<![CDATA[Stories by Felipe Pepe on Medium]]> https://medium.com/@felipepepe?source=rss-f5dd0a54b863------2 https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/fit/c/150/150/1*NHJ67HEnMX_ieRSGpFVrbQ.jpeg Stories by Felipe Pepe on Medium https://medium.com/@felipepepe?source=rss-f5dd0a54b863------2 Medium Fri, 15 May 2026 08:35:27 GMT <![CDATA[Super Columbine Massacre RPG! —  20 years later, are the limits are still winning?]]> https://felipepepe.medium.com/super-columbine-massacre-rpg-20-years-later-are-the-limits-are-still-winning-7fe8f18f5c45?source=rss-f5dd0a54b863------2 https://medium.com/p/7fe8f18f5c45 Sat, 26 Jul 2025 00:50:04 GMT 2025-07-26T08:56:14.985Z Super Columbine Massacre RPG! — 20 years later, are the limits are still winning?

A few days ago someone left a review of The CRPG Book, criticizing me for featuring Super Columbine Massacre RPG!:

The game turned 20 years old this year, so I’ll take this opportunity and the ongoing shitshow with Steam & itch.io to write on why SCMRPG! is actually a very important game, that deserves not only to be in a book about RPG history, but remembered as a landmark in video game history in general.

The next few paragraphs may be obvious if you were around in 1999 but remember, this was 26 years ago. It’s new to a lot of people.

On April 20, 1999, senior students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold entered Columbine High School and began a school shooting, killing 12 students and one teacher, plus wounding 21 other victims. The two killers then committed suicide.

This was not America’s first (or last) school shooting, but the scale and brutality of the tragedy was shocking. The aftermath was a frantic search for reasons — and/or someone to blame — be it guns, depression, bullying, Goth culture, Marilyn Manson or violent video games (both boys were avid Doom players).

The shooting would later be pushed even deeper into the public debate with Michael Moore’s 2002 documentary Bowling for Columbine, which examined the tragedy and America’s obsession with guns. A worldwide hit, it would win many awards and become one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time:

All this kept the Columbine shootings a heated and controversial topic, which would ignite once again when independent film-maker Danny Ledonne anonymously released Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, a free game in which you play as Eric and Dylan — the two school shooters.

First released on April 20th, 2005, six years after the shootings, the game initially flew under the radar. About a year later it began being noted by critics like Ian Bogost, and soon the mainstream press was all over it — the game eventually reached over 700,000 downloads. Danny Ledonne’s identity as the game’s author was then leaked, and so he decided to come out and stand up for his creation.

An amateur game created on RPG Maker 2003, Super Columbine Massacre RPG! blends 16-bit era sprites with digitized photos of the tragedy, in a disturbing fusion of fiction and reality. The game begins with Eric and Dylan preparing themselves, sneaking into school to plant bombs and then
executing the shooting, killing dozens of victims in JRPG-like battles. Said battles are almost entirely one-sided, with the victims mostly just cowering in fear, while you select a gun or bomb to kill them.

While a brutal game, violence in SCMRPG! is presented in an almost hallucinatory way, detached from reality, with lines like “Dylan dodges Matrix style”. After the boys’ suicide, there’s a dream-like section where they go to Hell and fight hordes of Doom monsters, padded out to such length that even the most bloodthirsty players will tire of it.

As you explore the school, you’ll relieve the events of that tragic day, as well as trigger flashbacks of the frustration, anxiety and bullying that the two
boys lived. There’s a surprising and well-researched depth here, with the game taking a documentary-like approach and showing real facts of their lives, like how Eric was prescribed drugs for his social anxiety and those prevented him from joining the Marines, or how he ran into a school “rival” before starting the shootings, forgave him and told him to go home.

All these details provide a unique perspective into the tragedy. SCMRPG! was often criticized for trivializing the shootings, but in fact it humanizes
them. It places players in the shoes of the boys and offers a glimpse of why did they did it — and then lists them among the tragic losses that day, not as monsters.

