Helsinki, Finland.
University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science.
Eighteen-year-old Linus was alone in his room, facing a strangely tinkered PC.
Judging from its appearance alone, this thing should be some kind of Europe- made PC.
But Linus's modifications to it were so chaotic that it was difficult to understand what this thing was at first glance.
All sorts of messy wires emerged from the casing, then twisted and turned before disappearing back inside.
A special video cable connects the monitor to the PC's video output.
Judging from the specifications, this is a first-generation Nova Radeon chip produced by MicroNova.
Linus's hands flew across the keyboard, typing out lines of commands.
As he operated the system, corresponding changes began to occur on the PC.
This is a simple 3D model, which Linus achieved using simple commands that he never imagined, thanks to 3D accelerated graphics cards and the OpenGL graphics library.
Especially now that there's the development engine from Gamenova, this process has become incredibly simple.
Back when the software first launched in Finland, Linus applied for extra living expenses from his family to purchase a one-time license for the engine.
This made him one of the few people in the university who could use a personal version of NovaEngine.
Finland is located in Northern Europe, close to the Arctic Circle.
While social welfare is incredibly generous, eliminating any worries about making a living, it's not entirely true that everything is perfect.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that GAMENOVA products always take a long time to appear in Finland.
To be fair, the work efficiency of Ubisoft's Europe branch is not low; in fact, it can be said to be astonishingly high.
Whenever a new game is released, Ubisoft is always able to complete the localization translation work in the shortest possible time and quickly start production and deploy it to various locations.
But that's where the problem lies.
Both translation work and CD production take time.
There are very few qualified CD production lines in all of France, and the vast majority of orders have to be transferred back to Ubisoft in France via the Netherlands.
This process can easily take ten days to half a month.
Even if Ubisoft is highly efficient, it will still be a long time before the product reaches you.
This is why whenever GAMENOVA releases a new game, there's always a group of impatient players who will fly to the East Coast of the United States specifically to snag a first-release title, or even travel halfway around the world just to California.
Even considering the round trip, going directly to the United States to secure a starting spot is much faster than waiting at home.
The only problem might be that the US version usually doesn't include multiple languages.
For players from native Briton environments, it's relatively easy. Britain, for players from regions like France, Germany, and Italy, securing a starting position will require a significant improvement in their English proficiency.
In regions like Finland, where production is already a low priority, it's uncertain when the official special edition will be released.
However, this is no longer a big deal at the University of Helsinki.
Hearing the knocking on the door, Linus slowly stopped what he was doing and opened it.
The person who arrived was carrying a large travel bag and wearing a thick coat.
He is known as " Backpack," a highly accomplished figure at the University of Helsinki, and almost every new student makes sure to get to know him first.
The reason is simple----
Seeing Linus appear behind the door, Backpack grinned and ripped open his coat.
Inside his coat, a large number of different CDs were densely packed together in various ways.
" Torvalds, wanna buy? Just got a bunch of the hottest items for the Christmas season."
" Backpack " is a superhero tasked with buying and selling GAMENOVA discs.
No player in the school can do without him.
Although a small premium needs to be paid to cover the other party's travel expenses and allow him to earn some extra money.
But being able to get the goods locally so far in advance, spending a little more money is not unacceptable at all.
If needed, " Backpack " will rush to Ubisoft France as soon as possible to get the US version stock that has just been shipped from the United States or the UK version that has already been produced.
If he really can't buy it, he'll even fly directly to Boston on the East Coast, Backpack he has connections there.
"Buy?"
He stared at Linus with a grin.
He was particularly impressed by the guy who bought the NovaEngine license key from him for over five thousand dollars.
"They're all games?"
Linus glanced at the new faces, then shrugged. "Never mind, I'm not interested in video games."
"Ha, what a strange person."
" Backpack " raised an eyebrow, but he was already used to this situation.
The main reason Linus impressed him so much was, of course, that he never seemed to buy video games.
Even with a phenomenal hit like Quake, he showed little interest.
But he would not hesitate to spend thousands of dollars to buy someone else's software license.
What a freak.
Say whatever you want.
Linus didn't care about the other person's opinion and took two steps back, intending to close the door.
"Hey, don't rush me. I bet you'll be interested in this new work."
The Backpack stopped Linus's movement, and Linus took off his large travel bag and reached inside to rummage around.
A short while later, he pulled out a package box.
The cover features a large red "Z" shaped letter with artistic embellishments around the edges, making it resemble a castle wall.
The letter was pierced straight through by a golden sword.
Its name is printed on the right side.
The bold [ZORK] and the thin [IDLE]
The flat design style used in the entire logo is simply amazing and extremely stylish.
To be honest, when Linus saw the packaging box, he was really drawn to it.
However, it's not because of its beautiful logo, but because of its name.
Zork
He recognized the name.
A text-based Adventure game developed by several MIT alumni.
Although Linus wasn't interested in video games, he was quite impressed with Zork.
The game used the Z-Machine virtual machine, which was very interesting, allowing the game, originally developed for the PDP-10, to run on a home PC.
Not to mention the compatibility between the ZIL implementation language and the MDL language.
As a computer enthusiast, he has taken this thing out to study quite a few times.
They were amazed that they could write Zork, a program developed using the MDL language, on PCs through a single linker language.
Unfortunately, this game was ruthlessly abandoned by the times when graphical games were introduced.
It now only has a small following within the geek community.
And it actually got a sequel?