Game development now, Mythical Sorcery 10 years ago.

Disclaimer 1 : I was literally a kid(less than 10 years old lol) 10 years ago, yet my greatest interest in game/software development still existed back then. This means the past events and situations presented in this post cannot be very accurate as I am retouching my memories of my childhood, but they are just to give you guys some general overview of the flow of changes :) + This is written in personal perspective :P

Disclaimer 2 : This post is incomplete . Still under development

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Short history of Gaming in Korea

Let’s go back in time for about… 10 years. Why 10? Its totally not because that’s as far as I can remember. Totally.

Gaming for average users were VERY different back then.
My first game ever played was Pokemon on Gameboy Colour, and boy it was amazing. I played tonnes of Pokemon although I was never patient enough to collect all pokemons :P

Anyway, not long after I started playing Pokemon, my family got a WindowsOS computer, and a MMORPG came into my sight. It was a MMO which no one knew how popular it was going to be.

Until here, gaming experience is pretty global. But the common sharing ends here. Korea’s gaming industry developed very differently.

No one knew that in future, it would be the longest running MMORPG in history. Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds came like a wind and wiped every players in other games into the gust. It was the very first MMO launched in Korea, and although I was really late for the party (it launched 1996, I started playing around 2000), it was THE MOST popular game back then. This is the game, that made Nexon’s global existence possible.

Soon, a more graphically pleasing and friendlier game launched in Korea. Crazy Arcade BnB immediately became everyone’s favourite. This was rather Bomber Man replica of the game, with multiplayer, game modes, items and other friendly features. Although it was ‘friendly’, it was rather a hardcore game which was difficult to master. This was launched and still run by Nexon too, and Nexon immediately became the dominant game publisher in Korea.

One interesting fact about Crazy Arcade. Back then, Japanese anime called “Top Blade” was absolutely brainwashing every children’s brains. Literally everyone loved TopBlade. EVERYONE. Crazy Arcade launched a game mode ‘Spot the Difference’ with TopBlade pictures/anime screenshots, which further increased its popularity. However, I as far as I know, the game mode was soon removed and pretty recently the game mode revived as ‘Hidden Catch’.

Now you may wonder, why do I not exactly know when the game mode was removed? Because MapleStory launched in 2003. Again, it was Nexon with this amazing game. Nexon really was GOD when it came down to online gaming in Korea. Anyway back to Maple Story – it was, and it still is the most successful f2p game in Korea.

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Early Indie

RPG Maker series existed way before this, but to average citizens, weren’t really accessible (Apparently these series were not Windows based! Never got to try them though! I was never born.).
However, RPG Maker 95 was the very first version which ran on Windows,  my first touch with this amazing creative tool was back in early primary school, and this led me to RPG Maker XP. They were simply amazing back then.

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08/04/2014 | Categories: ▶ GameDev Related | Leave a comment