Super Columbine Massacre RPG is disturbing because it is meant to be. I’ve talked and written for some time about how games need not be fun to be worthwhile. This game is not fun, it is challenging, and difficult to play — not technically difficult, but conceptually difficult. We need more of that.
— Ian Bogost

Not everyone agrees, of course, with activists like Jack Thompson saying the game blatantly promotes similar actions, training new killers.

In 2007, SCMRPG! was chosen as a finalist for the Slamdance Guerrilla Gamemaker Competition. Contradicting their independent roots and edgy name, the festival’s director decided to pull the game from the contest on alleged “moral obligations”.

In protest, a group of other competitors — including the developers of Braid, flOw and Castle Crashers — wrote an open letter to the Slamdance organisers:

“We find it very unlikely that a similar decision would have been made about a jury-selected film, and see this decision as hurting the legitimacy of games as a form of expression, exploration, and experience.”

Outraged by the removal of the game, the jury of the Slamdance Film Festival decided to award the game a Special Jury Prize, this time as a documentary. Once again, the Slamdance organisers vetoed the award.
In the end, more than half of the finalists ended up removing their games from the contest in protest, and Slamdance never hosted a Gamemaker Competition again.

Danny Ledonne further explored these events with a 2008 documentary titled Playing Columbine, focused on the controversy surrounding SCMRPG! and the perception of games as children’s toys.

When covering the festival incident in 2007, New York Times reporter Heather Chaplin summarized the whole ordeal quite elegantly: “Video Game Tests the Limits. The Limits Win”.

20 years later, did limits really win? Are they still winning?

Writing this on the same week as a group of shitheads managed to pressure payment processors to censor Steam and itch.io, it sure feels like it…

However, on a broader perspective, SCMRPG! managed to sparked a global debate about the role and value of video games as media, and to push others into experimenting as well.

Of course, it wasn’t the first “game documentary”, we had experiments since the 80s — from the seminal A Mind Forever Voyaging (1985) to several French games like Méwilo (1987) to multiple games about political protests in Czechoslovakia, such as The Adventures of Indiana Jones in Wenceslas Square in Prague on January 16, 1989 (1989) and 17. 11. 1989 (1989).

SCMRPG! wasn’t even the first game about school shootings. Pico’s School (1999) is usually considered the first Flash game and it’s also inspired by Columbine — only this time you play as a kid who defeats the shooters. In an extremely edgy way.

Yeah, Flash games were edgy stuff — this is where The Binding of Isaac (2011) came from. There were games about hunting, torturing and killing Bin Laden, and also about flying planes into the World Trade center. Every 2000s election had Flash games about punching or killing politicians.

SCMRPG! and all the debate surrounding it was a catalyst that helped more people realize the power of video games as a medium, especially among the then-emerging “indie” scene. It showed how those silly amateur games could promote debate on a national scale. In the spirit of time, it immediately led to games like Rendition (2007), a highly-controversial political game about torture during the “War on Terror”.

But it also paved way to later titles like Dys4ia (2012), That Dragon, Cancer (2016) or He fucked the girl out of me (2023).

And that is why it’s important to remember Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, especially with everything going on right now.

You don’t need to play it or like it, just like you don’t need to play or like the stuff being banned or delisted from Steam & itch.io. But it’s important that they exist — not only in an selfish sense of “transgressive art might lead to things you like”, but as a core purpose of any art medium.

To finish this, a final example on transgressive games fighting the limits.

Maybe for you Spec Ops: The Line is the ideal political game —subversive and anti-war, but also a AAA FPS with good graphics & gameplay, based on a fictional event. Transgressive enough for countless video essays, safe enough for Walmart.

Personally, I think Fursan al-Aqsa: The Knights of the Al-Aqsa Mosque raises a much more interesting debate about AAA military shooters and violence in media. Created by Nidal Nijm, a Brazilian-Palestinian, it’s an FPS where you play as a Palestinian student fighting against Israel’s IDF.

