episode_0010

After the extremely difficult Expo was somewhat settled and the handover to the KT employees was completed, I thought I could finally rest in the East…

“The computer lab has been temporarily used as a course registration room.”

“Eh…?”

“We got kicked out.”

Yes! Time flew by like a bottomless pit as I prepared for the Expo, worked as an assistant, and attended the celebration party!

Your bloody first-year summer vacation was replaced by an expo.

Of course, the temporarily conscripted books can be used by our club again once the course registration is over…

“The semester is starting…?”

For the first time, I felt the blood draining from my body, something I had never felt before, even when I met the President.

***

After the course registration period ended, I took out the plan that had been returned to me and was stuck in a corner of the library.

It’s time to restart this [City Construction Simulation] project, which had been put on the back burner due to urgent Expo work.

“I’ve thought a lot about how to make that, including the code and stuff…”

He said it was a decision. Im Jin-bae, who started this huge project, took out the results of his hard work.

What’s the result?

“I don’t understand, teacher.”

The resulting code is so complexly intertwined with variables that it’s impossible to understand at first glance.

But what can I do? I have to make it like this.

Eventually, everyone in the club began developing with tears in their eyes.

Yu Ji-young and I put coding on the back burner and started drawing dots on the drawing board.

Due to the nature of city construction, there are numerous buildings such as single-family homes, villas, apartments, and skyscrapers, and each of these buildings must be manually dotted one by one.

Of course, I did some coding in between and helped other members with their coding, and eventually I ended up getting the title of ‘God’ from the members.

In the process, a version control system was also created, where files are stored on a single server, and users connected to the server can download and fix the files they need, or create additional files and upload them to the server, and save the changed parts. Through this system, an environment was created where errors can be quickly caught and reviewed.

But… isn’t this just Git? It’s about time that Linux, a famous open source operating system, is also starting to take shape…

Eventually, I reduced my sleeping hours and downloaded the early versions of Linux that were uploaded on www, found things to fix, and gave feedback.

I would find areas for improvement, write patch notes with them, and send them to the development team, and when the patch was accepted, my name would be included in the next patch note. As expected from the beginning of open source, they knew how to elevate contributors and keep people hanging on without financial compensation.

Of course, I was also caught up in it. I boasted of sleeping more than 2 hours a day on average, half of all patches were taken up by my nickname [FoxC], and I even received an email from Linux developer ‘Linux Torvalds’ asking what kind of person I was.

As a result, Linux was officially released a year earlier than the original world at a crazy pace. I wonder if this will snowball someday.

The story got a little off topic, but anyway, thanks to the budget we received from the Expo, our club was invincible, having literally built an ‘advanced’ development environment, including replacing all of the computers.

Everyone, including me, was divided equally,

Starting from dividing the map into a grid of diamonds, to searching through books on urban engineering that I had borrowed from Im Jin-bae’s friend.

A method of dividing urban areas into residential/commercial/industrial zones.

Essential facilities needed in a city, such as water, electricity, firefighting, public safety, and education.

A scenario that determines your starting location and traits, as well as the debt you have from the start.

It links together a multitude of variables – quality of life, crime rates, economic budgets, population, traffic, debt, and even housing prices – and creates interactions that are tailored to what players build and what policies they choose.

Can you believe that these were projects completed in just three months, right before the final exams?

You can’t trust the country, and you shouldn’t trust it in the first place. If you believe this, you’re a swindler who is very likely to fall prey to scammers.

To be exact, I did make it. I just made it.

Bugs? I didn’t catch them. Complexly tangled variables keep causing trouble, and when I catch one bug, two or more variables connected to it cause bugs. In the end, I only stopped at the critical bugs.

Optimization? How could it be? It’s fortunate that it doesn’t crash due to resource issues when you first start it up, but the moment the city becomes a high-density residential area, it starts to slow down drastically. If it can get an average of 10 frames per second, it’s fine.

We know what this is called.

“This is industrial waste. It’s a waste of computer and server memory where this is stored.”

We learned the hard lesson that passion and environment alone cannot make us invincible.

That didn’t mean we gave up. After the final exams ended with the screams of our seniors, the club members were all kicked out again during the vacation.

