1988 Retro Game Tycoon - Chapter 95



Only Noblemtl

Episode 95 – The Ugly Duckling’s Transformation

– The transformation of the electronic poisonous mushroom into a goose that lays the golden eggs of electronic entertainment?

– Domestic arcade game achieved sales of 16.8 billion won in just 15 days after its release

– Home game consoles are also popular, such as the Hyunmyeong Comboy with 150,000 units and the Oseong Gemboy with 200,000 units.

Video games have been the ugly duckling until now. Video games, which began to gain popularity among teenagers in the late 70s, became a sensation with the introduction of a game called . Eventually, college students and office workers flocked to the arcade. Coins were in short supply in the market, and there were even frequent cases of students stealing money to play games.

After a teenage girl was electrocuted to death in 1983 while trying to steal coins from an arcade game machine, the government rolled up its sleeves to revitalize the arcade industry, which had been in the dark. It cracked down on arcades, most of which were unlicensed, standardized game machine standards, imposed taxes, and pushed for the elimination of Japanese culture from games, and made arcade games based on traditional Korean culture such as Son Gi-jeong, Sim Cheong-jeon, Yi Sun-sin, and the national anthem.

Most attempts have ended in failure. Thousands of unlicensed arcades are still in operation, and there are no proper Korean games. The industry estimates that the number of arcade boards produced so far, centered around Cheonggyecheon, is in the millions. Some of these arcade boards, which are copies or modifications of Japanese boards, are exported to Southeast Asia and other places.

As video games became popular, autistic concentration problems arose in which children would play games without talking to each other, just looking at the screen. Video games were likened to poisonous mushrooms that grow in the dark, and were called electronic poisonous mushrooms. For parents, video games are a headache that interferes with their studies.

The electronic entertainment industry, which had been like that, began to change this year. It started with a small Korean company called Starbeat. developed by Jewoo Electronics for the home game console Jemix V became popular, and then they developed a baseball game called and held an event game called Return of the Stars at Dongdaemun Stadium, attracting the attention of the entire nation.

The portable game Pocket, developed in collaboration with Myungsung Electronics, gained explosive popularity among young men and women, creating a new meeting culture called ‘Pocketing’. In the meantime, large companies also entered the game market one after another. Hyunmyeong Electronics introduced Comboy, and Oseong Electronics introduced Gyeomboy, targeting the home market.

While rival conglomerates in the financial world were focusing on home game consoles, Starbeat, which had been the first to open the floodgates for change, threw its hat into the ring for the arcade market. It introduced the ‘A1 System Board’, which was the first to be produced domestically, rather than the copy boards made in Cheonggyecheon, and released its first arcade game, ‘Fist of Jongno’, on Liberation Day.

, which depicts the fights and revenge of gangs in Jongno, Gyeongseong in the 1930s, has been very popular since it was released. As the summer vacation is coming to an end, students flock to the arcades and the game consoles are packed with people. As Korean games have become popular in arcades that were previously dominated by Japanese games, business owners are rushing to stock them.

Mr. Kim (45), who runs an arcade in Gangnam, said, “I like that I can fight against the yakuza and the Japanese military without worrying about the Japanese culture,” and smiled broadly at the increased number of customers after the introduction of .

The arcade industry, which had manufacturing and mass production capabilities but had long been troubled by the lack of suitable games, has been given a new lease of life by Starbeat. Starbeat, which has only about 20 employees, has already surpassed 20 billion in sales this year. Starbeat, which is full of young people who love games, is planning to continue releasing arcade games and even export them. Electronic games, which were thought to be the ugly duckling, turned out to be the goose that laid the golden eggs.

***

People often say that when the water rises, you row.

But after experiencing it for myself, I realized that this statement was wrong.

When the tide really comes in, there is no need to row. No, I can’t row. The current that is pushing me is too strong. If I surrender to the current, the huge waves will carry the boat into the vast sea.

The real job is not to row, but to hold the rudder firmly. Just be careful not to get carried away by the waves and end up somewhere other than the ocean.

As things go well, you have to be able to really step back and see where you are headed. This is very difficult, of course.

As the A1 board surpassed 5,000 units, began to appear in the media.

That was the starting point. Now, we no longer need to go around selling . Arcade owners who want to install A1 boards started contacting us first.

Word of mouth among arcade owners seemed to spread much faster than it did among the general public. Since arcade owners are all self-employed and responsible for their own livelihoods, they are bound to be more sensitive to profits than anyone else.

Inquiries about purchasing A1 boards poured in from all over the region, including Gyeonggi-do, Gangwon-do, Chungcheong-do, Gyeongsang-do, Jeolla-do, and even across the sea to Jeju-do.

“What? No matter how much I told you to become popular, is it okay for you to become popular this quickly? It seems like you’ve never learned humility before.”

Although he said that, the owner of Gangnam Computer Arcade had a constant smile on his face.

“Are you admitting that this is a trend? Already?”

“It’s the same with other arcade owners, and judging by the fact that the newspapers are talking about it, it’s a trend. They’re all advertising it for free nationwide. Owners who haven’t installed it yet, they’re telling you to hurry up and install it. Do you get a lot of calls these days?”

