Exidy

Chapter 16 Exidy

The next day.

Ethan Jones once again drove the Ford F-150 he had borrowed from Thomas Jensen, carrying a Snake game console wrapped in tarpaulin, and sped toward Sunnyvale, twenty-three miles away.

In the future, this city will be an integral part of the famous Silicon Valley, but for now, the only famous company here is the massage parlor.

Of course, Ethan wasn't there to find a massage parlor. After wandering around the streets of Sunnyvale for a while and taking directions from a kind old lady, Ethan finally stopped in front of a factory gate surrounded by iron fences. On the spiked gate hung a sign with the words "Exidy" written in white on a red background.

He honked the horn, and a white man in work clothes emerged from the factory. Upon seeing the expensive Ford pickup truck, he immediately jogged over and asked, "Sir, who are you looking for?"

"I'm looking for Pete Kaufman." Ethan took off his sunglasses.

The white man was taken aback by the handsome face that resembled Tom Cruise's, and said, "Sir, I am Pete Kaufman."

Then he asked, "Are you Ethan Jones? The Ethan Jones who called me yesterday?"

"Yeah, Pete, I'm Ethan."

Ethan patted the steering wheel with a flourish, pointed to the back of the car with his right thumb, and said, "I've brought over the machine I introduced to you on the phone yesterday."

"Okay! Ethan, welcome to Exidy Games..."

Pete Kaufman nodded quickly, opened the iron gate, and gestured for Ethan to park his car anywhere.

That's right, Ethan came here today to seek cooperation with Exidy, the manufacturer of coin-operated arcade machines.

This decision was made based on intelligence gathered over the past two months regarding the current state of the video game industry.

The video game industry has seen some very interesting developments.

Although the world's first video game was created in a laboratory in 1947, it was not until the advent of the world's first commercial small computer, the PDP-1, in 1960 that video games were brought from scientific laboratories to universities.

Even though the creative MIT students developed Space Wars the following year, and the world’s first word game, Journey to Oregon, was born at the University of Minnesota in 71, the games that were created in the following decade or so only circulated in universities and were never successfully commercialized.

The reason is the same: computers are too expensive.

Scientists believe that video games, which rely on computers, will not become widespread when computer prices remain high, and university students also believe that the general public may not have access to this technology in the short term.

But in the same year that "Oregon Tour" came out, a man named Nolan Bushnell felt that video games did not need the medium of computers at all, and that their game feedback could be shown with the most basic physics technology. Everyone else had gone down a dead end!

So he took the 1962 Space Wars game created by MIT students and used the simplest physics technology to make an electronic arcade version, which he named Computer Space Wars. This was the world's first officially commercially available video game.

But "Computer Space Wars" failed, for the same reason as Ma Yun's criticism of Alipay engineers—

Many R&D personnel like to design products based on their own ideas, completely disregarding the feelings of the general public. They always think that segmentation is the best approach, but they don't realize that segmentation only brings visual confusion to ordinary people. What users want is simplicity.

Computer Space Wars is a complicated product; games made by geniuses are simply incomprehensible to ordinary people.

But it doesn't matter, because the following year, in 1972, Nolan Bushnell saw the simplest game at the launch of the Milwaukee Odyssey: billiards.

Because at the time, Milrova priced the Odyssey at $100 a unit, which was not a price that American consumers could afford in 1972, while Nolan Bushnell's coin-operated arcade machines allowed consumers to experience this new thing called video games for only 25 cents.

So, sensing an opportunity, he decisively copied the billiards game, created "Pong," and placed it in a bar, and then...

The legendary stories that countless people have heard have thus emerged.

The combination of low prices and novelty led to the emergence of Atari!

Nolan Bushnell thus successfully opened the door to the video game industry with his Atari!

While Nolan Bushnell's plagiarism is a fact, he is indeed the father of video games because while a bunch of engineers were figuring out how to make video games accessible to the general public, he simply smashed down the high barrier of the computer.

This flawed logic of not building a house if you can't afford a foundation is what leaves other engineers speechless.

