Hearing Carmack's somewhat anxious shout from behind him, Ethan kept a calm expression on the surface, but inside he was already laughing.
That's right. Hooked perfectly. He turned around, pretending to look puzzled.
Carmack had already sprung up from the sofa, both hands constantly rubbing the corners of his shirt.
"You said you're with GAMENOVA?"
"I'm not," Ethan shook his head. "I'm the boss."
"..."
For once, Carmack wore an utterly deflated expression, as though he'd just swallowed a dead fly.
"So Metal Gear and Street Fighter... you developed them?"
"Yeah. Got a problem with that?"
"Ahem..."
Carmack scratched his head awkwardly.
This future titan of the gaming industry had escaped from the juvenile home several times. Yet instead of going anywhere else, every single escape ended at the arcades in Kansas.
Because of that, the staff at the juvenile home had become extremely experienced. Whenever Carmack snuck out again, they simply headed to the arcade. They'd find him there every time.
The clever brat had even taken advantage of moments when the arcade owner wasn't paying attention to secretly remove the cabinet panels and crawl inside to study the motherboard's architecture.
He had already thoroughly dissected Metal Gear and Street Fighter, the two hottest games of the moment.
Although Carmack was an arrogant person, his respect for technology was genuine.
Even someone as prideful as he had to admit that Metal Gear utilized the hardware to an almost absurd degree. Not a single ounce of performance had been wasted.
As for Street Fighter, it was overwhelmingly impressive in every aspect. From hardware to software, every part of it overflowed with the developers' ingenuity.
He had long wanted to seek out its creator and exchange ideas. But when that very person finally stood before him… he had gone and mocked him without restraint.
He really had been showing off before a pro.
"Ethan, I want to join GAMENOVA! I want to make games too!"
"You?" Ethan looked Carmack up and down before revealing a doubtful expression. "Forget it. I don't think you're suitable."
"What do you mean?!" Carmack cried out, looking as though he had suffered the greatest insult imaginable.
"My skills aren't worse than anyone else's! You could fire every programmer you've got and replace them all with me, and it wouldn't make any difference."
"First, our company isn't a daycare."
Ethan pressed a hand against the puffed-up Carmack, signaling him to calm down.
"You expect me to hire a high school dropout? Sorry, but I'd rather not get sued in federal court by your legal guardian."
"Second, our company isn't lacking in geniuses."
"Maybe your technical skills really are impressive, but replacing them is impossible."
"Third, your personality really is... difficult. Development is a team effort. A 'genius' who doesn't know how to get along with people isn't particularly valuable to me."
Ethan made air quotes with his fingers around the word "genius."
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Seeing Carmack on the verge of shutting down completely from being roasted, Ethan stopped at just the right moment and switched to a gentler, more helpless expression.
"Forget it. You're still just a kid. Everyone's been arrogant when they were young."
He pointed at the pile of items on the table.
"I'll arrange your early release later. Once you're home, finish this project and let me see what you've got."
"Oh, and you need to go back to school. If you can't even get into the University of Kansas, then all that proves is that you're a one dimensional weirdo."
The staff at the juvenile detention center couldn't understand what had gotten into someone as successful as Ethan.
The man had traveled all the way from California just to bail out a kid who hadn't even graduated from high school.
Even Carmack's own parents couldn't make sense of it, but Ethan was in an exceptionally good mood.
...
By the time Ethan returned to California, dusty and travel worn, the task he'd entrusted to Sam had also been completed.
Beside his Commodore 64 now sat a thick plastic box. It was a floppy disk drive, the core device used for reading and writing floppy disks.
Unlike Ethan, who was pleasantly surprised, Sam looked thoroughly depressed.
"You really intend to add this thing to the NovaBox? An entire floppy disk drive?"
Sam understood why Ethan was so determined to adopt floppy disks.
Unlike EPROMs, which offered only 64 KB of storage for several dozen dollars, a single 3.5-inch floppy disk with a capacity of up to 1 MB could cost as little as five dollars.
Aside from its noticeably slower read and write speeds compared to an EPROM, the floppy disk was practically flawless.
But just because floppy disks themselves had no major drawbacks didn't mean using a floppy disk drive in a home console had none.
Sam picked up a sheet of scratch paper containing his earlier cost estimates. At the bottom, he'd written in huge red letters.
Over $100!!
"The NovaBox's hardware already costs a fortune to manufacture. A complete floppy disk drive costs over a hundred dollars! That's practically as much as the rest of our hardware combined."
"We can earn that money back through game sales, Sam. We need both its storage capacity and its write capability."
Once software had reached its limits, the bottleneck preventing games from becoming even more sophisticated became the hardware itself.
Only greater storage capacity would allow him to bring those classic franchises into existence and write capability was an absolutely indispensable feature for a home console.
Back then, Nintendo's decision to release the Famicom Disk System in 1986 was a testament to President Hiroshi Yamauchi's remarkable foresight.
That peripheral, which repeatedly sold out due to overwhelming demand, truly gave the Famicom a second golden age after it had already reached its peak.
Many legendary masterpieces only became possible thanks to the dramatic increase in storage capacity that the Disk System provided.
To promote this rather expensive new peripheral, Nintendo had even brought Shigeru Miyamoto himself onto the project to create the world's first video game distributed on floppy disk.
It also became the world's first video game with a truly meaningful save function.
Even more importantly, it became one of the founding titles of the RPG genre, and remained one of Japan's three great national RPG franchises even decades later.
Its name was The Legend of Zelda.
"Besides that, we'll also have to design a dedicated 'Disk Fax Machine.'"
Ethan casually picked up a floppy disk and examined it.
"Players can use the fax machine to upload their game scores to GAMENOVA. Of course, these machines only need to be installed in game stores that sell our cartridges."
There were simply too many possibilities this technology could unlock.
Hiroshi Yamauchi's ideas for the Disk System had been astonishingly imaginative. His foresight was so incredible that even Ethan couldn't help wondering whether the man had been a reincarnator too.
According to historical records, Yamauchi had even conceived a telephone network project.
He had planned to equip the Disk System with a communications port capable of connecting to telephone lines, allowing players to remotely download video games onto floppy disks while also giving the Famicom online multiplayer capabilities.
If not for the rapid advancement of storage media technology, which quickly drove up capacities while driving down prices and the widespread adoption of technologies such as battery-backed save memory, the Famicom's floppy disk era might not have come to such a regrettable end.
Ethan found it difficult to imagine what the timeline would have looked like had Yamauchi actually succeeded in realizing that astonishing plan.
Of course, Ethan had no intention of pursuing that technology himself.
Half a step ahead of the times made you a genius.
One full step ahead made you a madman.
Right now, his greatest advantage was that he had seized the opportunity presented by floppy disk drives more than a year ahead of everyone else.