Sony's PlayStation Proposal
Remington's call far exceeded Yoo Jae-won's expectations. He had assumed it would be a follow-up report on handling the LA riots, but instead it concerned a game console. He never imagined Sony would be the first to propose building one.
For Yoo Jae-won, game consoles immediately brought PlayStation to mind. That made sense—tracing the lineage of the consoles he had enjoyed in his youth, the one right after the Famicom was the PlayStation. His parents had bought him the Famicom; he had purchased the PlayStation himself with money from part-time jobs. He had cherished both, yet if measured by hours played, the PlayStation won by a wide margin.
Thanks to that, when he later constructed the dream worlds he sold to the gods, he drew heavily from various PlayStation games. In his naive childhood he had simply imitated them. After destroying a world or two he began to pick and choose. In the end he paid homage. The more games he enjoyed, the more diverse and richer his dream worlds became. Generously speaking, it would not be an exaggeration to say that game consoles had contributed roughly ten percent to the person he was today.
"Yes, Boss. The leader of Sony's PlayStation project, a man named Ken Kutaragi, wants to use our 3D acceleration chip and Glide X2 in their console."
"Ken Kutaragi!"
Yoo Jae-won knew the name well. Ken Kutaragi was the father of the PlayStation. His success with the console had propelled him all the way to president of Sony—an almost legendary figure. Starting with the original PlayStation, the sequels PlayStation 2 and 3 had also succeeded, allowing Sony to expand from an electronics company into an entertainment giant. The capital gained from that expansion later led them into finance, eventually transforming the company into a financial institution. It had not been part of any grand plan. After losing ground in the twentieth century's flagship sectors—television and mobile—to Korea, Sony had diversified in search of survival and simply happened to succeed in finance.
"Oh? You know him?"
"Anyway, I've forwarded the proposal he sent to your email inbox. You'll get a clearer picture reading it yourself than hearing it from me over the phone. Ah, and I'll also brief you on the LA situation."
Yoo Jae-won had wanted to hear more about Sony, but the conversation shifted to Los Angeles. From Remington's perspective, a written report was far faster than verbal explanation, and the LA matter took priority over Sony. After all, it concerned people of the same ethnicity as Yoo Jae-won.
"Understood. Has anything changed?"
Yoo Jae-won agreed that the LA situation was more urgent. The LA incident referred to the Black riots. The riots had erupted on the exact same date as before and spread in the same pattern. The cause was identical: in the Rodney King trial, three of the four officers were acquitted and one was ordered to retrial. The court had always been friendly to the police, and this time was no different.
Moreover, contrary to the television footage, Rodney King had not been entirely a victim. When the verdict was announced, a local Los Angeles station rebroadcast the arrest footage of Rodney King being stopped for speeding. The clip had been edited in an extremely biased and sensational manner—cutting out the parts where he violently resisted arrest and emphasizing only the police using force to subdue him.
In any case, the Korean community in LA bore the full brunt of the backlash. Yoo Jae-won could have ignored the matter entirely. His business base was in San Francisco and Seattle, and his operations transcended race. He also had no ties to Korean-American organizations. A modest donation would have been sufficient; no one would have criticized him for staying out.
Yet Yoo Jae-won proceeded with full-scale support exactly as planned. Once again, the funds came from the "giving tree" Japan had provided. Even after acquiring Sanyo and other strong Japanese firms, plus the successful Comcast deal, he still had substantial capital left. He had earned that much, and the taxes due were correspondingly large. He had sworn not to evade taxes, but that did not mean he would forgo legitimate tax optimization. He had no hesitation using donations and foundation establishment for lawful tax benefits.
As a way to support Koreans affected by the LA Black riots, Yoo Jae-won established a foundation of his own. Donating to existing organizations would have been easiest and most visible, but there was no guarantee the money would actually reach those who needed it. So he chose to create a foundation and provide direct assistance.
Remington was appointed chairman, and Yoo Jae-won donated a hundred million dollars to launch it. The sum was so enormous that it made headlines not only in LA but across the entire United States. The foundation's operating philosophy was equally unconventional. Most foundations preserve the principal and use only the interest for their stated purpose. Worse ones spend only a fraction of the interest. The ID Foundation for LA had a different goal: to spend the entire hundred million dollars.
"Basic relief payments have all been distributed. We're currently reviewing loan applications, but unlike the grants, the number of loan applicants is lower than expected."
