Replay: The History of Video Games (52 page)

China online: Gamer at a internet cafe in Taiyuan, Shanxi province. Stringer Shanghai / Reuters / Corbis

24. Second Lives

Japan annexed Korea on the 22nd August 1910. The fast-rising imperial power had already defeated China in the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895 and done the same to the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905. These military victories earned Japan the respect oher imperial powers, even prompting the formation of a ‘learn from Japan’ movement in Britain.

Japan’s victories and new diplomatic standing gave it unopposed influence over Korea, a country that had only gained independence from China in 1897. In the five years that followed the Russo-Japanese War, Japan used its influence to dissolve the Korean army, hand itself a veto over the nation’s laws and take control of its foreign policy. And in August 1910, Japan forced the Korean government to sign an annexation treaty that officially ended Korea’s independence.

The Japanese were harsh rulers. Those suspected of aiding rebel fighters faced execution or enslavement. In some cases, whole villages were rounded up and locked in public buildings that were then set alight as a punishment for helping dissidents. Japan also set out to erase Korea’s culture. The country’s history books were burned, the Korean language suppressed and most of the Gyeongbokgung, the Korean palace built in 1394, was demolished to make way for the Japanese governor’s headquarters.

After Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, Korea was divided into US and USSR occupied zones. The US zone became South Korea and the Soviet Union’s zone became North Korea. One of the first laws South Korea’s government introduced was a ban on the import of Japanese goods and cultural items, a legal reflection of the understandable fury and bitterness Koreans felt towards their former occupiers.

This law, which remained largely unchanged until the late 1990s, would have a significant influence on the video game business both in Korea and across the world. Its most noticeable impact was that it severely limited the supply of video games to South Korea in the 1980s. Japanese companies could not export their games or consoles to the country and since American and European companies were only just starting to expand into other developed nations they saw little incentive to head to the relatively poor nation of South Korea. And since home computer ownership was rare in South Korea, few Koreans attempted to build a game industry of their own.

Those wanting to play video games had little choice but to resort to buying illegal copies of games. “Japanese movies, music, comics and games were all banned from being imported,” said Jake Song, a future game designer who got his first taste of games on a school computer. “But for the few who enjoyed games, they played illegal copies of Japanese games. It was fairly easy to buy Taiwanese clones of the Nintendo Super NES and the UFO, a device that enabled the use of illegally copied discs instead of cartridges, and it was fairly easy to get pirated software from PC bulletin board systems or the computer-related shopping districts in Seoul.”

None of this was out of the ordinary for a mainland East Asian country in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Few game companies had any presence in the region and so the black market ruled supreme. But then in the early 1990s South Korea entered a period of rapid growth that greatly improved living standards. Sales of PCs began to rise, encouraging a few Korean companies to start releasing video games. Nearly every single one sold in low numbers. Koreans were too used to cheap or free pirated games to consider paying out for an official version. One after another, Korean publishers of retail games would give up.

Then in 1994 the IT firm Samjung Data Service hit on a way to get Koreans paying to play while trying to think of a product that wo appeal to the small-but-growing number of Koreans buying internet-ready PCs. Samjung’s founders were a group of graduates from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in the city of Daejeon. During their time at the institute they discovered
MUD
, the text-only online world created by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw back in the late 1970s. The founders realised that people couldn’t easily copy an online game and, even if they managed it, they would lack the infrastructure necessary to run it. This, they concluded, was the way to sidestep the piracy problem.

They put together
Jurassic Park
, a
MUD
of their own, and began charging players for the time they spent playing it.
Jurassic Park
did not become the success Samjung hoped, largely because few Koreans owned an internet-connected PC at that point, but it had showed the country’s would-be game makers the way forward. All that was needed was for internet access to become more widespread and, as luck would have it, the Korean government was about to make that happen.

In 1995 the South Korean government announced its intention to create a “knowledge-based society” founded on widespread broadband internet access. It was a crazily ambitious project. The internet was still a new concept, slow dial-up connections were still cutting edge and here was a relatively minor Asian economy pledging to plough hundreds of millions of US dollars into building the world’s best computer communications network. But for Korean game companies the announcement was a gift. Armed with the promise of fast broadband internet access for all and the business model of
Jurassic Park
, Korea’s game industry gave up on retail games and prepared for a cyberspace future.

One of the first to embrace this future was the Nexon Corporation, a company co-founded by Kim Jung-Ju in 1994 after he saw
Jurassic Park
. Kim’s plan was to release an online multiplayer game that used graphics rather than text. His business partner was Song, who had ended up programming business software for a living but also created text-only
MUD
s in his spare time. While games such as AOL’s
Neverwinter Nights
were already offering US game players graphics-based online games by the time Nexon formed, South Korea’s isolation meant Song and Kim were in uncharted territory as far as they were concerned. “They weren’t any terms for this genre, so we called it graphic
MUD
or
MUG
,” said Song.

