Game Development Giant

late at night.

The lights are bright inside a Mars Entertainment flagship store in downtown Los Angeles.

Outside the door, there is a long queue of players. It is blurry and unclear in the distance, but according to estimates, the length of the queue is at least several hundred meters.

Through the closed glass windows, you can clearly see the situation in the store.

The staff of Mars Entertainment has everything ready. There are more than 20 sales booths and raffle prizes stacked in a pyramid shape. This is also a tradition of Mars Entertainment. Players who purchase the first release can get it. A lottery ticket.

You can scratch off some good prizes from this lottery ticket.

For example, the Dreambox 2 game console, some game cartridges or game floppy disks, and even when a heavyweight work of Mars Entertainment was released before last year's carnival, five carnival tickets were prepared as rewards for a lottery.

In front of the door is a large electronic countdown clock.

The number above is five minutes and forty-three seconds, and then before a second passes, one second will be subtracted from the electronic clock.

As the official release time gets closer and closer, the players waiting outside are becoming more and more excited. Whether they know each other or not, they are all discussing things about this game with each other.

Especially Jester’s announcement about Battle.net just before its release.

Almost everyone is extremely curious about Battle.net. They all know about the Internet, but is Battle.net a super-large local area network that can connect nationwide? At least judging from Jester's description, that should be the case.

And when they think about being able to play online games with people from all over the country, and the joy that games such as Quake and Age of Empires bring to them during online battles, they feel a little hot in their hearts, and they really want to experience it earlier. What exactly is this Battle.net that Jester described.

Even if you cannot use this battle network at the beginning, you can connect to Quake or Age of Empires just like LAN connection. So just having some contact is fine.

It is said that except for those invited by Mars Entertainment themselves, the other places will only be randomly selected from the buyers of Rune Stone Guardian three days before the release. Someone casually said a few words like this, although there are many Everyone has heard the news released by Mars Entertainment before.

But most of them still listen to their relatives and friends.

Not many people really know all the news, so when someone talks about it, they prick up their ears, hoping to hear more.

It's assigned randomly, so how do we know we will be drawn?

After someone heard this sentence, they immediately frowned, after all. This is not the future, just apply online for anything and be randomly selected.

Of course, Jester has made these very clear before.

Someone asked this question, and someone soon explained to him that such discussions could be seen everywhere in this large, dark crowd. This was because they were bored waiting here and wanted to kill as much time as possible. After all, there isn't much time left before the release.

Finally, the countdown outside the door entered the final countdown.

The noisy voices in the crowd suddenly fell silent.

Then, the staff of Mars Entertainment opened the glass door of the flagship store, and then specialized security personnel came out to maintain the scene. Maintain order so that players who come to buy on the spot can enter the venue in an orderly manner, and then flow to different sales locations for purchase.

Meanwhile, not much time passed.

There was a conflict between Jester's fans and American RPG fans before. As a result, the rudimentary forum that had just appeared in this era, which gave rise to this bet on the sales of Rune Stone Guardian and Genesis 4, suddenly became lively.

To know. Although in this day and age, even in the United States, not many people have access to the Internet.

Even fewer people can still surf the Internet late at night.

However, after all, it was because of the gambling game, and this time Guardian of Rune Stones was released in the early morning. Therefore, not long after it was released, there was a new post about the poster who had just started from The release site of Runestone Guardian is back.

I found that the sale site was indeed crowded with countless buyers.

The sales volume of Rune Stone Guardian this time will definitely be frighteningly high, and he also expressed his worries about Genesis 4 which will be released tomorrow.

It may have been late at night at first, but this post was not responded to quickly.

But in less than an hour, several people responded to this post. From the content of the replies, it can be seen that the responders are all fans who support Ultima 4. They are obviously aware of the popularity of the launch site. , invariably did not attack the Runestone Guardian in this regard, but shifted the focus to Jester.

Jester is too shameless. Do you really think there are so many people going to buy it? That's not the case. I have been observing it before. Before he announced the news today, the number of people queuing up was only three. One percent, but as soon as he announced the news, the number of people immediately tripled. If it weren't for that news, how could the premiere of this bad game be so lively tonight.

You can easily hear the speaker's grievances from this reply.

And those who echoed also agreed with his remarks. \u003c, they usually don't play RPGs very much, they only like to play fast food games like Quake, so after they heard about it, even though it was later developed by Jester, they all said they would not buy it.

However, just after Jester announced the Battle.net test news this afternoon, they actually formed a team and went directly to the sales point to queue up. I even followed them to see it, and there were already hundreds of people queuing up. And there’s a steady stream of people going there, bah, I think maybe Jester thinks that the quality of the game “Runestone Guardian” is definitely not good, otherwise, they would use this kind of off-board trick?”

Echoes of this kind soon followed.

As this post received more and more replies, some players who had bought the game and tried it out, especially those fans who supported Jester, also came to this forum one after another and saw this hotly discussed topic. post.

Soon, Jester's supporters began their counterattack.

Haha, a bunch of sbs, have you ever played and said this game is not fun? Let me tell you, I just bought the starter, queued for more than a day, and played for more than half an hour. I can tell you responsibly, This is a very, very, very fun game!”

Not long after, this sarcastic reply to the comments above was like pouring a spoonful of cold water into a frying pan. In just a moment, the entire post exploded.

All kinds of abuse started.

There are many fans of American RPGs, and most of the fans who support Jester and Runestone Guardian are probably still waiting in line to buy the first release, so there are not many people who can fight back against the trolls, and the trolls There is nothing nutritious about it.

After all, there's no good reason to yell at a group of people who have never even played this game before calling it a shit game.

But soon, as the scolding became more and more unpleasant, the post was directly locked by the administrator of the forum, and the IDs of the people who scolded the most harshly were also directly banned.

But this is of no use.

Soon, a new rhythmic post was sent out again, and this time the rhythmic one came out and asked Jester's fans. As the saying goes, it's not rude to come back but not reciprocate. It didn't take long. Time, this post, once again became a battle.

Jester naturally has no time to pay attention to what is happening on this forum.

It's not that he doesn't know, he is still very clear about the bet, but for him, this is not a big deal. At most, it can only be said to be a little adjustment in life.

He stayed up all night. The main reason was that he wanted to wait for the latest release news. According to the pre-determined plan, three to four hours after the release, the first batch of sales reports would be reported to him for the first time. News and data. Of course, if he doesn't sleep at night, he doesn't mean to be idle and bored.

He still has a lot to do.

Because after the release of Guardian of Rune Stones is almost over, he will be preparing for his wedding.

This will take at least a month.

There is still a lot of work on him now. Although he is the boss, there is no problem if he can do it after he comes back from the wedding, but Jester is not a person who likes to procrastinate by nature, and his prestige in the company , and now the efficiency of various development teams in Mars Entertainment is far higher than that of other game companies.

It’s all driven by Jester’s example.

Jester had just finished an overview of the situation in Draenor in Warcraft. Jester, who felt a little sleepy, was about to go out and make a cup of coffee to dispel his sleepiness. He inadvertently looked up at the clock on the wall and discovered that It's already three fifty in the morning.

At this moment, Jester was still thinking about why the call to inform him of the news hadn't come yet.

The phone on his desk suddenly rang.

Picking up the phone and asking, Jester knew that the call was from the head office of Fengxing Publishing. Although the distribution work was jointly carried out by Mars Entertainment and Fengxing Publishing, the statistics of the data were still handled by Fengxing Publishing. Statistics. (To be continued...)