David pressed Enter, saving the document.
The value of a news story lay in its contrast.
A $199 price point was an expected price war, but four discs was a dimensionality-reducing strike against existing physical media.
On the other side of the room, the photographer emerged from the makeshift darkroom.
He hung a row of freshly developed negatives on the lightbox.
"Look at this," the photographer said, pointing to one of the negatives. "A close-up of Nintendo's asymmetrical controller. I found an opportunity to snap a photo of them repairing the controller behind the booth. You can clearly see the joystick's design structure. This will be a real eye-catcher for tomorrow's daily paper."
The Editor-in-Chief walked over and examined it with a magnifying glass.
"Use this one. Place it next to the Nintendo article." The Editor-in-Chief turned to David. "Give the front page to Square. The four-disc Final Fantasy VII breaks all industry norms. Players' anxiety over capacity will be completely ignited. Put the N64 on the second page."
David agreed to the arrangement.
He copied his finished article onto a floppy disk and handed it to the layout editor beside him.
A knock sounded at the suite's door.
Paul pushed it open and walked in. He lived at the other end of the hall and was carrying two wrapped sandwiches.
"Late-night snack?" Paul tossed the sandwiches onto the coffee table. "Bought them from the restaurant downstairs. Way better than those cold hot dogs from last year."
David walked over, picked up a sandwich, and tore open the wrapper.
"Finished your PC articles?" David asked, taking a big bite.
"Done and dusted," Paul said, pulling out a chair and sitting down. "Blizzard's Diablo and Westwood's Red Alert. Those two have pushed the ceiling for PC games even higher. Especially that Battle.net system—I spent two thousand words analyzing its P2P architecture."
Chewing his sandwich, Paul pointed to the laptop on David's desk.
"Does it have a phone jack?" he asked.
"Yeah. Why?"
"Gotta show you something new. Thank God the Marriott has this kind of internet access."
Paul walked to the desk, pulled a phone cable from his pocket, and plugged one end into the wall jack and the other into his external modem.
He skillfully typed in a string of numbers.
The modem emitted a series of harsh dial-up tones. After a burst of static, the connection was established.
Paul opened a browser and typed in a URL.
Internet bandwidth in 1996 was pitifully low.
A few minutes later, a crudely designed page appeared.
At the top were a few large blue characters: Silicon Valley Online.
Below it was a column titled "E3 Express."
"We set up a homepage on Silicon Valley Online," Paul said, pointing to the screen. "We've already uploaded some of the short reports we compiled after the show closed today."
David leaned closer to the screen.
The webpage listed several headlines: "N64 Priced at $199, Gaming Industry Enters Three-Way Standoff."
"Blizzard Announces Diablo, Battle.net System Now Free."
"Square's Four-Disc RPG Stuns the Crowd."
Each headline led to a short report of only two or three hundred words.
"Will this work?" David asked, puzzled. "If we put the news online for free, who's going to buy our magazine?"
Paul smiled.
"Times have changed, David. It's all about timeliness. By the time the printing press lays out, prints, and distributes to newsstands, it takes at least two or three days."
"The Internet takes just a few seconds. Players want to know what's happening at E3 the instant it happens. We use these free short updates to attract traffic."
Paul scrolled down the page. At the very bottom, a line of bold red text stood out: "Want to know more exclusive gameplay details for Super Mario 64? Want a deep-dive graphics analysis of Final Fantasy VII? Look for the Computer Gaming World E3 Special Issue, on sale at the end of this month! Comes with ten exclusive game posters!"
David finally grasped the logic.
Use the web for short-form news to drive traffic, then monetize it with the print special issue.
"It's not just us," Paul said, pointing to some friendly links in the sidebar. "NetGeneration is doing the same thing. Once the Internet goes mainstream, the way media is disseminated will be completely revolutionized."
David stared at the simple lines of text.
No fancy layout, no high-resolution images—just pure information.
In the era of dial-up, this lightweight text transmission had a natural advantage.
The Editor-in-Chief had appeared behind them at some point, staring at the webpage on the screen.
"David, contact Headquarters tomorrow. We need to set up a similar homepage. We can't let those PC guys steal all the spotlight," the Editor-in-Chief ordered.
Paul disconnected the network and packed the modem into his bag.
"Seriously, the amount of information today was still huge," Paul said, leaning back on the sofa. "Because we had time to digest it, we could see a lot of things beneath the surface."
Last year, everyone was scrambling to be the first to publish, doing nothing but copying the specs released by the manufacturers verbatim into their articles.
This year, with more time, the media began to think.
"Take Sony, for example," David said, pulling out his notebook. "The casual games Kazuo Hirai showcased this afternoon—they seemed unremarkable at first glance. But combined with the PlayStation's install base, they are trying to break out of the hardcore gamer circle. This is a different signal than before."
Paul nodded.
"And Tecmo's Dead or Alive," Paul added. "Using Sega's Model 2 board for the game shows that Sega is building a technical alliance. By opening up their underlying technology to third parties, they are locking these companies in. This is much more clever than simply collecting royalties."
These kinds of in-depth industry analyses were nowhere to be seen in last year's E3 coverage.
Ample time and a reasonable division of labor had led to a qualitative leap in the quality of media coverage. Journalists were no longer just mouthpieces for the manufacturers, but had begun to play the role of industry observers.
A commotion erupted in the hallway.
In the next room, several Japanese journalists were arguing loudly, their voices punctuated by the shrill screech of a fax machine. The entire administrative floor had been transformed into a massive information processing center. Media professionals from all over the world were here, dismantling and reorganizing their daytime observations, ultimately converting them into lead type and web code to be sent to tens of millions of gamers globally.
Ten o'clock at night, in a men's dormitory at UC Berkeley, California.
Tommy stared at the CRT monitor in front of him, the hard drive in the computer case emitting a faint read-write sound. The external modem had just finished a series of shrill handshakes, and the connection icon in the lower right corner of the screen lit up.
He skillfully typed the URL of Silicon Valley Online into the browser's address bar. The network bandwidth in 1996 was pitifully low, and the page loaded extremely slowly, line by line of code sluggishly converting into visible text. The large blue letters at the top of the webpage appeared first, followed by a row of simple text hyperlinks below.
Tommy had originally just wanted to try his luck and see if there were any scattered reports about the E3 Exhibition.
Please Support me by becoming my Patreon member and get 30+ chapters.
[email protected]/Ajal69
change @ with a
Thank You to Those who joined my Patreon