“Yes, we are having to wait for a number because we can’t process them all. How is it here? Will there still be customers even if we increase the number to eight? And summer vacation is over?”

“I thought it would definitely decrease during the day since the vacation was over. I was prepared for that, but I increased the number to 8 because of the customers who flocked in during the evenings and weekends.”

“But?”

“During the day, office workers would show up one by one. When I asked them, they said they wanted to try it, but since it was vacation, the students were all over the place, so there was no way.”

“Well, working people can’t compete with students on vacation for time.”

“Of course. Those bad guys wait for an hour, two hours, and then they’ll kill you. After waiting that long, they start to struggle so that they don’t die. There are so many people that it’s hard to continue after they die. If you do that, you’ll end up getting beaten to death.”

“It’s grim.”

“Of course. The kids are really sensitive to those invisible rules. I can’t do anything about that. Now that we’ve increased the number to eight, when we have free time, three or four of us come and do it as a group. They know how to keep an eye on things and continue if there’s no one else. You can’t just sit there blankly while all your friends are doing it, right? It’s embarrassing. So there’s no harm in it.”

I nodded to the boss’s words.

It was a really good decision to change the game to 4 players at the end.

Playing a game alone is a completely different experience than playing it with two, three, or even four people at the same time. The screen becomes crowded with characters, and as the number of players increases, the game becomes more difficult, so it becomes much harder to solve if there is a large skill gap between the players.

In the arcade, it is virtually impossible to ride the bus like in internet games. No matter how well a person does, if he or she cannot protect himself or herself because enemies are coming from all sides, he or she cannot continue the game.

There are no potions or healers here. Arcade games are extremely cold in front of coins.

It was not an easy problem technically, because each moving object in the game took up memory. The easiest way was to increase the board’s memory, but that would drive up the price through the roof.

The key is how well programmers manage memory. Even though we invested as much as possible into the A1 board, we still had to work hard to manage memory as if we were squeezing a dry cloth.

Even up until the final QA stage, the most technically demanding part was making it possible for 4-player play without any problems. I also directly participated in coding this part because I wanted to finish it somehow before the summer vacation ended and in time for Liberation Day.

“As I was looking at people’s faces, I discovered something else interesting.”

“What is it?”

“There are some guys who come here with their friends and do it often. But one of them is a little bit behind in skill. I thought I could keep up with him somehow, but one day he ended up getting kicked. He probably didn’t do it because he didn’t want to, but there’s nothing he can do. Everyone pays to do it. I thought, oh, that guy won’t come anymore. But my hunch was wrong.”

“Are you back again?”

“Yeah, he came and practiced alone. He’s not very good at it. But he still came regularly and practiced quietly. I even coached him. When I saw him, I felt a little sad.”

“How did you set the difficulty? Did you set it to hard?”

“No~, is that too early? We need to give people time to get used to the game. I just set it to factory price. If we make it difficult or very difficult, they’ll get sick of it and leave.”

The difficulty of arcade games can also be adjusted using jumper switches. is divided into Easy – Normal – Hard – Very Hard. The default setting is ‘Normal’.

Arcades that are frequented by many video game experts can quickly adapt to games, so if the games are easy, they can become boring. Since the tendencies and skills of frequent customers vary from region to region and arcade to arcade, arcade owners are given the option to manage them as they see fit.

“There must be a lot of customers waiting, so there will be people who are impatient and raise the difficulty level because they don’t want to die quickly and keep holding on. They are really fools who only know one thing and not the other. Even if they make a lot of money for a short while, if word gets out that the game is difficult, they will all go to other arcades. At first, there aren’t many machines, so it’s hard, but you can try playing somewhere else. Who would play there?”

The owner of Gangnam Computer Arcade said, clicking his tongue.

The arcade owner and the gamers are always fighting an invisible war over the games. The arcade owner tries to earn 100 won more, and the gamers try to save 100 won more.

It’s an endless tug-of-war over a single coin.

“We also advise people not to touch the settings for at least two months, but once it falls into the hands of the owner, we cannot control it. However, as the owner said, if it is too difficult, people will avoid it and the balance will be achieved on its own.”

“That’s true. Anyway, you shouldn’t look down on them just because they’re kids.”

“Of course. They are our most important customers. In fact, adjusting the difficulty level is the most difficult part when making a game. So in the future, we plan to make a game that automatically adjusts the difficulty level according to the gamer’s level.”

“What? What do you mean, the game adjusts its difficulty automatically? Where else can you buy drugs? Where in the world can you find a game like that?”

“Not yet. But it’s not impossible.”

The difficulty of a game is a key issue that will determine the future life of an arcade game.

There are still many arcade veterans, but students who first encountered games in the 70s and 80s began to evolve into veterans in the 90s. This is not just a Korean phenomenon, but a global one.

In order to satisfy the arcade’s core customer base of veterans, the games have to become more and more difficult. The problem is that the more difficult it becomes, the more difficult it becomes for newcomers to the arcade, and they don’t even have a chance to adapt to the games.

The solution would be for arcades to have multiple identical game machines, each with a different difficulty level, but this is not a true solution because arcades cannot have an infinite number of machines.

