Chapter 152: Genre Clash

Hiroshi Yamauchi silently read through the contents of the magazine, line by line. To be honest, he had almost grown accustomed to GAMENOVA's dominance.

Fortunately, Nintendo still had Shigeru Miyamoto's Dr. Mario and Enix's new RPG Dragon Quest, ensuring that the company's first quarter wouldn't be a complete disaster.

But the release of Castlevania had completely caught the entire company off guard, because they were currently developing a game called Metroid.

And according to the schedule, it only needed another two or three months before it would be ready for release.

Yet now they faced an extremely awkward problem, the themes had collided and they had collided head-on.

"Ability locks..."

"That's the core selling point of our new game..."

Yamauchi sighed.

"This is really a huge problem. People inside the company have already started calling it 'Metroidvania-style'... no 'Castlevania-like' gameplay."

Before the game had even launched, someone else had already claimed the right to define the genre, and that was definitely not a good thing.

Situations like this weren't uncommon in the gaming industry.

After 1942 became a massive hit, countless imitators sprang up almost overnight. Suddenly, every scrolling shooter seemed to have discovered the "right" formula, abandoning the old Xevious-style approach and rushing to copy 1942's blueprint.

Arakawa understood the implications perfectly. From a sales perspective, having Castlevania pave the way and build player interest would actually benefit their own upcoming title.

But running a company couldn't be about immediate profits alone. The label "Castlevania-like" was a dark cloud hanging over Metroid before it had even released.

"If we release now, we'll just end up playing second fiddle to GAMENOVA."

"The first to do it gets remembered as the innovator, and anyone who comes after is just labeled a follower."

"Hmm... Yokoi-san, what do you think?"

Yamauchi looked toward the man seated across from him.

Gunpei Yokoi headed Nintendo's Research & Development division and was one of the company's most influential hardware engineers.

The D-pad, Game & Watch, the Famicom, and many other iconic pieces of hardware had all come from his ideas and designs. Now, he was once again at the forefront of development, this time leading the work on Metroid.

"Castlevania's design philosophy is different from ours," Yokoi spoke calmly. "I just finished another playthrough downstairs. Its focus is combat, and when it comes to exploration itself, it only scratches the surface.

"Our Metroid is different. It doesn't have RPG elements; its core is exploration itself.

"President, GAMENOVA definitely struck first this time, but we haven't lost yet."

...

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Carmack burst through the office door, breathing heavily.

"I did it!"

His voice was filled with the exhilaration of finally releasing months of pent-up frustration.

Only Carmack knew how painful it had been to be transferred away from GAMENOVA's headquarters.

He could only watch as one new game after another was released, while he remained stuck at MicroNova writing graphics libraries.

He had nearly lost his mind.

If Ethan hadn't kept dangling the promise of, 'When you come back, I've got something huge waiting for you,' Carmack would've probably skipped work and sneaked back countless times already.

Ethan smiled as Carmack walked over, and the two shared a quick hug.

Carmack wasn't even twenty yet, but he had already taken on the responsibility of developing one of GAMENOVA's most important pieces of technology: the graphics library.

"Well done. Trust me, what you've built here is worth far more than making a game or two."

Ethan looked past him.

"Where's Vivian? Why didn't she come with you?"

"…Seriously?"

"Can't you pay a little more attention to me? I just finished writing OpenGL!"

...

The moment Ethan stepped into MicroNova's office, he was startled by the bustling atmosphere inside.

The entire office had naturally divided itself into two camps. On one side stood the hardware department led by Kwok and Jensen. Electronic components covered every workbench, while wisps of white smoke occasionally rose from soldering irons melting materials together.

On the other side sat a large team of developers headed by SGI engineers, still busy debugging OpenGL's various functions.

"Hey! What the hell is this thing you made? I was gone for five minutes, and you've already messed everything up! Start over!"

Carmack rushed over, pointing at the monitor while criticizing the code. Yet none of the developers looked even slightly annoyed, they simply nodded and listened, taking every criticism without complaint.

"What exactly did you guys turn this into…?" Ethan said, the corner of his mouth twitching.

"You came?"

Vivian's voice sounded beside him.

Ethan turned around and saw her stepping out of the hallway. She wore a white lab coat draped loosely over her shoulders, her hair pulled back into a casual ponytail.

"The NovaRadeon is pretty much finished."

Vivian waved the circuit board in her hand.

"It's VGA-compliant, supports 256 colors, has 256KB of VRAM, and OpenGL is already integrated."

Ethan's eyes lit up as he walked over. Compared to the massive brick-like graphics cards of future generations, this board looked nothing alike.

It had no outer casing, and no cooling fan, either.

Besides the unmistakable ISA edge connector, a ribbon cable extended from the board to a trapezoid-shaped port, that was the VGA connector.

Ethan glanced toward Carmack and joked, "The software didn't hold your hardware back, did it?"

"Hey!"

"As if!"

Carmack immediately shot back.

"Hah! If anything, it's the hardware that's holding us back."

Vivian gave a helpless smile.

The 256KB of VRAM alone put serious limits on what they could do. The processor was another problem; it simply wasn't powerful enough to handle more complex calculations.

All things considered, the hardware had met expectations, but it was far from perfect.

"VRAM…"

"That problem shouldn't be around for much longer."

Ethan wasn't interested in dwelling on the limitations. He was more than satisfied with the graphics card.

Going from zero to one was always harder than going from one to a hundred.

Anyone could keep improving something that already existed. But creating something from nothing was the real challenge, it was the first hurdle that had stopped countless brilliant people.

Vivian inserted the NovaRadeon graphics card into a desktop PC sitting on the table before opening a programming window and typing several lines of code.

"OpenGL is now fully compatible with both the Nova Language and assembly."

"Look, we can simply write a few lines like this, define the vertices of a triangle, and then..."

Tap.

As Vivian pressed a key on the keyboard, the display refreshed with a brief flicker, and a perfectly symmetrical equilateral triangle appeared on the screen.

In the past, drawing a filled triangle in assembly language would've required hundreds, if not thousands, of lines of code.

Now, with just a couple of simple lines in the already concise Nova Language and its built-in OpenGL library, they could achieve the same result with only a fraction of the effort required before.

"This is amaz..."

"Move!"

"Ethan, let me show you what OpenGL can really do!"

Before Ethan could finish praising it, Carmack eagerly stepped forward, snatched the keyboard away, and began typing furiously.

And barely two minutes later, he was done.

His new program contained only about twenty additional lines of code compared to Vivian's.

Then Carmack pressed Compile, and something completely new appeared on the screen. Strictly speaking, it was an animation. It was a 3D cube, rotating smoothly in real time.