Half a step ahead is genius, a full step ahead is madness

Hearing Carmack's somewhat anxious shout behind him, Lin Lixin remained outwardly calm, but he was already laughing inside.

That's right. Aren't you climbing right onto the hook now?

He turned back, feigning confusion.

Carmack had already bounced off the sofa, his hands constantly rubbing the hem of his shirt.

"You said you work for GAMENOVA?"

"I don't." Lin Lixin shook his head. "I'm the boss."

For once, Carmack looked utterly deflated, as uncomfortable as if he had swallowed a dead fly.

"You developed both Metal Gear and Street Fighter?"

"Yes. What of it?"

"Ahem..." Carmack looked a little embarrassed and scratched his head.

This future kingpin of the gaming industry had escaped from the boys' home several times, and he had gone nowhere else: his destinations had all been arcades in Kansas.

Precisely because of that, the staff at the boys' home already knew the routine inside out.

Whenever Carmack sneaked out again, they could never go wrong looking for him at an arcade.

The little imp had actually taken advantage of the arcade manager's inattention to secretly remove the arcade cabinets' panels several times, crawling inside to study the structure of their circuit boards.

Carmack had long since studied every last detail of Metal Gear and Street Fighter, those two recent smash hits.

Although Carmack was an arrogant person, his respect for technology was genuine.

Even someone as tsundere as him had to admit that Metal Gear's use of its hardware performance had reached an outrageous level, without the slightest bit of performance going to waste.

Street Fighter was even more impressive across the board, without a single blind spot; from hardware to software, it brimmed with its developer's ingenious ideas.

He had long wanted to pay the developer a visit and compare notes.

But he had never expected that when the man himself stood before him, he would instead spout a load of arrogant mockery.

This really was showing off axe skills at the master carpenter's door...

"Lin, I want to join GAMENOVA! I want to make games too!"

"You?" Lin Lixin looked Carmack up and down, his expression turning doubtful. "Forget it. I don't think you're quite suitable."

"Why not!" Carmack cried out, as though he had suffered an enormous insult. "My skills are no worse than anyone else's! Even if you fired all of them and replaced them with me, it wouldn't make any difference."

"First, our company isn't a daycare."

Lin Lixin held down Carmack, whose fur was standing on end, keeping him from hissing just yet.

"Have a high school student who's taken leave from school work for me? Sorry, but I don't want your guardian suing me in federal court."

"Second, our company has no shortage of geniuses."

"Your skills might indeed be good, but replacing them is impossible."

"Third, your personality really is a little out of step with everyone else. Development is teamwork. A 'genius' who doesn't understand how to deal with people has no value to me."

Lin Lixin made air quotes with his fingers.

Seeing that Carmack was almost ready to shut himself away after that dressing-down, Lin Lixin stopped at just the right moment and switched to a gentle, resigned expression.

"Forget it. You're still a brat, after all. Who wasn't cocky when they were young?"

Lin Lixin pointed at the pile of things on the table.

"I'll handle the paperwork for your early release in a bit. Once you're back, let's see you build this project."

"Also, you have to go back to school. If you can't even get into the University of Kansas, that'll only prove you're a weirdo who's good at just one subject."

The juvenile detention center's staff could not understand what on earth had possessed a successful man like Lin Lixin to come all the way from California just to get out a brat who had not even graduated from high school.

Even Carmack's parents could not figure it out.

Lin Lixin, however, was in excellent spirits.

By the time Lin Lixin returned to California, travel-worn and weary, the task he had asked Sam to handle had also yielded results.

A bulky plastic box now sat beside his C64.

It was a floppy disk drive, the core device used to read and write floppy disks.

Unlike Lin Lixin's delight, Sam seemed deeply troubled.

"You really plan to add this thing to the NovaBox? A complete floppy disk drive?!"

Sam could understand why Lin Lixin was pursuing floppy disks.

Unlike EPROM, which cost tens of dollars for just 64 KB of capacity, a 3.5-inch floppy disk with a capacity of a full 1 MB could have its unit price squeezed down to as little as around five dollars.

Apart from read and write speeds significantly slower than EPROM's, floppy disks could be said to have no drawbacks.

But floppy disks themselves having no drawbacks did not mean that using a floppy disk drive on a home console had none.

Sam picked up a sheet of scratch paper bearing his earlier rough cost estimates. In the blank space at the bottom, he had written a huge "Over $100!!" in red pen.

"The NovaBox's hardware costs are already extremely high, and a complete floppy disk drive costs over a hundred dollars! That almost matches the cost of all our other hardware."

"We can earn that portion of the cost back through games, Sam. We need its capacity and write capability."

Once software had reached the end of the road, hardware became the bottleneck preventing games from becoming more refined.

Only greater capacity would allow him to create those classic IPs.

And write functionality was an essential capability that home consoles absolutely could not do without.

Nintendo's decision to release a disk drive peripheral for the Famicom back in 1986 had come precisely from president Hiroshi Yamauchi's clear foresight.

The peripheral, which sold out time and again, had indeed given the Famicom a second spring after it had already reached its peak.

Quite a few masterpieces had only become possible after the Disk System's birth, thanks to its revolutionary increase in capacity.

To promote this somewhat expensive new peripheral, Nintendo had called on the great Shigeru Miyamoto himself to step forward and develop the world's first video game to use floppy disks.

It was also the world's first video game with a save function in the true sense.

More than that, it was one of the founding pioneers of RPGs, a title that remained one of Japan's three great national RPGs even in later years.

Its name was The Legend of Zelda.

"Besides that, we also need to design a dedicated 'floppy disk fax machine.'"

Lin Lixin casually picked up a floppy disk and turned it over for a few looks.

"Players can use the fax machine to upload their game scores to GAMENOVA. Of course, the fax machines only need to be installed in game stores that sell cartridges."

There were simply too many possibilities to tinker with in this technology.

Hiroshi Yamauchi's ideas for the disk drive were like heavenly steeds galloping through the sky, and his astonishing foresight almost made Lin Lixin suspect that he was a transmigrator.

According to the records, Hiroshi Yamauchi had even had a telephone network plan back then.

He had intended to install a communications port on the disk drive that could connect to a telephone line, allowing video games to be downloaded remotely onto floppy disks and giving the Famicom the ability to support online battles.

Had storage media technology not advanced by leaps and bounds, rapidly driving down both the capacity costs and prices of all kinds of storage...

Together with the spread of technologies such as battery-backed saves, those developments had brought the Famicom's floppy disk era to its regrettable close.

Lin Lixin could hardly imagine what the timeline would have become if Hiroshi Yamauchi had carried out that astonishing plan.

Of course, Lin Lixin himself had no intention of going off to develop that technology.

Half a step ahead was genius; a full step ahead was madness.

His greatest advantage now was that he had caught the disk drive wave more than a year early.