With the addition of Bass, along with Hans Zimmer and Lin Lixin themselves, the situation became even more complex.
Now the three pillars of " Patapon " are fully formed.
The artistry of the game, the artistry of the music, and the artistry of the visuals.
The remaining task is to promote this trendsetting work to the world.
However, before that, Lin Lixin had a small problem to solve.
Bay Area, micronova.
"Come on, let's finish this quickly. I'm looking forward to going back to play games."
Lin Lixin pushed open the office door and, without saying a word, pulled out a chair and sat down.
He glanced around and looked at Vivian.
Where is Sun?
" Sun Yansheng? He said MPEG was looking for him, so he went there first." "MPEG? They're pretty quick..."
Lin Lixin nodded, without saying anything more.
MPEG, or Moving Picture Experts Group, is backed by the ISO International Organization for Standardization and the IEC International Electrotechnical Commission.
In a sense, this is quite a troublesome situation for Gamenova.
Because their work happens to conflict with Gamenova's niche.
Define standards.
Standards for both video and audio.
That's what mpeg does.
Standardization is not a bad thing, at least not for most people.
The establishment of unified standards ensures the interoperability of various technologies and products worldwide.
Without ISO, Gamenova would need to customize a dedicated hardware system for each new region it releases in.
However, it is not perfect either. Slow updates, long iteration cycles, and the need for significant additional investment are all its drawbacks.
For small and medium-sized enterprises and startups, anything involving ISO standards requires going through the entire overly ritualized process.
This is a serious burden for industries like semiconductors and the Internet, which are developing rapidly and changing at an unprecedented pace.
Of course... there was also a bit of personal motive involved.
From the very beginning until now, Lin Lixin has never given up his fight for the right to define the definition.
The debate over defining game genres, defining semiconductor technology, defining standardization...
To this end, he even established the W3C specifically to promote Internet and World Wide Web technologies.
This is not to say that Lin Lixin is a particularly compassionate philanthropist.
In fact, this is an important part of gaining publicity for Gamenova.
Once Gamenova becomes the standard symbol, then the "empire" he created will truly achieve cyber immortality.
Lin Lixin stroked his chin, calculating the time.
If all goes well, the MPEG-1 standard will be released this year. Based on its foundation, VCD technology will naturally emerge next year.
If it were any other company, trying to catch up from scratch at this stage would probably be too late no matter what.
Unfortunately, Gamenova has Lin Lixin.
In addition, Lin Lixin had actually started planning this path many years ago.
The planning began from the very early stages of the project.
It was an ordinary afternoon in 1984.
At that time, they had just become famous overnight with "Tetris" and earned their first pot of gold.
Back when the Gamenova brand hadn't even been established yet, and Lin Lixin and Sam were still tinkering with arcade machines in their run-down rented room.
For the flight shooting game "1942", Lin Lixin attribute values were only in the double digits at the time, racked his brains and created a small thing.
That's an audio compression algorithm.
Thanks to this technology, Lin Lixin was able to fit a set of dubbing, though not very clear, that was amazing into the film "1942" in just a few dozen kilobytes of storage space.
Later, with Gerald's involvement, Gamenova officially had its own hardware technology stack. Gerald attempted to embed an MSM5205 chip into the substrate for real-time audio data decoding.
Taking advantage of that opportunity, Lin Lixin perfected the compression algorithm in one go and gave it an official name.
[vorbis]
And that work is called... Street Fighter.
It was in this game that Gamenova successfully implemented built-in character voice acting, making the resounding "Shu Ting!" a famous Gamenova meme that is now known throughout the streets and alleys.
Then came the birth of Gamenova's first 16-bit home console, the NX.
Along with this machine, the gimmick of "a game console that can be used as a CD player" was also introduced.
Any CD burned in a special format that conforms to the official Gamenova format can be played with NX.
This format is called vorbis-ogg.
mpeg may have been developing for two years and making various preparations.
Unfortunately, Lin Lixin had already started this work six years ago.
This technology has finally reached the point of complete maturity and practical application. "We don't need to design any new algorithms; Vivian itself is already a perfect technology."
Lin Lixin's lips curled into a smile.
That feeling of burying a huge hole and then suddenly filling it in is fucking awesome.
Looking to the future, there are many reasons why the Oggvorbis failed, but the shortcomings in sound quality and ease of use are not among them.
From a purely technical standpoint, OGG is perfect.
It boasts sound quality comparable to MP3 and also supports ID3 information like MP3, used to store various related data for an audio file.
Streaming playback, flexible use, multi-channel compatibility...
It is almost the most perfect of the lossy compression formats.
What truly caused OGG's failure was the helplessness of the times, and being born at the wrong time.
By the time OGG was born, MP3 players had already dominated the market for countless years, and the entire market had long been molded into the shape of MP3 players.