Nolan Bushnell's approach immediately attracted countless imitators, and in just two years, this new thing called electronic arcade machines occupied the entrances of major bars, billiard halls, and bowling alleys in America.

Because the most difficult promotion process in the industry had already been done by these game manufacturers, when Ethan decided to get involved in the video game industry, he directly abandoned the idea of ​​personally visiting each store to promote his products.

Firstly, the purchasing power of the masses is insufficient.

Because electronic arcade machines are too expensive now, when merchants equipped their machines last year, or at most the year before, at a price of one thousand or even one thousand two hundred dollars each, they certainly wanted to make unlimited profits with limited costs, rather than eliminating the arcade machines in a short period of time.

At times like these, in order to promote new games, Atari only dared to offer motherboard replacement services. They would take away the merchants' old arcade machines, replace them with new gaming motherboards, and then take them back to the merchants, thus revamping the games. All the merchants paid was the cost of a motherboard.

When Atari didn't dare mention the phase-out to its merchants, Ethan was even less likely to be foolish enough to invite trouble.

Secondly, Ethan remembered a statement his finance teacher made in his previous life—

"Make money early, for risks can't defeat you; if you don't make money early, three generations will be impoverished."

In Ethan's view, if you want to make money in this industry, and make big money, you have to eliminate the time spent on ground promotion and directly cooperate with arcade manufacturers who already have close ties with the market, and use existing channels to sell your products!

If I had to describe it, it's actually just like the Hollywood movie production formula.

Independent production companies with production capabilities but no distribution capabilities often take their film copies to GTV (Golden Media Group) after filming, seeking their help with distribution. Although GTV charges a hefty fee for this, independent production companies can try to achieve rapid success by utilizing a wide range of channels.

If you're not famous, you have to offer discounts!

Once you become famous, why worry about not having money?

Therefore, before leaving Milrowa, Ethan directly copied the list of all the arcade machine manufacturers on the market that his former employer had collected.

Exidy, the closest video game console manufacturer to Ethan's home in Los Gatos, was founded in 1973 and is now a supplier of game consoles to many bars and billiard halls in the San Francisco area.

As Ethan drove in, several more white men ran out of the warehouse after hearing the commotion.

Upon learning that Ethan was there to promote video games, the people present showed great enthusiasm.

"Yo! Ethan! We're so glad you chose us!"

One of the men, a middle-aged white man wearing overalls and a bowler hat, gave Ethan a high-five, then clapped his hands and called out to the people around him, "Guys, hurry up and get the game console off Ethan's car!"

Ethan found the high level of enthusiasm somewhat strange, while Pete Kaufman beside him smiled and introduced, "This is my partner, Samuel Hawes. Ethan, to be honest, if your machine is really as good as you say, I think we have a chance to work together. After all, people are tired of the games on the market these days."

Ethan understood what Pete Kaufman was saying.

Although Atari stirred up the video game storm as early as 1972, to date, there is not a single game on the market that is truly developed independently by the company; everyone is just copying each other.

The reason is simple: when excellent works come from university students and there is no clear copyright holder, plagiarism, the easiest way to make money in the world, will naturally be used by everyone instinctively.

When everyone starts copying, the games consumers play become highly homogenized.

At first, they might play out of interest, but later on, all arcade manufacturers will have to face the fact that they need to develop their own.

It was because Ethan understood this that he got involved in the video game industry.

no way!

Who can blame him when he, at only twenty years old, already has forty years of research and development experience?

(laugh~

Note: ① Exidy: The most famous work is *Death Race*, an extremely violent racing game where players drive cars and crash into people. Its insane violence once made it to the *New York Times* and influenced the creation of *Mad Max* and *Road Rash*. ② Although Nolan Bushnell plagiarized, he is still widely recognized as the father of video games because his success was not due to copying games, but rather breaking people's mental barriers by making video games without computers. ③ The gaming environment in 1975 described in the text is real. Nolan Bushnell himself joked that he copied Milrova's billiards game, while others copied his *Pong*. The market environment at that time was that absurd and ridiculous.

(End of this chapter)