"Gu, I said you will regret that you signed 15,000 units for the expected delivery volume in May. I admit that this is quite impressive. But this is the last bloom before your demise. I said that you will suppress your expected delivery volume in June to less than 10,000 units, and do what you say!

I also want to tell you that your expected orders in July will be suppressed to less than 5,000 units! Then one month is lower than one month! This is the end of not handing over the transplant authorization to Atari! I want to see how your company can support millions of dollars in TV sales per month!”

The vice president of Atari Company, Dardanell, demonstrated to Gu Ao after obtaining the latest signing statistics.

Of course, when he called, he was under the pretext of further discussing cooperation, otherwise Gu Ao would have hung up the phone as soon as he heard his voice.

Gu Ao's reply was still calm: "Why, let's take a look. I only have one sentence: I will die if I do anything wrong. In order to suppress Tiankun Entertainment in the rush period, your company even cheated the arcade hall bosses who have worked with for many years.

It’s less than a month since the arcade version was launched, so you’ll be using the mobile version. Do you think those people will be deceived again in the future? Thank you for forcing those operators to my side."

Dardanell laughed wildly and said, "What kind of storm can a group of ants unite? We have more than 85% of the total share of the US video game market, and the rest of you are all united, not less than one-sixth of Atari's.

Even if you are united, we will not be able to crush them one by one. It will be harvested in just one knife. As for the arcade hall bosses with no technical content, a group of new people will naturally join. As long as there are tens of thousands of dollars in startup funds, everyone can be the arcade hall bosses! They are worthy of being treated as humans? I am afraid that you know you can't beat them and break them into pieces to fight guerrillas. This is the end of the day when you dare to enter the American market!"

Faced with such arrogant remarks, Gu Ao had no choice but to hehe, not wanting to show off his words anymore.

But he knew that the public opinion counterattack he had arranged was about to begin.

Even more favorable than his expected plan, of course, is only beneficial at the level of public opinion, not in terms of market share.

Judging from the real benefits you have gained at the moment, Atari is obviously the dominant one. Their shamelessness has made it even more advantageous in terms of market share, while only the loss of reputation and business reputation.

However, as a nearly monopoly existence, Atari doesn't care much about goodwill now and does not feel the need to restrain his pace of making money for a good reputation.

The home machine versions of "Imitation Earth Defender" and "Imitation Island of Adventure" have sold out as many as one million pieces in just one week, and the subsequent delivery time of dealer orders has been scheduled for summer vacation.

Atari launched a single new game cassette priced at $30, and the "two-in-one" sold at 50. As of the expected orders ending the summer vacation, both the separate version and the two-in-one can have sales of about 2 million copies.

That is to say, in every three American families that have Atari 2600 game consoles, one family will buy these two games, which shows how popular it is.

With this rough calculation, the sales of the two game cartridges in four months can exceed US$150 million and 3 times higher than the sales of Gu Ao who sold arcades for a whole year.

In the face of such huge sales, it is not difficult to understand that Atari doesn't care about overdrawing goodwill and reputation.

...

Just 5 days after Atari's "Imitation Earth Defender" and "Imitation Island" appeared on home machines.

That is, May 10, 1981, a Sunday and Mother's Day.

Two American newspapers whose distribution volumes are barely ranked among the top 20, and were the first to publish articles on the quality of Black Atari products.

These two newspapers, the Chicago Sun, which has a daily circulation of 1.2 million copies and the New York Post, both belong to the group under the name of media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. (It is the Post, not the Times, the Times is much more powerful and will not be the vanguard of such industry news)

However, what surprised Gu Ao the most was that the proclamation of the attack was not purchased by Gu Ao's people, but from the operation of a group of spontaneous people.

"The clumsy work of Atari 2600 game "Defender" and interviews with authoritative people." (Note: "Defender" is the name given by Gu Ao, a copycat Gu Ao of Atari's "Defender of Earth")

"This newspaper reported: Recently, Atari has released the arcade version of "Defender" and the 2600 home version within a month. The product has only been on the market for a few days. The huge difference in the experience performance of the two versions has attracted strong attention from industry insiders..."

"The original background map of the arcade version shows a very silky refresh rate, which is refreshed frame by frame. After transplanting to the home machine version, the first thing consumers see is that the background terrain has been extremely simplified, and all the bullying mountains and forests have all become abstract rectangular geometric patches.

What’s even more fatal is that these geometric patches that imply ‘urban buildings’ are not refreshed from the right side of the screen frame by frame, but jump out every few frames, which is very abrupt.”