Ultimately, when playing an arcade game, either the gamer must choose the difficulty level themselves, or the game must determine the gamer’s skill level and adjust the difficulty accordingly.

If gamers were allowed to choose their own difficulty, all the poor kids would probably just play on easy and keep playing for a single coin. Then the arcade owners would get frustrated and wouldn’t stock the game in large quantities, no matter how popular it was.

Ultimately, the answer is to develop AI that can adjust the game’s difficulty on its own, so that the game automatically adapts to the gamer’s level.

Of course, it’s not as easy as it sounds. But it’s also a necessary skill to maximize the lifespan of arcade games.

As the economic newspaper reporter put it, arcades are the goose that lays the golden eggs even in Korea, a wasteland for video games.

Even though our company is so busy that we can’t keep up with all the orders coming in, there are still more arcades in the country that don’t have A1 boards. There’s still a huge potential for growth.

“Since the strategies for Stages 1, 2, and 3 were published in the computer magazine, people’s skills will improve even more. And next month, the strategies for the remaining Stages 4 and 5 will be published. Please check them out and adjust the difficulty level as you see fit, boss.”

“Are you going to split the game strategy into two months? You’re smart. Yeah, it wouldn’t be fun if you solved it all at once.”

“Yes, the magazine likes that better too. Because we can cover the special feature next month too.”

As always, I included a game strategy and a bit of development background in , and a detailed description of the technology and development process that went into game development in .

I also asked Lee Ki-cheol if he would like to do a magazine interview, but he flatly refused.

“I can’t do that because it’s embarrassing. Since you’re a good gamer, you should do it yourself.”

“Okay. Then I’ll organize it first, so you can look at it later and add some more information.”

“It’s nothing more than that. I’ll see. When I have time.”

These days, Lee Ki-cheol spends most of his days playing on the A1 board he made himself.

“You damn gamer! How do you make games so fun?”

“The great thing is my brother. Without him, I wouldn’t have been able to make the board this quickly. That’s why.”

I handed Lee Gi-cheol a bankbook.

“What is this? Huhhhhh?”

Lee Ki-cheol opened his bankbook, was shocked, and checked the amount several times.

“What? How much is this? Six, seven, eight balls?! 300 million? Am I seeing this correctly?”

“Yeah, that’s right. Our company made over 10 billion by selling that board. That’s why we give it to the Iron Age as a bonus. It’s all my brother’s money.”

“You earned that much? With that?”

Lee Ki-cheol looked at me with a face that seemed to have lost its soul. He also knew that the A1 board and were huge successes.

But I wasn’t interested in the specific amount. I never asked him what compensation he would receive.

“Wow, that’s amazing. That guy made this much money?”

Lee Ki-cheol looked at the bankbook and smiled happily.

Then he handed the bankbook back to me.

“Why are you giving this to me?”

“You keep this. I don’t need it.”

“What? No, but this is your brother’s money?”

“I don’t need that much money. With the research funds you give me every month, I can pay the rent here and buy the parts I need, and that’s it. You even provide all the side dishes, so what else do I need?”

“No, but I’ll do what I want to do···.”

“What do you want to do? I’m doing whatever I want right now.”

Lee Ki-cheol said with a big smile. His eyes were so clear that I couldn’t say anything in response. He looked really happy.

“It’s all because I met you, Gamdol. I’m really grateful for that. But I don’t have any money. Even if I suddenly get a lot of money, it’s just a feeling of relief. Just keep it with you and use it whenever you need it. If I ever need it again, I’ll tell you, so give it to me then.”

Lee Ki-cheol said it with a smile, but it wasn’t a joke.

Now I can tell what Lee Ki-cheol is joking about and what he is serious about.

So I thought I knew Lee Ki-cheol a little bit now.

Not at all.

“No matter what, this is your money···.”

“Oh, but that’s money I wouldn’t have earned if I hadn’t met you. So you should take care of it instead. I don’t want to worry about that kind of stuff, and it’s a pain in the ass. Since you’re a business owner, you’ll have a lot more work to do than me, and you’ll have a lot more things to spend money on. So it’s better for someone who needs it to have it.”

“Whatever I say, it won’t be of any use, right?”

“Of course. But make a promise with me.”

“What is it?”

“Please prepare some side dishes for me until I die. Buy me something delicious sometimes. And most importantly, let me continue doing fun things like I do now. That’s enough for me.”

“I’m not your brother’s wife. Do you want me to spend my whole life chasing after your brother who may or may not turn into someone?”

“Yeah. Isn’t it an honor?”

Lee Ki-cheol smiled brightly.

It was a face that I could not possibly spit on, curse at, or hate.

“Okay. But you too, don’t go anywhere else and spend your life researching my game consoles. When a new field comes up, you have to study really hard. Got it?”

“Yes, brother!”

Lee Ki-cheol saluted me. His face was full of mischief.

He signed the account book containing 300 million won, writing only one sentence, ‘I entrust the account book to Seo Nam-joon.’

That’s how I signed a lifelong contract with Lee Ki-cheol.

There was no contract.

1988 Retro Game Tycoon Episode 96