modularization.
In truth, he thought of more, but things like multithreading would be difficult to implement on current computers anyway, so there was no point mentioning them.
“Certainly... if we build it that way, management would become much easier.”
They were only ideas, but Clayton listened very seriously. Since he already had experience developing and operating a MUD, he understood clearly what benefits implementing these ideas would bring.
Over the past few weeks of working in Parallel Soft’s development room, Clayton had learned through his colleagues that Insu really was only a ten-year-old child. However, he had also already learned that Insu was truly the genius leading this development room.
That was probably one reason he listened seriously to Insu’s ideas. And after hearing them, he could only think that Insu really was a genius.
The team leader himself said he did not know much about servers or networks, and when they actually talked, Clayton could feel that was true. But when Insu still poured out ideas Clayton himself had not thought of, there was no other answer except genius.
I knew there were many geniuses in this field, but our team leader is really...
Insu could not know what Clayton was thinking. No, it was closer to saying he had no time to care about that. Unlike the server side, the offline prototype side had already finished planning and entered full development.
Originally, he wanted to hand work over to the team members and proceed more leisurely from here, but once development actually began, that became impossible.
It was only natural. They were finally challenging the MMORPG genre. Moreover, since he held the ambition of seizing the global market in one stroke with this game, there was no way he could stop paying attention.
While Insu was struggling to develop a game for a new era, the world kept moving, and another pioneer released an innovative game.
“Huh? CD?”
Even if he was absorbed in development, he could not keep doing that after work too. Insu was lying on his stomach on the bed, reading a gaming magazine, when the description of one game caught his eye.
CDs themselves had already been developed in the early eighties.
However, because they were expensive and could not be modified, they had struggled to become widespread. Starting in the early nineties, though, PC manufacturers began releasing products equipped with CD drives, and high-capacity software began appearing to match.
But that absolutely did not mean CDs had already become mainstream.
If they had, TLF2 would have been released as a CD package too.
In these kinds of introductory and transitional periods, adopting something too quickly often resulted in heavy losses instead. Yet this game proudly advertised itself as a CD package.
On top of that, it was even exclusively for ASTRA-G 1.0.
Insu had ignored ASTRA-G because he thought it offered almost no advantage, but this game had chosen the OS to receive support for its modest multimedia features: QuickTime, multimedia sound, CD-ROM drivers, and modern hardware drivers.
It was openly declaring itself a game filled with the latest technology.
[VEIL]
The game’s genre was adventure. In America, this was already one of the mainstream genres with a strong fanbase.
As he slowly read through the introduction article to find what made the game special, one phrase caught his eye.
[Beautiful backgrounds composed of 3D images!]
“3D? Already?”
And when he looked at the actual screenshots in the magazine, there were fairly convincing 3D images. Of course, they could not compare to the games he had enjoyed in his previous life, but they looked like images that should only appear at least five or ten years later.
That doesn’t make sense.
Even if they somehow made it, the minimum requirement written here was a 386 or higher. There was no way a 386 could run something like this. But after reading more of the magazine, he found the clue.
[Pre-render]
It was not creating 3D images in real time like the 3D games he knew. Instead, they had used a high-performance PC to render 3D scenes in advance over a long period of time and then converted them into images. This process was called pre-rendering, and the resulting image was the pre-render.
Aside from that, the article described high-quality sound, a minimized UI that maximized immersion, mouse-centered controls, and how the game excellently recreated the elements required of an adventure game almost entirely through graphics with barely any text.
In other words, the genre itself was familiar, but it felt like a game one generation ahead because of its latest technology and top-tier quality.
Is this Myst?
(Translator’s Notes: Myst — Landmark adventure game released in 1993, famous for its pre-rendered visuals and massive commercial success in the PC game market.)
Insu did not have much interest in adventure games, so he did not know a great deal about them. Still, as an aspiring game developer, he knew the name Myst.
It was a masterpiece adventure game with the characteristics mentioned above, and also a PC game that held an unbroken sales record for the next ten years. Its cumulative sales surpassed six million copies by the early 2000s, a record that was only finally broken after The Sims came out.
(Translator’s Notes: The Sims — Life simulation game series created by Will Wright and first released by Maxis in 2000, centered on controlling simulated people and their daily lives.)
High-capacity games are going to start appearing soon.
The reason game developers did not use CDs much was that sales did not come out well, but conversely, if a game used CDs and sold well, then others could use them too.
Moreover, CDs had many advantages compared to floppy disks. They did not break easily, and above all, they were cheap. The price per disc was still higher for CDs, but the price per unit of capacity was incomparable.
A floppy disk cost roughly one thousand won, while a CD cost between five thousand and ten thousand won. CDs were ten times more expensive, but their capacity was four hundred times greater, meaning the price per capacity was one-fortieth. Furthermore, CDs were only expensive because this was still the early stage; later, the price per disc would also drop to the level of floppy disks.