Chapter 86: Box Office Success and Success
Chapter 86: Box Office Success and Success
And once developers could freely use that much storage capacity, they naturally could include graphics, sound, videos, and other elements that would attract gamers’ interest, so from a developer’s perspective, there would no longer be much reason not to choose CDs.
And since Myst was released on CD during the early adoption period of CD-ROMs and achieved overwhelming success, it would not be an exaggeration to call it the game that opened the CD market.
However, in truth, when Myst first launched, the number of computers equipped with CD-ROM drives was still relatively small, so it was not an explosive blockbuster right away. Even so, considering the handicap it carried, it still achieved impressive sales of 200,000 copies within six months of release.
Afterward, some gamers installed CD-ROM drives specifically because they wanted to play Myst, while game companies that saw Myst’s success began releasing games on CD as well. This increased CD-ROM adoption further, which in turn increased Myst’s sales again, eventually leading it to surpass six million copies.
Aside from that, Myst had an enormous influence on later games through its design philosophy of immersing gamers using only graphics and sound, allowing them to intuitively play the game without needing separate explanations.
But hasn’t SimCity 2000 come out yet?
The thought had occurred to him because he had mentioned The Sims earlier. He remembered that SimCity, one of the legends of this era, should have appeared around this time too. Yet he had not seen any mention of it.
The previous game, SimCity 1, definitely came out though.
It had been released under the name [The Metropolis]. And he remembered seeing that game achieve significant success comparable to SimCity 1. Yet strangely, there had been no news about a sequel.
Of course, Insu did not have every PC magazine article memorized. But a massive hit like SimCity 2000 would have been covered repeatedly in multiple magazines to the point where it would be difficult to miss by accident.
Did the company go bankrupt or something?
After closing the magazine, Insu abruptly jumped off the bed and headed toward the computer on his desk. Then he connected to PC communications and searched for related information.
Even if The Metropolis had achieved considerable success, a successful game did not necessarily guarantee the success of the game company itself. It could collapse for entirely unrelated reasons, or even if it had not gone bankrupt, perhaps some other issue had arisen.
The reason Insu was so interested was partly because it was such a monumental title, but also because he coveted the IP of The Metropolis.
He did not have the spare capacity to personally create a sequel, but if the developer was struggling, he might be able to acquire the company or provide investment and direction instead. And if it was SimCity 2000, then barring extraordinary circumstances, it was bound to succeed.
Moreover, as mentioned earlier, The Sims—the game that later broke Myst’s record—had also been made by the same company behind SimCity. Considering that, it was only natural for him to become greedy.
“Ah...”
But it turned out to be a short-lived dream.
After looking into it a bit, he discovered that The Metropolis 2 was already in development and had even completed beta testing.
Should I at least buy some stock?
The thought briefly crossed his mind, but another memory immediately stopped him.
Come to think of it, Maxis, the company that developed SimCity, eventually went bankrupt, didn’t it?
Honestly, he could not remember the exact process that led to it, but despite possessing not one but two of the most successful franchises in gaming history—SimCity and The Sims—Maxis had still ultimately failed.
If only he remembered how they failed, he could at least invest appropriately and pull out at the right moment. But he did not, and moreover, this was a parallel world.
Still, recalling Maxis’s failure gave him a chilling feeling.
The SimCity and Sims series created by that company were games centered around the concept of virtual reality, and what Insu ultimately pursued was also virtual reality.
Furthermore, both Maxis and Insu’s Parallel Soft shared the similarity of achieving tremendous success early on.
And Maxis went under.
It was not that he was making some ominous prediction that because Maxis failed, he would fail too.
Rather, he became aware that repeated success might have caused his confidence to swell too much.
I need to stay more alert.
He had become somewhat complacent because he remembered MMORPGs achieving tremendous success for a considerable time, even if they later declined.
However, Insu had started development earlier than the timing he remembered, and what he was making differed significantly from the MMORPGs he recalled.
And so, Insu tightened the loosened screws in his mind once again.
Time passed, and in December, The Metropolis 2 was released.
Whether it would succeed as much as SimCity 2000 remained to be seen, but at least the initial atmosphere was tremendous.
And then 1994 arrived.
Originally, they had wanted to complete the prototype within January 1994, but development was not proceeding as smoothly as expected.
It was not because the team members were not working hard. Morale was not bad at all, and the slogans Insu had put forward—the world’s first MMORPG and virtual reality—had worked extremely well, making everyone highly motivated.
The problem was that because MMORPGs were such an unfamiliar genre, many of the systems were unfamiliar too, making implementation difficult.
The corruption system in particular was theoretically straightforward, but when they actually tried implementing it, the MMORPG’s nature required them to manage enormous amounts of data, causing them to run into physical limitations.
Even after compromising by using a tick system, the burden remained severe.
As a result, there were many opinions suggesting they should remove the system altogether.
“Even without this, gamers will still be able to immerse themselves in the game enough.”
Yunsu acknowledged that the corruption system was excellent, but after seeing it consume resources like a pig devouring feed, he had become disgusted by it.
