Such a silky-smooth Snake

Half an hour later, Ho Kwok Yuen finally figured out what had happened and found himself both annoyed and amused.

"So I did get suckered after all." He shook his head helplessly, though his earlier anger was gone.

At least Lin Lixin had been serious about the salary and benefits he had offered.

The company was simply much shabbier than he had imagined.

Ho Kwok Yuen's gaze lingered on the Contra machine against the wall for a long time before he looked back at Lin Lixin.

"Canada recently imported a few Contra machines too, though only big cities like Toronto and Vancouver have them."

He had never played the game, but he certainly had heard of its reputation.

The tough-guy image in Contra had become incredibly popular lately, even turning into a stereotypical label for Schwarzenegger.

He simply had never expected such an astonishingly influential next-generation title to have come from the young man before him, who was barely in his twenties.

"I thought it was a new machine from Sega or Namco."

Lin Lixin smiled and picked up a sketch from the desk.

"Mr. Ho, what our company wants to make isn't just graphics chips."

The drawing showed an architecture diagram lacking in detail, with an 8-bit processor and two graphics coprocessors at its core.

"I believe general-purpose graphics accelerator cards are one direction future development will take. Whether arcade machines, home consoles, or personal computers, they'll all eventually have their own graphics cards."

Those words struck a chord deep in Ho Kwok Yuen's heart.

He was precisely the sort of "visionary" who constantly pursued high-end research and development.

By the time Ho Kwok Yuen left, his indignation on arrival had long since faded, replaced by an excitement he could hardly put into words.

Through the "graphics card" concept Lin Lixin had shown him, he seemed to have glimpsed a corner of the future.

Without much hesitation, he immediately accepted Lin Lixin's invitation, officially joining the newly registered Micro-NOVA.

Of course, he still had to return to Canada first to bring his wife over.

Lin Lixin returned to the arcade and could finally get back to development.

Looking at the half-drawn tank image before him, however, he suddenly had a flash of inspiration.

With their latest dual-graphics-chip design, it seemed he had no need to get hung up on the original Metal Gear.

Throughout the history of the Metal Gear series, three titles had received IGN's highest rating of a perfect score.

Two of those were Metal Gear 4: Guns of the Patriots and the final MGS title, Metal Gear 5: The Phantom Pain.

Those two were, of course, out of the question with the current hardware.

But the remaining one was different.

Its name was Metal Gear: Ghost Babel.

It was also the highest-rated game on the GBC handheld.

"Hmm... this... might actually work?"

Although the GBC was a product from as late as 1998, it was still a handheld, and its specifications were not outrageously high.

The biggest limitation actually came from that customized Z80 processor clocked at a full 8 MHz.

But Lin Lixin and the others were making an arcade machine, so they could work around it with some clever tricks.

Those two graphics coprocessors, for instance.

They could offload much of this Metal Gear game's graphics processing onto those two chips, freeing up substantial processor resources.

Lin Lixin sat up straight and deleted every last bit of the half-finished realistic tank.

Lower the resolution!

Lin Lixin simply redid the specifications for all the textures.

After all, the GBC's screen resolution was a pitiful 160 × 144, a completely different proposition from the MSX.

Yet the GBC version of Metal Gear was no worse than the original in its visual presentation, and even far surpassed it.

The reason was-fluidity.

The silky-smooth animations and transitions made the controls extremely responsive. Unlike the original's stiff controls, inputs received the smoothest, most immediate feedback.

With such a major change in design direction, the initial development phase dragged on for a long time.

Coupled with the complexity of the character animations, it took Lin Lixin a full month to finally produce a test demo.

It contained only a few simple scenes, but all the core features had been developed.

It ran on a test board they had cobbled together.

This crucial playtesting stage naturally fell to Sam again, while Vivian recorded the graphics coprocessors' status from the sidelines to aid later optimization.

Right at the start, a radio communication sequence played.

This was also an important storytelling device in Metal Gear.

[Snake]: This is Snake... Colonel, do you read me?

[Colonel]: Looks like the high-altitude, low-opening rapid parachute insertion worked.

"Snake? Why give him a name like that?"

Sam immediately understood that the protagonist he was playing must be this so-called [Snake].

It just did not sound like a person's name.

"It's just a code name." Lin Lixin smiled. There were simply too many characters called Snake in the Metal Gear series. "I think snakes represent lurking and concealment, which fits this game's theme perfectly."

Sam nodded with only a vague understanding, but his attention had already shifted entirely to the game.

On-screen, the protagonist stood at the entrance to a passage, with a "maze" of forest before him.

"Why is the resolution so low?"

Vivian frowned slightly. With two coprocessors, they should theoretically have been able to achieve visuals on par with Contra.

Yet instead of increasing, the resolution had dropped. It was practically driving in reverse.

Lin Lixin did not answer. He simply sat quietly to one side and gestured for Vivian to be patient.

Sure enough, the moment Sam pressed a movement key, Vivian's doubts vanished like smoke.

Although the character was so blurry that his face was unrecognizable, his movements were astonishingly fluid.

Even the motion of lifting his foot to take a step was clearly visible.

The instant Sam pressed a movement key, the character raised his foot, leaned forward, and moved in the corresponding direction.

The sheer pleasure of such responsive controls startled even Sam himself.

"Wait, you actually used visuals this smooth to make a game without fighting?"

Sam cried out. The smoother the visuals were, the less he understood Lin Lixin's thinking.

"I'll be blunt. Making the protagonist sneak around guards like a thief-isn't that going against the market?"

As he saw it, constantly hiding and sneaking around offered no satisfaction at all.

A war-themed game should be about gunfire! Explosions! A flashy popcorn action movie!

Despite his constant grumbling, Sam's hands never stopped, and he dutifully read through "Mei Ling's" mission instructions.

In the upper-right corner sat a graphic made up of green and yellow pixels, matching the layout of the scene exactly.

The game called it "radar."

But Lin Lixin had another name for it-the minimap.

This thing was, in fact, an early prototype of the minimap.