The result of Nexon’s work was Song’s 1996 game
The Kingdom of the Winds / Baram Eui Nara
.
The Kingdom of the Winds
emphasised its Korean roots. Its virtual world was based on the country’s history and mythology and its art style drew its inspiration from Korean ‘manhwa’ comic books. “Nationalism was part of what I was taught since birth and throughout my education,” explained Song. “So I think I had been compelled to make a game with a Korean theme. But after
The Kingdom of the Winds
I was relieved of that kind of imperative. Because I am Korean, I think even if I make a medieval European fantasy game, Korean sentiments will naturally melt into it.”

Kingdom of the Winds
was a turning point for Korean games. Its use of graphics raised the bar for every other Korean game maker – text-based
MUD
s would no longer cut it. It also became the first Korean game to achieve mass appeal. At its height, nearly one million people were paying a monthly subscription fee in order to play. In one fell swoop, Kim and Song had shown that South Korea was a viable games market and that Korean developers could compete on equal terms to Japanese and American companies without compromising their culture.

But just as
The Kingdom of the Winds
started to take off, South Korea and the rest of mainland Asia was engulfed in economic turmoil. A loss of confidence in the Thai currency, the baht, in July 1997 sparked off a wave of investor panic that sent East Asia’s economies into freefall. The South Korean economy shrivelled by a third in the space of a year and the national debt doubled. Soon Korean workers were being laid off in their thousands.

In theory, the crash and the resulting surge in unemployment should have strangled the country’s barely formed game industry. But rather than destroy it, the economic woe actually boosted it. Some of the newly unemployed hit on the idea of opening ‘PC bangs’, internet cafés where people could play online games. It was an appealing business prospect. The government, which accelerated its broadband drive in response to the crisis, was offering generous subsidies to internet-related business and, thanks to
The Kingdom of the Winds
’ success, there was a huge demand for online games. Not to mention a lot of out-of-work people with time to kill. PC bangs charged customers around $1 an hour to play and became immensely popular, encouraging more and more to spring up across the country. And as the number of people hanging out in PC bangs swelled so did consumer demand for online games. By 1998 around 3,000 PC bangs had opened across South Korea, giving millions of potential game players access to high-powered PC gaming on the cheap, and more were opening all the time. By the following year the number had risen fivefold to 15,150 and it was all thanks to two 1998 games:
StarCraft
and
Lineage
.

StarCraft
was an American real-time strategy game with a sci-fi theme that revolved around frantic battles between three distinct alien races, each of which had their own weaknesses and strengths. The game’s creators Blizzard Entertainment expected little success in South Korea. “Korea was already a market for us, but not a very big one,” said Rob Pardo, the executive vice-president of game design at Blizzard. “We didn’t localise it – you actually play the English language version over there. There were lots of things going on in Korea around the time that
StarCraft
came out: the growth of PC game rooms; the growth of internet connections. StarCraft came out in that time frame and captured a lot of the Kon imagination. They really like science fiction, they really enjoy that fast-paced strategic thinking and they have a very competitive gaming culture.”

Koreans became the world’s biggest
StarCraft
fans. Of the 9.5 million copies of the game sold worldwide, 4.5 million were sold in South Korea. Blizzard’s video game was so popular it became a national sport. TV stations began broadcasting matches between the best players. One channel, iTV Game, even dedicated itself to broadcasting
StarCraft
matches to an eager audience. The professional gaming scene that
StarCraft
spawned in South Korea made the low-key US gaming competitions based on
Doom
-style death matches and 1980s arcade games look like a joke by comparison. The US’s Cyberathlete Professional League got excited when 30,000 people decided to watch the event online. But South Korea’s World Cyber Games could attract 50,000 spectators to the arena in which it took place plus hundreds of thousands more on TV and the internet, enough to persuade multinational companies, including Samsung, to pay huge amounts to sponsor the event. The World Cyber Games also had generous backing from the South Korean government, which contributed to the 2002 contest’s $350,000 prize money. The government’s support even included giving video gaming official recognition as a sport.

StarCraft
’s mammoth success in Korea was mirrored by another 1998 game: Song’s
Lineage
. In stark contrast to
The Kingdoms of the Winds
, the NCSoft-released
Lineage
embraced a more European vision of fantasy. “When I was creating T
he Kingdom of the Winds
it was very difficult to find all sorts of reference data because it was set in ancient Korea,” said Song. “So I set out to make a conventional medieval European fantasy and the comic book
Lineage
happened to be published serially in one of the magazines I was reading at the time. I felt online games should provide a playground and that the players create the stories themselves, so I didn’t really make it to relay the storyline of the comic and used only the basics of the world, for example the names of kingdoms or cities.”

Song sought to make his new role-playing game more accessible than
The Kingdom of the Winds
by creating simple one-click controls and focusing the game on grandiose battles where dozens of players would co-operate to defend or storm castles in order to gain territory and the resulting tax revenue. “I wanted to create a structure where the users naturally created the content amongst themselves and it made sense when it was continuously repeated,” said Song. “That’s how the concept of players warring over castles came about.”