“That won’t work. This corruption system is the driving force that keeps the game world continuously running and allows other important systems, like trade, to function properly.”
After much deliberation, Insu separated the system entirely so that another computer would independently update states according to the tick intervals.
Of course, that did not mean Insu personally built all of it. He only proposed the idea, while the team members had to smash their heads against the floor handling the actual design and coding.
Because even if the idea itself was simple, once data had to move between different machines, countless practical difficulties emerged: delays, packet loss, and continuously verifying reliability.
For this, Insu had to purchase a separate latest-model 586 computer.
(Translator’s Notes: 586 Computer — Refers to Intel Pentium-class PCs common in the mid-1990s. In Korea, “586” became a common shorthand for that generation of computers.)
Not only was its processing capability stronger, but thanks to its superscalar architecture, the 586 also possessed a degree of parallel instruction processing unlike earlier CPUs, making it far more efficient for handling tasks spread across multiple connected machines.
And so, Insu and the team members somehow implemented the systems one by one.
Compared to game development, the portal site business division seemed to be progressing extremely quickly.
That was only natural. Aside from the search engine itself, the remaining functions were not particularly difficult to implement, and the largest, most visible sections were actually the easiest.
Moreover, because Insu had come from the future, his vision and plans for portal sites were highly concrete and realistic, while Michael, the PM, had already created and uploaded similar sample sites onto the web before. As a result, the basic planning had genuinely taken only a few days.
“Oh! This looks good.”
Michael showed Insu a fairly convincing prototype in November, two months after development had begun in September.
“Right now, it only looks convincing on the surface. The search engine, user account functions, and admin pages are only just entering the design stage.”
Michael smiled awkwardly at Insu.
At this point, everyone in the portal site business division also knew that the game development division’s team leader was a young boy.
At first, Michael had found it impossible to believe too, but after continuing to work at the company, he had seen and heard enough that it became impossible not to realize that Insu was genuinely functioning as the team leader.
Still, because they did not work in the same development room, it did not feel completely real to him, leaving some lingering awkwardness.
But it was not as though he failed to acknowledge Insu.
After all, the results Insu had shown—the overwhelming success of the games beginning from TLF1—and now the MMORPG project, which even Michael found highly fascinating, were plainly visible. Insu was clearly leading more than a dozen people while pushing the project forward, making denial impossible.
Ignoring Michael’s reaction, Insu focused on examining the portal site prototype.
It feels a little outdated, but it definitely gives the impression of a real portal site.
In truth, the outdated appearance could not be helped.
Insu had refined things somewhat using memories from the future, but because this era fundamentally had low screen resolutions, boxes and text needed to be large, and there was no room to preserve whitespace, leaving the screen packed tightly.
Users even needed to scroll because everything could not fit into view at once.
This was not only because of resolution limitations, but also because users were still unfamiliar with portal sites as a service. Rather than refining colors or fonts to look elegant, the priority at this stage was simply making everything as noticeable as possible.
And besides, the feeling that it looked outdated only existed for Insu because of his memories from the future. To people of this era, it probably would not seem outdated at all.
After examining the prototype for a while, Insu suddenly spoke.
“So aside from the search engine and user account functions, could this already be launched as a service?”
“Huh? Ah, yes. Without the user account side, we wouldn’t need complex data management either.”
Michael considered it little more than an empty shell for now, but that did not mean it lacked value for users. At the very least, it could provide information, and even that alone was enough to attract users.
There aren’t many websites right now anyway, so we can just manually collect and organize them. That would let us launch the service much earlier.
This was not a thought that had suddenly occurred to him.
As the internet became more widespread and the period when portal sites had emerged in his previous life drew closer, Insu had gradually grown anxious and begun searching for ways to accelerate the launch.
Starting early meant stronger first-mover advantage and more time to establish recognition in people’s minds, so even if the service was not perfect, launching the parts that were already possible did not seem like a bad idea.
Services like this usually displayed “Since 19XX” at the front, and somehow, that kind of thing increased trust, even if only slightly.
Like those “third-generation bean sprout soup restaurants” or “150-year traditional naengmyeon shops.”
After all, if something had continued operating for a long time, people naturally believed it must have had fewer problems, accumulated expertise, and would probably continue surviving in the future.
And if a portal site—or rather, an internet business in general—had “1994” attached to it, then it would truly qualify as one of the original pioneers.
People would think, “There were already portal sites back then?!”
More than anything, the reason Insu suddenly brought this up was because he had just remembered that Yahoo had created a directory-based portal site much earlier than expected.
While crawling-based search engines were indeed more advanced technology, they were not absolutely necessary right now. He worried that if they delayed too long trying to make things more polished, they might lose the opportunity to become the original pioneer.
Michael was briefly surprised, but after thinking about it, it did not seem particularly problematic.
In the first place, the number of internet users right now was so small that there was little room for major issues to arise.
And originally, Michael already believed that directories were more efficient than search engines for the time being.