Building a Gaming Empire In 1984

Inside the base, a cardboard box slowly moved through a narrow, cramped corridor.

Sam held his breath, staring intently at the radar in the upper-right corner.

According to the display, a guard was stationed around the corner.

The protagonist, Snake, tapped against the wall, immediately alerting the enemy. Rifle in hand, the guard cautiously rounded the corridor.

Sam could clearly see the man's head turning left and right, as if he were genuinely searching for the source of the noise. He had obviously noticed the cardboard box. He walked over and stopped right in front of it.

Even through the screen, Sam barely dared to breathe. His palms were already covered in sweat.

?

A question mark suddenly appeared above the guard's head. Then he turned around and walked away in confusion.

"That actually works?"

Vivian's eyes widened in shock at how Sam had fooled the enemy with nothing but a cardboard box.

"Shh!"

Sam made a silencing gesture, as if he were afraid of alerting the enemies inside the game. Even he hadn't expected the trick to actually work.

After half an hour of playing, Sam had more or less figured out the game's personality. At first, he had assumed that if he got spotted, he could simply eliminate all the witnesses.

For the entire first ten minutes, he repeatedly triggered alarms and ran around in complete chaos. Almost all of his time was spent evading pursuit and looking for hiding spots.

Only after getting beaten up repeatedly did he finally calm down and carefully observe the guards' field of view and patrol routes, beginning to experiment with using various items to distract them.

The feeling was surprisingly strange.

From the moment he stopped trying to fight everything, the game suddenly transformed from a frustratingly difficult experience into an engaging strategy game.

Infiltrating the base without triggering a single alarm became the thing he was most obsessed with.

Sam stared intently at the guard he had lured over. With the patrol route disrupted, a flaw appeared in what had originally been a flawless defense.

He seized the opportunity and slipped through an incredibly tiny blind spot in the guard's vision.

When he reached a security door, Sam simply pulled out a keycard he had collected earlier and passed through without resistance.

But just as he was eagerly wondering what awaited him next, the screen suddenly went black.

Thank you for playing the demo!

That was it?

It just ended?

Sam immediately felt an unbearable itch of curiosity, wishing he could crack open Ethan's skull and see what the later stages looked like.

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"Damn it, this is actually kind of fun."

He scratched his head and openly admitted that he was hooked. The more he avoided combat, the more tense, thrilling, and addictive the game became.

This design, which completely went against mainstream expectations, displayed an astonishing charm.

Unlike traditional games, where getting hit simply meant failure and a return to the starting point, this game punished mistakes by making the level dramatically harder.

Sam could clearly feel that the more mistakes he made, the more alert and aggressive the enemies became, forcing him to pay for his recklessness.

"This... this is like a..."

"Puzzle," Vivian finished for him, equally astonished. "Every area is a complex, layered puzzle."

"Exactly!" Sam quickly agreed. "And every puzzle has multiple solutions, which means everyone's playthrough feels completely different!"

He could fool enemies with a cardboard box, throw empty magazines to create noise, or even control a missile and fly it around the map.

Even though he had already completed this small demo area, he still wanted to play it again. He was eager to see how things would change if he used different methods to solve each situation.

"You really built this with just an 8-bit processor?"

As an observer, Vivian wasn't as deeply affected by the gameplay itself, but she paid special attention to the visual presentation.

She picked up the crude hand-soldered test board and carefully examined its components. Sure enough, it contained only a single 8-bit Z80 processor.

And the two graphics coprocessors had been developed under her and Kwok's lead, so no one understood their specifications better than she did.

Achieving visuals this smooth on such primitive hardware was beyond what a normal person should be capable of.

"Just a few little tricks to fool the eye," Ethan said with a slight smile. "Thanks to the help of those two graphics chips."

He didn't elaborate further.

This demo had already squeezed nearly every ounce of performance out of the test board, with virtually nothing wasted.

To achieve it, he had dumped all the attribute points he had recently saved into programming.

"You're seriously..." Vivian's mouth twitched. She had completely lost the ability to comprehend Ethan's absurd technical skill. "Forget it."

She waved her hand and looked back at the screen.

Sam had already started a second run, planning to test a new idea that had suddenly occurred to him and see if he could clear it faster.

Looking at the complex level design, Vivian asked, "How many stages are you planning to make?"

"Hmm... about thirteen for the main story."

"Main story? You're planning side content too?" Vivian immediately caught the key phrase.

"Right. I'm adding a 'Virtual Training Mode', a dedicated collection of training missions."

"Then how many stages total, including the training mode?"

"Two hundred."

"Pffft!"

Vivian's eyes bulged as she stretched her neck in disbelief.

"T-Two hundred stages?! Are you serious? This one stage took you a whole month. At that rate, you won't finish until after the year 2000!"

She could only assume he was joking.

Not only would designing that many stages require an enormous amount of time and effort, but even if he somehow created them all, there was no way their tiny storage capacity could hold that much data.

"Under normal circumstances, you'd be right."

Ethan walked over to the development Commodore 64 and typed a few commands.

A program appeared on the screen, displaying a field neatly divided into multiple square tiles.

Vivian immediately recognized several familiar elements.

Crates, roads, grass, walls...

Ethan typed another line of code.

map.set(0, 0, 0)

map.set(0, 1, 1)

A complete crate suddenly appeared in the blank preview area on the right, assembled from two texture tiles: a side and a top.

"So I designed this," Ethan said. "I call it TiledMap. And of course, there's also a matching map editor."

"???"

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