Arcade Machine

The next few months Simon spent most of his time at the company. He only took a vacation for new years day and his 18th birthday on January 15 1970. But everyone in the family was relieved when Simon finally committed to something in New York which seemed like a real business and not just traveled around the world for the search of art. On March 10th 1970 the first prototype was finally ready. After hiring six engineers that helped Steve with the design, all some of his former friends he convinced to join him, the prototype was finally ready to start trial. The development of the chip design and the arcade machine took a lot longer than the game development. SImon invited two friends of his university to help with the art and the music and his game developing skills of his previous life made it very easy to program a simple snake game in 1970. On the morning of March 10th he presented the first trial machine to the whole team.

This is an arcade machine that is half a person tall. It has a 14-inch color screen and is surrounded by a layer of iron. There is a joystick and two buttons at the bottom of the screen. The joystick is naturally used to control the direction and the buttons are used to start the game and confirm.

After Woz connected the line, he turned on the power and the arcade screen lit up. The color screen gives people a much better first impression. However the color screen not only increased the cost for the display itself, Woz also needed to use more chips as the programming task was much heavier. That's why most early game consoles used black and white screens. Snake used color screens which was also Simon's request.

With skillful operation Woz quickly entered the game interface. After inserting a 25-cent coin into the entrance on the right options popped up on the screen.

With a few clicks Woz entered the game interface and saw a bar composed of several square blocks moving on the screen. The head of the block had a light red light, which could be recognised at a glance as a Snake's head.

Near the border of the screen there is a wall formed by a circle of turning heads. The snake is constantly swimming around and cannot touch the surrounding walls. In between the screens various kinds of luminous bricks will appear continuously, and none of them are eaten. The snake's body will become longer, and the longer it is, the more troublesome it will be when turning, because when the body grows the snake's head will easily hit its own body.

When the snake's body covered half of the screen Woz's huge brain capacity and computing power were exhausted and he eventually lost to the game he helped make.

"Not bad, Woz, you have been playing for a long time, right?" Simon smiled and said as he recognised Woz's technique as definitely that of a master.

"I've been playing for three to five days and have been challenging the highest record." Woz said with a smile.

"It's good to play more. Although this game has been designed, there are still many areas that need to be optimized. These can only be understood when playing." Simon nodded and said. He only knew the rules of the game, but the details of the game for example, where is the most appropriate position for the prize to appear? These can only be known through a lot of experiments.

"How do you feel? Do you want to play a game?" he said to Dennis.

"Okay, let me try." Dennis also became interested, but he only played for less than a minute when he hit the wall and died.

"I'll give it a try." Tanja also said with great interest.

Woz had already prepared dozens of coins. After Tanja got the coins she persisted for a minute and lost.

"You should turn upwards quickly." Tanja said with some regret. The result of being too greedy was that the snake's head hit the wall, but there was no way. All the rewards for high scores were in dangerous positions. Wealth and fame are sought in danger.

"Dennis, this arcade game will be our first flagship product in the United States in the future. You have also played it, what do you think?" Simon asked with a smile.

"Steve can play for 3 minutes, but Tanja and I can only play for one minute. From this point of view, even if each person plays for 2 minutes on average, when business is good, we can play at least 20 games an hour." Dennis thought for a while and said.

"There is a possibility, but we can't expect that every bar's business will be so good. It would be good if this kind of game machine can be played 30% of the time." Simon smiled. It costs 0.25 US dollars a time, which is enough to play a few times. This is an acceptable range for ordinary Americans. After all, the income of ordinary Americans now is less than $1,000. When going to a bar to spend money, they usually mainly chat and talk nonsense, supplemented by consumption.

"How do we open up the channel of American bars? Or through middlemen?" Dennis asked again.

A big part of the terminal cost of goods is the middle channel dealer. For many goods in mature markets, the profits earned by middlemen even far exceed those of the manufacturers.

But for commercial supplies like arcade machines, maximizing profits is the most important thing. As long as your products are popular in the market, then after leaving a certain amount of profit to the bar owner, you have to take the rest into your own hands.

The game industry can last for decades, but their carriers are constantly changing. The glory of arcades only lasts ten years.

"After Woz's design, Snake's needed chips are currently 37, plus the motherboard parts are about 800 US dollars, plus the monitor, frame, transportation and various labor, the cost of an arcade machine is estimated to be about 1,500 US dollars. We just sell it for about US$3,000." Simon said calmly.

"3,000 US dollars?" Dennis's eyes almost popped out of his head. Is this game console much more expensive than a car?