"What's more fatal is that in the game, as long as the player clicks the fire button, even the bullets fired cannot be moved frame by frame, but instead teleports at a jump speed. If the player fires at a high speed, resulting in two or more flying bullets in the same scanning line, the scanning frame rate of the screen will be crushed. The small aircraft controlled by the player will flash and disappear, and will not reappear until the number of bullets on the screen decreases, which is simply no gaming experience..."

After describing the symptoms of the degree of spicy chicken performance, these reports consulted some authoritative experts in the electronics field, and then the expert's opinions were interpreted as follows:

"The reason for the above situation is obviously that the Atari 2600 home gaming console was used as the hardware design when it was finalized in 1977. When this model was designed, the best CPU on the market was Intel's 8080, while the Atari company chose Mos6502, and the maximum capacity of the supported gaming cassette is only 10kb.

Such CPU and cassette recognition capacity obviously cannot support the transplantation of the latest Motorola 68000 cpu arcade game four years later. To be precise, the Atari 2600 platform can only be equipped with a full-page screen refresh game, and it will never make any achievements in the scroll game that scrolls by frame. If you force this, you will only harm the consumer experience..."

The expert's opinion is quite pertinent, and it is not considered to have been bribed and opened.

At that time, in the past two years, in 1981 and 1982, with the popularity of horizontal scrolling games, Atari would have chosen to adapt as much as possible. He found that the old functions of the 2600 game console could not support horizontal scrolling, so he changed it to "After the player's character flew out from one side of the screen, cut the entire page directly to another map, instead of moving it over one frame at a time."

If you don't understand, you can watch some early versions of the FC game "Castle of Devil", which are representatives of the entire page screen-cutting. If you have never played "Castle of Devil", you can also watch "Sqij, the hottest chicken game in history" explained by Director Ao.

If Atari really does this now, it can actually delay the life of 2,600 game consoles at the design level. Unfortunately, they are now forced to get angry by Gu Ao's cross-border efforts, so they choose to counterattack and ignore the consumer experience with each other.

In addition to these technically honest secrets, the report also has the opinions of some medical experts at the end of the report:

“…For this purpose, this newspaper interviewed relevant experts from the top research hospitals in China and Mayo Presbyterian Hospital in cooperation with Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Professor Eric Adella, director of the ophthalmology department of Mayo Presbyterian Hospital, said: According to the current picture performance of Atari 2600 platform "Defender", if underage players play this game, their vision will drop rapidly. If you have to play, please make sure to shoot alone and do not allow more than two bullets to exist in the same row on the screen at the same time."

Gu Ao was so happy when he saw these reports.

He could imagine that it was probably a group of arcade owners who had a relatively large business and had been cheated by Atari, who stuffed some red envelopes and sent similar negative news to the newspaper.

Of course, the purpose of these arcade hall bosses' resistance was definitely not to help Gu Ao stand up.

They are looking forward to advising consumers who have not bought Atari cassettes: keep your eyes open and identify bad things, don’t get into the trap. If you want to play, pay 25 cents to play at the game hall, experience it well and protect your eyesight.

"It's almost time. With the banner of rhythm at this critical moment, the effect will definitely be maximized." Gu Ao thought to himself, and then called the contact information of some people inside the Fox News Channel.

In fact, Gu Ao fully knows why the Chicago Sun and the New York Post, which are affiliated with Murdoch News Corporation, are the first to jump out and dare to publish such news. Because Gu Ao now spends millions of dollars a month to do TV shopping on Fox Channel 5, and Fox TV is also owned by Murdoch News Corporation.

Gu Ao first chose the place because Fox and even News Group faction did not take up Atari's advertisements. Atari's publicity in the media industry has always relied on the power of its major shareholder Warner.

Therefore, now that the Fox system can blacken the Warner system, of course, it is spared no effort.

The enemy is a friend.

"Mr. Rubens, aren't you busy?" Gu Ao called.

"Oh, it's my dear Gu, are you going to increase the duration of advertising?" The person opposite was very interested.

"No, no, no, I have a short film of material. I think you relevant personnel will be interested. Please introduce me to the real director of a commercial channel. I have some exciting information here."

"Can you roughly explain what aspects are related?"

"It is the business negotiation wording about how Atari is arrogantly ignoring consumer rights and blatantly stating to infringe on consumer experience. Don't worry, I understand the rules except pure news."

Of course Gu Ao knew that he should be posted as paid news.

"Okay, we'll have someone to contact you soon."
Chapter completed!