CD Projekt is still too small; it's best to let them grow under Ubisoft's wing.
By the time the contract expires in '95, those two "Dumbasses" should have built their team.
At that point, we can carve out the Eastern European market and negotiate directly with them for distribution rights, or even—invest in them.
After all, who would refuse the opportunity to own a studio that might one day create The Witcher series and Cyberpunk 2077?
"Alright, I understand. Maintain the status quo for now, but have our supervisors in Europe keep an eye on this CD Projekt. Give them some 'special treatment'—like priority access to our supply chain."
"Understood."
The last week of March 1994, the California rainy season had just ended, and the air in Silicon Valley was thick with the scent of blooming pollen.
For Frank Marshall, CEO of Silicon Valley Online, this week the air reeked of burning dollars.
"Websitedirectory.com, Webdirectory.com, Webdir.com——" Frank held a list in his hand, dark circles under his eyes, yet he was as hyper as if he'd just downed a whole bottle of vitamins. "I registered every domain name I could find that contained the words 'Directory' and 'Web.' Now, even if someone wants to follow suit, they'll be tearing their hair out just trying to come up with a name."
This strategy of "taking the road others would take, leaving them with no road to take" was a crushing blow in an era when domain squatting hadn't yet become an industry.
At ten o'clock on Monday morning, there was no ribbon-cutting ceremony, no champagne toast, not even time for Frank to finish his cold coffee.
The head of the tech department simply hit Enter on his keyboard, and the website named "Webdir" quietly connected to the public Internet.
More than a website, it was an Internet "directory."
The page was shockingly clean.
There was nothing extraneous, only rows of neatly arranged blue hyperlinks, categorized as [ News ], [ Sports ], [ Technology ], and [ Entertainment ].
For this moment, Silicon Valley Online's Marketing Department had pushed its "leaflet offensive" to the extreme.
Striking posters were plastered in front of Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and even every small computer hardware store in San Jose.
The poster bore only a single, soul-stirring slogan: "Still wandering blindly in the dark ocean of the Internet? Webdir will be your guiding light."
The effect was even more explosive than anticipated.
Just two hours after going live, server load alerts began screaming in the data center.
"Looks like our campaign worked," Frank muttered, staring at the backend data. Then, he snatched up the phone and roared at the tech department, "Scale up servers! Throw in both backup sets! If we crash, I'll hang you all on the BBS homepage as public examples!"
Meanwhile, the "Internet Chit-Chat" section of the Silicon Valley Online BBS had completely exploded.
The pinned thread, "Webdir User Feedback," had garnered hundreds of replies within just one hour.
User "Surfer—Boy" commented, "God, I finally don't have to manually type URLs in that damn Notepad anymore! I used to have to try five times to get the right domain for NBA scores, and now it's just two clicks. Who came up with this genius idea? I'm sending them a check!"
Another user, "CodeMaster," was more direct: "The categories are clear, but I suggest adding a 'Popular Recommendations' section. Also, could you include my personal page? It only has a few pictures of my cat, though."
Watching the screen scroll wildly with effusive praise, Tom Kalinske leaned against the doorframe, idly flipping his lighter and smiling with a hint of schadenfreude. "Frank, looks like your bandwidth costs are about to double again. But this time, you won't mind, will you?"
Frank wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead, his eyes fixed on the nearly vertical traffic curve. His grin stretched to an absurd degree. "Mind? I'm just afraid we don't have enough users. This is traffic, Tom. This is raw power."
It was past 3 AM in Tokyo.
Takuya Nakayama still hadn't slept, the only light in the room coming from the tired glow of his bulky CRT monitor.
The screen refreshed line by line at a maddening pace. First came the rudimentary logo at the top—the words "Webdir" in a design that closely resembled Sega's "SEGA" logo. Then followed two thick black dividing lines, and finally, rows upon rows of neatly arranged, densely packed blue text links.
Despite some CSS styling to enhance its appearance, the page still looked rather plain and crude. Even the font was the browser's default Times New Roman. The entire page retained an air of "industrial half-finished product," as rough as a potato pulled fresh from the earth, rinsed, but still caked with dirt.
But this potato was now made of gold.
Takuya Nakayama moved his mouse, listening to the soft shush of the mouse wheel rolling across the mousepad. His cursor hovered over the "Entertainment" category.
This was the gateway to the 1994 Internet.
There were no flashy pop-up ads or browser-crashing tracking scripts like those that would come later.
It was simple, direct, and even a bit endearingly clunky, much like the legendary website from his past life called "hao123."
No, it was even more primitive than hao123.
If hao123 was a furnished apartment, the Webdir before him was at best a bare-bones room that had just been plastered.
Yet this crude, unadorned space was currently thrilling countless American netizens across the ocean who had just come online.
"It's so ugly," Takuya Nakayama couldn't help but chuckle, his fingers tapping a light rhythm on the desktop.
But this ugly thing felt strangely comforting.
Given the era's agonizingly slow internet speeds and limited hardware, any superfluous decoration would have been a crime against bandwidth.
This minimalism wasn't about aesthetics; it was purely about user experience.
He clicked on a link, watching the browser's status bar slowly begin to load.
Though Webdir was currently just a mute guide, a mere walking stick, as long as users grew accustomed to this crutch, wouldn't he be the one to decide later whether to upgrade it to a wheelchair, or even a self-driving car?
That Frank guy might complain about bandwidth costs, but his execution was undeniable.
Though the page was somewhat ugly, its structure and logic perfectly followed the sketch he had drawn on the whiteboard earlier, not even changing the order of the categories.
As the page finally finished loading, Takuya Nakayama stretched lazily, his knuckles cracking with a crisp pop.
At 10 AM the next morning, the most prominent GG ad space on the Silicon Valley Online BBS homepage suddenly changed its image.
There was no elaborate design, just a red banner with white text so basic it would make any graphic designer want to die. Bold letters displayed a provocative statistic:
[ Webdir Launch Day Report: 201,342 unique visitors, 1,245,899 page views. Thank you to one-tenth of American netizens for choosing us. ]
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