Oh, Yujiyoung also went away. Even though she didn’t know how to code, she helped find vulnerabilities in the codes that were abstracted with conditional statements on the whiteboard, and she also wrote a huge amount of evaluation documents to be submitted as soon as the vacation was over. In fact, it’s no exaggeration to say that she did everything except coding, and Yujiyoung also went away without any hesitation.

Even if you weren’t a coding slave, no one in our club could escape from their work.

As a result, the game was able to escape the level of industrial waste.

We’ve optimized it so that it can run on the computers we used before, and we’ve fixed ‘as many’ variable-related bugs as possible.

Planting trees on sloped or special tiles increases house prices, or wind farms increase pollution levels, is intentional. That’s how it is.

Thus, the game that is called the beginning of the simulation genre, [SimCity], appeared in the world.

***

“But how do you distribute it on www?”

“Ah.”

If we put something like this on our club’s homepage, we’ll face social criticism… There’s no place to put this.

“Then let’s create a webpage just for distribution?”

The world’s largest online game store, [Pipe], was born for such a shabby reason.

One day in February 1994, when the winter cold wave was still raging, a website was suddenly launched.

A site with a simple design that is the pinnacle of minimalism, with only two categories: analog games and digital games.

But unlike the analog category, which contained several board games like chess and Othello, the digital games category contained only three downloadable files, one of which was overwhelmingly large.

People who initially came to this site to play board games with a clean UI and fast pace gradually started to get addicted as they tried games in the digital category.

Although it did not create a big stir, games began to spread as a hidden culture that people who use computers and the Internet enjoyed but could not speak about openly.

Here we need to take a moment to reflect on the status of games in this world.

At a time when arcade culture was growing thanks to the success of Pong and Space Invaders, the home game console, the Famicom, was released slightly earlier than the original.

Arcades eventually gave way to home consoles, and the sheer explosive growth of home consoles inspired everyone to jump into game development.

While the arcades were unable to produce any more hits after their last struggle with Galaga, home game consoles were producing numerous games based on their explosive popularity.

However, there were not many games of sufficient quality for the home games that even dogs and cows jumped into, and the result was an overflow of pornographic games that chose stimulation over gameplay, or so-called adult games, and so-called coding lumps that could not even run the game properly.

There was the emergence of games ported to computers, gamers’ dissatisfaction and disgust with video games, and the accumulated deficits caused by game companies’ chicken game due to overheated market competition.

Eventually, gamers were no longer willing to buy video games with a reputation for being low-quality, but game companies placed massive orders, expecting record sales based on existing data, and of course, failed miserably.

After that, game companies went bankrupt one after another, and existing games were released for free. Naturally, they were all either low-quality or adult games, and eventually, gamers, religions, and the government declared that games were a social evil while shouting “We are the World”, which resulted in the era of great oppression for games.

But what gamers overlooked was that the religious community and the government were always the ones who were serious about oppression.

Ultimately, the goal of preventing the flood of low-quality games that gamers wanted and creating fun and high-quality games ended up being in vain as the government and religious groups completely erased the video game culture from the world.

In the end, home game consoles and video games were erased from existence, and even Nintendo and Sega, which announced the revival of gaming culture in the original history, were unable to appear.

What’s left? An arcade that was dying.

The arcades, which only had existing games that had been verified for their playability and were not affected by government suppression, survived by being chosen by gamers. Of course, Street Fighter, which had been around for a while, was suppressed due to its violence, so the only game left in the arcades was Galaga, the arcades’ last stand.

In the end, the culture of gaming was perceived by outsiders as something childish and low-class that only kids played in arcades, or in other words, as kidult culture.

This was the status of games in this world.

In other words, the games in this world are the kind of games that only kids would play, with minimal violence or sexual content.

The story is a bit long, but anyway, the reason why the game we made became a hit is because it was simple, different from existing games, but required thinking, and was pleasing to the eyes and ears, and had the look of a true game that gamers wanted.

This has now been applied overseas, and SimCity, which has spread all over the world through the Internet, has become a masterpiece of the century that anyone who uses the Internet must try at least once.

“I think there’s something wrong with the variable handling on this webpage. Did you put in a conditional statement or something like that incorrectly?”

“Why? Where are you talking about?”

“Here, the download count variable is a bit strange.”

“One, ten, hundred, thousand, ten thousand, hundred thousand… Hundred thousand? No, wait a minute.”

We became Internet stars without even knowing it.