Chapter 314 (1/2)

Santa Monica.

In the conference room of danielis entertainment headquarters, after listening to the report of EA management on the company's operation, we started the theme of today's meeting.

The secretary handed out a piece of information, and everyone in the meeting room began to recall all aspects of the information about the novel named dune in the materials on hand.

Sand dunes is not a novel, but a collection of science fiction novels around the ”sand dune” planet.

Frank Herbert, a famous science fiction writer in North America, launched his first novel dune in 1965. Until his death in 1986, he has been perfecting the ”dune universe”. He has published many science fiction works around the ”dune” planet, such as ”son of dune”, ”king of dune” and ”savior of dune”.

However, these novels basically revolve around a sand dune planet called aragis.

In the distant future, people have discovered a kind of thing called ”spice” on yarragis. Spice has many functions, such as prolonging human life and assisting space jump, which can help human to realize space travel. Moreover, for many years, humans have only found spices on yarragis, so there are too many stories around the sand dune planet

because of the perfect story background and grand narrative structure of the Sand Dune series, this science fiction series has become popular rapidly since its birth, and has been rated as the space version of the Lord of the rings by some media.

Similarly, as in the Lord of the rings series, there has been a desire for the story to be put on the big screen for many years.

In 1984, with David Lynch as the director, de Laurentiis entertainment finally burned $40 million and finally put the story on the big screen. It's just not so good. With an investment of 40 million US dollars, the box office in North America after the release of the film is only more than 30 million US dollars.

In the conference room at this time, Simon is also curious about how the boss of d'laurentius entertainment came up with the idea of making David Lynch, an artistic director, shoot a commercial sci-fi masterpiece, and dare to invest $40 million.

That's 40 million dollars in 1984.

Now that de Laurentiis entertainment is bankrupt, Simon quickly takes his mind back, goes to the whiteboard in front of the conference room, picks up a pen and writes down a few words on the whiteboard: real time strategy game.

In a word, EA's strength now is sports games, and Simon has no idea of reversing this trend.

While maintaining EA's advantages in sports games, he plans to let EA focus on developing the most popular real-time strategy game in the 1990s. Because of the mode of real-time strategy game, this kind of game is more suitable for PC platform.

Although it plans to transplant a large number of EA's games to the TV game console platform, Simon will also let EA maintain its dominant position in the PC field.

For today's meeting, Simon has done a lot of homework in advance, and also sorted out the information in the hands of everyone at this time according to the information in his memory.

The real-time strategy game has sprouted in the early 1980s, but it reached its peak in the 1990s with the emergence of Warcraft, StarCraft and other games, and the concept of real-time strategy game was finally improved in the 1990s. Now, all kinds of real-time strategy games are just a rudimentary model, and usually do not have the resources collection, force production and real-time combat elements that mature real-time strategy games should have.

On the other hand, Simon didn't take out the top level real-time strategy games like Warcraft and Starcraft directly. On the one hand, there are still some restrictions on the hardware conditions at this time. On the other hand, it is also necessary for EA to practice first and accumulate experience.

The real-time strategy game in the original time and space is finally mature after more than ten years of exploration and accumulation. EA has no experience in this field now. If we start it immediately, it is likely to destroy several classics in Simon's memory.

In a word, the real-time strategy game adapted from Dune series is also quite successful in the original time and space, which is also the reason why Simon told Nancy to win the adaptation right of Dune series at a high price.

Denise entertainment promised that the price of dune's copyright is similar to that of Ninja Turtle, with a basic $500000 adaptation fee and a 5% net profit share of all dune related video games. During the process of Nancy's contact with the copyright owners of dune, the news has already spread. During this period, there are no lack of other competitors trying to bid, but the copyright finally fell to Denise entertainment.

After all, the $500000 cost of adaptation is only secondary. If dune can achieve the success of Ninja tortoise, only 5% of the net profit will be a big input.

In 1984, the failure of David Lynch's version of sand dune movie made this series project coveted by many studios become the existence of no one. The copyright owner of sand dune has made a big mistake in the film adaptation of this series, so it is natural that they will not make such mistakes in the game adaptation.

Compared with the failure of dune movie, the video games based on dune are very successful.Warcraft, developed by Blizzard studio in the original time and space, is also recognized as a work that imitates the 1992 real-time strategy game dune Warburg 2.

Simon told everyone in the conference room in detail about the development points of the resource acquisition system, the real-time combat system and the force production system of the real-time strategy game. He also briefly described the prospect of this type of game in the aspect of online combat. Finally, he said: ”these are the general situation. You need to explore the detailed scheme yourself. Personally, I am very optimistic about the development prospect of real-time strategy games. This type of games can also make EA's advantages in the PC field develop to the extreme. Therefore, I hope you can treat this project very carefully. ”

”Simon, according to you, there are a lot of similarities between the development of this game and the simulated city that we launched this summer,” said Tripp Hawkins, EA's current chairman, CEO and founder, after Simon's speech

Simon nodded and said, ”I've also seen the material of” simulated city ”and had a trial play. The early generation of this game is not a success, I think it is mainly limited by the hardware platform. If you can further improve the 3D version, this game will be very popular. However, ”simulated city” does not have a combat system, it and I just said the real-time strategy game are two concepts

Another EA executive said at this time: ”so, Mr. westlow, do you mean that the core of this game is fight?”

”Of course not. If it's just a fight, it will become another game concept. I think the key point of this game development is the cooperation of real-time combat system, resource acquisition system and force production system. In the process of development, I hope you'd better spend a few months in the early stage to improve the setting of this game, and don't be impatient. Because this is the first time to try, the most important thing is to accumulate experience. ”

As the topic unfolded, other people in the room began to ask all kinds of questions.

So it was not until noon that the meeting finally ended.

Simon has to go to Hilton Beverly Hills Hotel to attend the signing lunch hosted by qintex group. As soon as she left the conference room, Nancy chased him out and whispered to Simon, ”I didn't negotiate the next salary plan with the Ninja Turtle development team. About half of them have to resign. They plan to set up their own studio.”

Blizzard studio's first game has achieved phenomenal success, and the development team has naturally risen.