At a promotional event earlier this week, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang attended an arcade in Tokyo, Japan, with the former president of SEGA and celebrated another new cooperation plan between the two companies. However, the most discussed part of this event is that SEGA provided Nvidia with important and timely help 30 years ago.
At this event, Huang Jen-Hsun appeared at “GiGO Akihabara Hall 3”, which is the original SEGA Akihabara amusement park, together with former SEGA president Shoichiro Kazuchi, current Sega CEO Satomi Haruki, chief operating officer Shufumi Uchimi, and “VR Kombat” and “Shenmue” producer Suzuki Yu.
According to the latest news disclosed by these executives, the latest sequel to SEGA’s classic fighting game “VR Kombat: Clash of Destinies” and the company’s many future new games will support Nvidia’s RTX Spark chips. With the help of this new “system-on-a-chip” technology, players can experience stable and powerful performance whether they are using thin and light laptops or traditional desktop computers.
However, this event also has very important historical significance for Nvidia, and can even be regarded as a kind of “repayment”, and everything goes back to 30 years ago, when this iconic technology company just started.
Although Nvidia has now become one of the world’s top technology giants with a market capitalization of US$474 million, when it was founded in the mid-1990s, their main business was actually supplying 3D graphics chips to SEGA. Even the first graphics acceleration chip “NV1” developed by Nvidia that year was used to provide computing support for “VR Kombat”, which debuted on the PC platform.
During the period of cooperation between the two parties, Nvidia signed a very lucrative contract to provide 3D technology for SEGA’s upcoming Dreamcast console. Unfortunately, due to various wrong technical decisions, the R&D team was ultimately unable to deliver the finished product as scheduled. This also plunged Nvidia, which had just developed at the time, into an unprecedented financial crisis.
Even in the face of such a crisis, SEGA’s then CEO Shoichiro Iriguo still had great confidence in Nvidia’s potential and secured an additional $5 million in funding for them. When recalling the past, Huang Jen-Hsun himself directly admitted that this funding became the biggest key to Nvidia’s ability to continue.
According to him, US$5 million was a very large sum for SEGA at the time, so he made it clear to SEGA at the time that this investment might eventually cost them nothing. However, without this funding, Nvidia will really face the crisis of bankruptcy and completely lose the opportunity to turn around. After an in-depth evaluation, he was finally willing to give it a go with SEGA.
The rest has become familiar history in the technology industry. Nvidia not only successfully turned around, but also gradually became one of the most important companies in the PC hardware market. It is now directly ranked as the world’s most valuable technology company due to the development of AI technology. After Nvidia was officially listed, SEGA also converted the $5 million it invested that year into shares and sold them, earning as much as $300 million. In this regard, Huang Renxun half-jokingly said that if SEGA was willing to wait until now to sell, then the stock might be worth as much as $1 trillion.
At this event, Huang Renxun took the stage with Shoichiro, the great benefactor of the year, and once again expressed his gratitude to him.
“SEGA, Mr. Iris, Mr. Suzuki, your friendship, support and trust in us all mean a lot to me. Japan has always been a very important place to me, and SEGA has always been a very important company. I hope that every colleague at SEGA can be as proud as we are of the continued history of cooperation between Nvidia and SEGA. This is really great. If Mr. Yu Suzuki had not been in Japan in 3D games and 3D The pioneering achievements in the field of animation, the game industry today may be completely different. Without your amazing and creative achievements, we would not be able to achieve this development today. Thank you very much!
Source: KOCPC Chinese