Silicon Valley is a conceptual name for the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in northern California. On the map, there is no Silicon Valley.

Alameda County, California, is within the scope of Silicon Valley, and the famous University of California, Berkeley is located here.

Not far from Berkeley, there is a villa with green plants on the walls. There is no furniture or electrical appliances in the living room of the villa. There are only a few people, some leaning against the corner of the wall with their chests on their backs, and some simply sitting on the floor.

"The current electronic game industry has entered a misunderstanding." Chen Chong stood in front of the fireplace and said to several people sitting or standing: "The entire industry is affected by "Sky Invaders". I think it has no future to develop shooting games."

"What kind of game do we do?" Larry Kaplan did a few boxing moves, then raised his arms and made a swing, saying, "Do boxing, or baseball?"

The people around him laughed, and in the empty room, they looked particularly loud - these people were several partners of Activision Games, and one was talkative James, who had agreed to resign from Atari and join Activision.

When they calmed down, Chen Chong continued: "You are all men, and you are men who do computers. You only stare at machines and data, and ignore a simple fact."

James leaned against the door, playing with a leaf, and asked casually: "What's the truth?"

"Adali is a home electronic game console, home use! Do you understand?" Chen Chong took out a pen from his backpack, wrote the English word "home" on the white wall behind him, and then drew a rampant line below, saying: "The meaning of home use is that housewives and children are the main customers of the game console."

The tech yum responded too slowly to common sense of life. Bob Whitehead frowned and asked, "What about that?"

"For housewives, Space Invaders are too violent and not attractive to them, for children, Space Invaders are too difficult and playable." Shen Chong wrote a few words on the wall again - this will be an office location for Activision, which will be renovated and painted soon - and then pointed at them and said, "Simple, puzzle, fun, this is the game we are going to do."

"But no one wants to play a game that is too simple, right?"

"Whoever can boldly underestimate the wisdom of Americans can make money." After Chen Chong said that, everyone in the room showed a knowing smile, because this sentence was often spoken by Atari founder Bushnell.

"But how can simple things be interesting?" Jim Levy asked, touching his chin, a musician, the only one in this group who can't program.

"Simple, it's not about how to play, but about the rules." Chen Chong took out a Rubik's Cube from his backpack and said: "The simpler the rules, the easier it is to get started. For example, this one, disrupt and restore, is very simple rules. A two-year-old child will play with it, but it is difficult to play well."

James whistled first, and the rest of the people applauded and applauded - Chen Chong spoke while turning the Rubik's Cube quickly. After saying that, the Rubik's Cube was restored.

Rubik's Cube is now popular in the United States. Many programmers are trying to use computers to verify the "number of God" problem. Many computer magazines have published papers about Rubik's Cube, so it is particularly popular in the computer industry. These are computer experts, so they have naturally played Rubik's Cube, but they recovered while talking, and the speed is very fast. This is the first time they have seen it.

James threw away the leaves, walked to Shen Chong and asked, "So, we want to develop a Rubik's Cube game to play on Atari game console?"

"This thing is only $19." Chen Chong threw the Rubik's Cube in his hand and said, "Who do you think will buy an Atari for $199 and then buy a game cassette to play it?"

James was embarrassed and made a very exaggerated tongue-stick move, then walked back to the door in a gorilla walking position, and everyone along the way punched him with a smile.

This guy is a living treasure...

"Let's make a game like this." Chen Chong changed a wall, drew several schematic diagrams on it, and then explained one by one: "This is a rectangular virtual space, which is seven squares of different shapes, all composed of four small squares. At the beginning, a random square will appear above the space and then slowly fall. During the fall, the player can rotate the squares in units of 90 degrees and move the squares left and right in units of grids..."

That’s right, the entrepreneurial work that Shen Chong selected for Activision Games is the famous Tetris!

Historically, Tetris was designed and programmed by the Soviet computer expert Alexei Pakitnov (АлексейПажитнов), and was first released on June 6, 1984. The game's English name is Tetris, which is a combination of the Greek number "4" prefix "tetra" and Pakitnov's favorite sports tennis "tennis". In China, because it was invented by the Soviets, it is commonly known as "tetris".

Tetris can run on almost all consumer electronic devices such as arcades, home machines, handheld machines, PCs, mobile phones, etc. The sales of authorized genuine games alone exceed 100 million, and there are more pirated and copycat versions. Therefore, they are widely circulated and are the most popular electronic game in the world. If any media selects the "greatest game", it will not fall out of the top three.

As long as such a masterpiece is made, it will rush to attract money in the market like a black hole. The soaring thing that is worried about money will naturally not be spared.

After explaining the basic rules of Tetris in detail, Chen Chong asked: "What do you think? Can you implement it on Atari VCS?"

"It sounds fun." James first reported, "With such a simple picture and action, with Atari's machine performance, it is no problem at all."