In the entire consumer electronics market, unless it's a specially customized device, there isn't a single machine that can be compatible with OGG.
OGG's strength in multi-channel audio was precisely what it encountered – a joint attack from Dolby and DTS, leaving it without its own niche. This low adoption rate created a vicious cycle, as most audio production software lacked native compatibility with OGG, further hindering its widespread use.
Ultimately, what shattered OGG's dream of widespread adoption was the emergence of HiRes high-resolution audio and FLAC lossless audio compression codecs.
OGG's development failed to keep pace with the development of the semiconductor industry.
Before everyone can even determine the truly best lossy format, lossless is no longer a distant dream.
In pursuit of higher sound quality, users directly declared the end of the competition in lossy compression.
Ultimately, MP3, the most widely used format, emerged victorious.
It remains the preferred choice among lossy formats even today.
It's not because it's actually that useful, but simply because it came out early.
However, now that Lin Lixin has arrived, we can no longer follow the old path.
How interesting would it be to further improve Vorbis and let it truly shine, replacing MP3 players?
Let the MPEG folks do their thing.
"Come on, I'll design its architecture. The rest is up to you. I still need to go back and work on ' Patapon '." Lin Lixin opened the software and immediately got to work without further ado.
The real challenge in chip design lies in optimizing the architecture and advancing manufacturing processes.
These two problems are precisely what the panel cannot provide for him.
But coincidentally, the Vorbis codec chip doesn't fit into either of these two aspects.
Because its structure is very simple, it goes in at one end and out at the other, and you just need to find a way to fit the core algorithm of Vorbis into the middle.
"Let me think... Hoffman coding, then quantization into vectors, hmm... we need RAM for caching, contour calculation, detail extraction, wait... vector stream data processing?"
Lin Lixin was stunned for a moment, then silently made a mental note of it.
Although it's an audio codec chip, in order to achieve Vorbis, this thing is surprisingly similar in design to a future killer weapon.
Shaking his head, he put this somewhat futuristic and impractical idea aside for the time being and continued to finish the rest.
In the evening, Vivian walked up to Lin Lixin with two cups of coffee and casually handed him one of them.
This guy is like a photocopier, he basically hasn't stopped since he started. Rather than designing, it's more like he already had this part prepared in his head, and he's just outputting it today.
"Then we use the improved discrete cosine transform here..."
Lin Lixin grabbed his coffee cup and drank it all in one gulp, then stood up abruptly from his seat.
"Okay, all done."
Silence--
Lin Lixin turned his head and looked at Vivian with a puzzled expression.
Vivian looked at him too, blinking her eyes.
"What? Oh, okay, I understand, let's try again."
"Ahem, okay, I've got it all done!"
"Wow, so fast? That's a whole codec chip! If I were to make it, it might take me more than half a year!"
Vivian's voice was extremely affected, full of a mechanical, monotonous delivery, as perfunctory as could be. "Tch, you're so boring. Fine, anyway, you can handle the rest of the work, right?"
Lin Lixin curled his lip in disbelief.
The truly brain-teasing part is basically complete at this point.
The next step involves spending more time iterating and adjusting gradually.
Lin Lixin was responsible for the architecture, Vivian translated it into RTL encoding; they were already used to this kind of thing.
Including subsequent simulation verification and layout production, it should take at most a week to see the first batch of chips produced.
Late February, Sunday, 8 PM prime time.
Gamenova's official TV station, along with several partnered TV programs, simultaneously released the MTV for Gamenova's new game.
That's right, it's not a PV, but a proper MTV.
Even Viacom's MTV joined in this effort, broadcasting this MTV that was destined to steal a lot of viewership tonight.
[gamenova] [presents...?]
The gamenova logo flashed by.
Then a cheerful background music track suddenly bursts in, gradually increasing in volume.
"Pat-pat-pat-pa--"
A group of small black balls rose up from the same black surface.
It features a classic 2D side-scrolling perspective, but makes extensive use of silhouettes and a minimalist style.
"Fever--!!!"
A sound effect sung by a child's innocent voice plays, and the screen suddenly brightens, revealing the game's visuals.
Strangely, there are very few UI elements on the screen.
Unlike other games that are cluttered with visual details, this game keeps the graphics as clean as possible.
"Pat-pat-pat-pat--pa~"
"Pat-pat-pat-bang!" The innocent voices of children and the rhythmic drumbeats, combined with the main melody composed by Hans Zimmer himself.
The game's visuals were designed by Saul Bass himself.
And -- the game design personally handled by Lin Lixin.
The combined efforts of these three forces result in this seemingly simple yet incredibly addictive music video.
There was no need to release the game at all; the background music of this music video alone kept countless people having that mesmerizing sound playing in their minds even as they slept that night.
Bang! Patapon!