The basic grant was ten thousand dollars—simply given to Korean households affected by the LA Black riots. Some people had viewed handing out cash so openly with suspicion, yet nothing helped victims more directly than cash. Loans were the follow-up measure. Ten thousand dollars was nowhere near enough to rebuild stores that had been burned and looted. Providing that amount as an outright gift would have been excessive, so it was structured as a loan.
The total damage from the LA Black riots was estimated at around three hundred million dollars. If Yoo Jae-won had wanted, he could have covered everything in one go, but he chose not to. While the riots had been triggered by Black residents, the Korean community could not claim zero responsibility. They had been overly deferential to whites while ignoring Blacks and had failed to integrate with the local community. Offering full reconstruction costs for free would have been tantamount to granting absolution, and there would be no guarantee the same thing would not happen again. Yoo Jae-won intended to use ultra-low-interest, ultra-long-term loans to encourage the Korean community to abandon its insularity and integrate with its surroundings.
That fewer people than expected had applied was surprising.
"The intelligence team looked into it. Many seem to suspect there must be a catch because the terms are too good. Most early immigrants have been scammed at least once. So their default reaction to any attractive offer is suspicion. The misunderstanding will clear up in time. We just need to wait."
"The organization for the scholarship program is nearly complete as well."
If the foundation had only supported Koreans, it would not have been named the ID Foundation for LA. The scholarship program would provide support without discriminating between Koreans, Blacks, or whites. It would cover not only academically gifted students but also those from low-income families and those with talents in arts or athletics. Expecting one program to erase all racial prejudice would be overly optimistic, but at the very least it might help prevent extreme incidents like the riots from recurring. In that sense, a hundred million dollars was no burden at all for Yoo Jae-won.
Instead, the people around him were making a fuss. The LA mayor, who had done nothing during the riots, and the broadcasting stations that had worsened the situation were now focusing intense scrutiny on ID Group. Requests for meetings and interviews from politicians and stations in LA were pouring in, but Yoo Jae-won coolly ignored them—just as they had once ignored Koreans.
"Oh, right! How is the large-scale Intel purchase going?"
After receiving the full LA report and preparing to end the call, Yoo Jae-won suddenly remembered the Intel matter and asked again. It was not that Intel was buying large quantities of ID Group products; rather, ID Group had placed a massive order with Intel—ten thousand units of the 999-dollar Pentium 66 MHz CPU. They had also ordered ten thousand units from a Taiwanese motherboard manufacturer and large quantities of memory from Future Semiconductor.
This was to realize one of Yoo Jae-won's grand ambitions: to bundle ten thousand PCs into a single massive cluster server. At Yoo Jae-won's standards, the processing power of a Pentium 66 MHz was nothing special. But when linked through clustering technology, it could produce meaningful results. For projects that relied heavily on parallel computation, the performance could easily surpass even the highest-spec supercomputers currently in existence.
Yoo Jae-won planned to use the resulting cluster server to launch various services—rental server offerings, cloud computing, and enhanced Nextcom services. There was also one secret project: machine-learning algorithms for artificial intelligence. The current hardware was somewhat inadequate for running such programs properly, but once launched, they could gradually upgrade the hardware to increase processing capacity.
Since the order was so large, a price discount was standard, yet for some reason Intel had not responded at all.
"Strangely, we still haven't received a reply."
"Really? That's odd."
Yoo Jae-won could not understand why. The CPU was expensive and sales were sluggish—why the silence? He even wondered whether Intel had discovered the FDIV bug themselves and paused production to fix it. If they were about to announce a recall, the market would have been noisy, yet everything remained quiet. Intel's lack of response was genuinely strange.
"If we still haven't heard anything in a few more days, we'll switch to AMD."
"Understood."
Afterward, Yoo Jae-won and Remington exchanged a few more personal remarks before ending the call. The topic was currently private, but it could soon become official. Shannon's due date was approaching. She had already begun maternity leave, and Remington remained. Even in America there was still no legal obligation to grant husbands paternity leave, but Yoo Jae-won had no desire to be stingy. His connection with Remington stretched back to his previous life. Using this occasion to introduce early paternity leave at ID Group would not be a bad idea.
Of course, the fact that the vast majority of ID Group employees were unmarried men also played a role. Most computer programmers were men in their twenties and thirties, creating an extreme gender and marital-status imbalance. Thanks to that, even a radical welfare policy like paternity leave could be introduced without major issues.