"It's very interesting, I can't wait." Larry Kaplan walked to the wall, looked at the messy graphics drawn by Shen Chong, and said, "It's not difficult to do it in about two weeks."

"Absolutely." David Crane nodded in agreement. He used to be the top player in Atari's game development department and was very familiar with Atari's machines. "The key to the game is the design. This game has been designed very well and it is not difficult to implement." (Note 1)

"By the way, what's the name of this game?" James jumped out to show his presence again.

"Just call it Tetris." Chen Chong originally wanted to call it the electronic cube, but after thinking about it, he gave up. Just use the original name, which is to leave a memory mark from his previous life.

After staying with these engineers in Silicon Valley for two days and explaining all the details of Tetris clearly, Shen Chong boarded the plane to Boston.

The development of VisiCalc is progressing smoothly because Shen Chong provides a good hardware environment. Brickly and Frankston do not have to wait until night to go to school to pick up machines every day. The R&D speed is much faster. At present, an incomplete BETA version has been made. According to the two estimates, the official version can be completed in July, about 3 months earlier than in history.

Now that Chen Chong is rich in funds, he is no longer stingy. He invested the remaining $80,000 in one go into the software art company (Soft-Art) account of the three-person joint venture. Then, with VisiCalc's design documentation and the BETA version of the floppy disk, he went straight to the most famous Cryan-Xiao Law Firm in Boston. (Note 1)

Chen Chong has to do a terrible act - apply for a software patent for VisiCalc.

In history, on May 26, 1981, a programmer named Parr designed an algorithm software to monitor temperature and successfully applied for a patent, which caused the biggest controversy in the history of computer software and laid the foreshadowing for the patent war between later IT companies.

If Chen Chong is a geek, he will definitely not apply for a patent. Unfortunately, he is not. He is a pseudo IT man. This kind of money-making method is not in vain. Spreadsheets are a must-have in office software. As long as the patent is successfully applied for, no matter which company develops OFFICE office software in the future, he will have to pay the patent fee. Chen Chong just sits on the ground and collects the money.

The lawsuit is resolved by lawyers. American lawyers are world-famous. After submitting the necessary materials, Shen Chong went to Dan Flystra.

Ferestella was originally a publisher of VisiCalc in history and became a millionaire with VisiCalc. However, during the Spring Festival, after Shen Chong took Bricklin's contact information from him, his fate completely changed.

Ferestella also graduated from Harvard Business School and opened a personal software company (Personal-Soft) and lived by selling some chess games running on computers. Shen Chong now lacks nothing, but lacks talents. So after intercepting VisiCalc, he turned around and stared at him again.

In the history of computer software, this guy made the first software sales agreement, completely separating R&D and sales, and providing a sample for the future development of the software industry. VisiCalc can become the first "killer" application in the history of computer software. In addition to the emergence of the software itself and meeting the needs of the times, Ferestella's personal abilities also played a great role.

So during the Spring Festival, Chen Chong won Bricklin on the first day and entered the door of his personal software company the next day.

In the era without the Internet, the sales of every software or game cannot be separated from the support of developers. Before the industry broke out, Shen Chong planned to build a sales platform similar to Suning Appliance in the future.

There are two benefits to doing this. One is that the software and game industries have just emerged. No one realizes that this is a big cake. Now, the cost of building a distribution and sales platform is very low. Once it forms a scale, it will be difficult for latecomers to compete with him. Therefore, before the Internet emerges, they firmly hold the necks of software and game developers and make a lot of profits.

Second, Shen Chong has limited energy after all, and his main battlefield is in Hong Kong. It is impossible to stare at Silicon Valley every day. With a distribution and sales platform, he only needs to browse the newly launched software every once in a while to see if there are any familiar ones in it.

This plan is the most expensive project that has been traveling through time since the Spring Festival to the present. In more than two months, nearly one million US dollars have been invested to instruct Felestra to establish a chain software sales store in major cities in the United States.

Felestra has great abilities. In two months, nearly 20 chain stores have been built in 11 cities. However, VisiCalc has not yet been launched, and chain stores can only operate both hardware and barely maintain a situation of not losing or making money.

After finishing his inspection in Boston, Shen Chong went to New York again.

Although Chen Chong knew that due to the Iranian revolution, oil prices would rise sharply, he did not know when it would rise. According to the information he inquired, there are currently only oil futures trading in the New York Commercial Exchange in the world, and there is only heating oil, a type of oil commodity.

It is Chen Chong's usual idea to find professional people to do professional things. Even if oil futures are not profitable, he must open an account on Wall Street, meet some financial experts, and prepare for making money in the future.

After staying in New York for 3 days, Shen Chong took the plane and rushed back to Hong Kong the day before the Qingming Festival.

...

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Note 1: The above people, except James, are all the founders of Activision Games.
Chapter completed!