"I can't tell if this is a good thing or a pity."
Yoo Jae-won muttered after hanging up. Now that he thought about it, even after starting his new life, he had very few female friends. The only women he still contacted were his elementary-school classmates Soo-kyung and Eun-hye. At the company, everyone around him was male as well.
"What is this? Did I receive some curse I don't know about?"
It was a curious situation, yet Yoo Jae-won did not take it seriously. Until now he had lived in a rather closed society, but once he began university life in the fall, an entirely different path from his previous life would begin.
Ding!
At that moment, an alarm sounded from the computer—an alert for an important unread email.
"Ah, right! Sony!"
Shaking off his idle thoughts, Yoo Jae-won immediately moved to the computer. Since he was always connected to the internet, checking email took only moments. The progress bar showing download speed shot from 0% to 100% in an instant. Even though the compressed file attached to the email was 600 KB, it downloaded quickly. Compared to the time right after his regression when he had uploaded Keyboard Warrior in America, the difference was like night and day.
"ADSL really is something else!"
The answer was ADSL. Deokjin-ri had once been rural even among rural areas, but now it was the neighborhood with the fastest internet service in all of Korea. Yoo Jae-won's house had been the very first to adopt ADSL. Seeing that, the villagers had followed suit. With such an outstanding example right nearby, the IT aspirations of Deokjin-ri residents were on an entirely different level from other regions. Believing that mastering computers could lead to success just like Yoo Jae-won, everyone bought computers and subscribed to internet service.
It was not only Deokjin-ri. Regions with high educational zeal also showed higher adoption rates of ISDN and ADSL. Contrary to parents' hopes, however, the children who gained access to computers and networks spent their time playing games. In particular, Keyboard Warrior—whose popularity had already faded in America—was only now becoming a hit in Korea. By default it was classified as educational software, and network play had been standard from the beginning, so its popularity was only now taking off in Korea.
Among computer enthusiasts, of course, nothing could surpass Doom. Because Doom had not passed Korea's video-content review, all copies currently in circulation were technically illegal packages, yet its overwhelming gameplay quality allowed it to spread quietly.
"Games really are a market you can never afford to miss……"
That was why Yoo Jae-won had been formulating his own plans in the gaming sector. Curious about what proposal Sony had made under these circumstances, he extracted the compressed file. Inside were a single document and several image files. He opened ID Word Processor and began reading carefully.
"As expected, President Remington summarized it well."
The document was over fifteen pages long, so it took him ten minutes to read it thoroughly. Most of the lengthy text consisted of praise for ID Technology's 3D-related technologies and explanations of Sony's status and strengths in the electronics market. The core message was that combining the two would allow them to challenge the game-console market. The project's name was, naturally, PlayStation.
The proposal also described the PlayStation's main specifications, which did not differ greatly from what Yoo Jae-won already knew: LSI Logic's 32-bit custom CPU, CD-ROM drive, 2 MB of main memory, and 16-bit sound. The new additions were the 3D acceleration chip developed jointly by ID Technology and various VGA manufacturers, plus the built-in Glide X2 library. While the 3D portion would be finalized through further discussion, Ken Kutaragi, the project leader, had outlined his preferred specifications. He planned to use Cirrus Logic's chip—offering the best price-to-performance ratio among 3D acceleration chip manufacturers—and set video memory at 2 MB. Although ATI offered the highest performance, its high price had forced him to compromise.
"They really like 2 MB, don't they?"
Both main memory and video memory were 2 MB. It reminded him of someone, but it could also be seen as a reasonable compromise between price and specifications. Game consoles used televisions for display. Unlike computer monitors, televisions had lower resolution and used interlaced scanning, so even thirty frames per second produced a smooth image. Because television picture quality was poor, the console's specifications could be lower—an odd sort of balance.
"I may owe them a great debt from my past life, but business is still business."
Yoo Jae-won had not forgotten his principles. Since Sony would be using ID Technology's technology, they would have to pay an appropriate price. More strictly speaking, the issue was not merely price—the joint venture with Sony also had to align with ID Technology's vision. If the partnership did not match ID Technology's future strategy, it would be better to refuse outright and pursue an independent entertainment business.
Having made up his mind, Yoo Jae-won's eyes quickly scanned the document. When he reached the final paragraph, the section on licensing fees caught his attention.
"Huh? What the—?"
The moment he saw the numbers, a strange sound escaped Yoo Jae-won's mouth.