Yes, the game is crude, tasteless and brutal — so much that it got banned in the EU, UK, Poland and Australia. And yet, it’s just like any military shooter such as Call of Duty — that massively popular AAA series which most of games media will happily ignore the BDS boycott on Microsoft to promote.

What set these games apart? Why can Americans make US Army-funded games about invading & killing anyone, but a Palestinian can’t do the same against the army currently genociding his people? Pushing this sort of uncomfortable question into the public debate exactly why it’s important to have games like this.

It’s ok if you don’t want to engage. But if you think SCMRPG! shouldn’t be remembered, that those NSFW games on Steam & itch.io should be removed, that Fursan al-Aqsa should be banned, then at least appreciate how they are helping you learn more about yourself and just how reactionary you are.

]]> <![CDATA[My Little Game History Anthology]]> https://felipepepe.medium.com/my-little-game-history-anthology-4029a0d29089?source=rss-f5dd0a54b863------2 https://medium.com/p/4029a0d29089 Thu, 08 May 2025 14:51:51 GMT 2026-04-19T06:55:37.928Z A (WIP) personal collection of writings, references, bookmarks and sources for further reading

With the current Internet being either dead, dying or taken by AI, might be good to return to the old days of sharing curated lists of recommended links. It’s also very useful to help find dead content that is on the Internt Archive but you would never find without the URL.

This is a WIP project, I’m stilll ading stuff and fixing the formating.

General Computing & Video Game History

Chinese Video Game History:

Japanese Video Game History:

South Korean Video Game History:

French Video Game History

Indian Video Game History

Brazilian Video Game History

Russian Video Game History:

Polish Video Game History

Other Countries:

RPG Maker:

Flash & Web Games:

MMOs. MUDs & Online RPGs:

Game Preservation:

Game Magazines & Journals:

CRPG History:

Random cool stuff:

]]> <![CDATA[A Colonização da História dos Video Games]]> https://felipepepe.medium.com/a-coloniza%C3%A7%C3%A3o-da-hist%C3%B3ria-dos-video-games-b31cef692ad2?source=rss-f5dd0a54b863------2 https://medium.com/p/b31cef692ad2 Sun, 05 Jan 2025 04:22:10 GMT 2026-04-18T02:04:13.115Z Não, você não foi uma criança estadunidense de classe média

Em agosto do ano passado, foi realizada em Taiwan uma exposição sobre a Era de Ouro dos RPGs, celebrando jogos de 1980 até 1999.

Fonte: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYOc8jwmItE

Lá estavam todos os clássicos que você espera encontrar — Wizardry, Ultima, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Diablo, Fallout, Chrono Trigger, Baldur’s Gate, etc… Mas também outros que você provavelmente nunca ouviu falar, tais como Legend of the Sword and Fairy, Xuan-Yuan Sword, Heroes of Jin Yong e The Twin Heroes.

Fonte: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaMq4l7xuXk

Estes últimos são clássicos taiwaneses. Durante o final dos anos 90 e início dos 2000, Taiwan foi uma potência no desenvolvimento de jogos, de certo modo atrás apenas dos Estados Unidos e Japão. Eles produziram centenas de jogos, jogados por milhões de chineses, chegando até a influenciar a literatura e séries de TV chinesas. Sucessos recentes como Naraka: Bladepoint são celebrados como continuações dessa linhagem.

Contudo, nós não sabemos nada sobre jogos taiwaneses. Por diversos motivos, das barreiras linguísticas até sinofobia nua e crua, eles não são parte do “cânon dos vídeo games”. Eles não importam, são apenas uma coisa pequena e local.

E não é apenas Taiwan.

Quais jogos importam e quais não

Em 2019, Mia Consalvo & Christophe A. Paul publicaram Real Games (lit. Jogos de Verdade). O livro analisa porque alguns jogos são considerados legítimos e dignos de discussão mas outros não — porque Counter-Strike, StarCraft e EverQuest são “jogos de verdade”, mas jogos como Kim Kardashian: Hollywood e caça-objetos como Mystery Case Files não.

Jogos de Verdade: O Que É Legítimo e o Que Não É nos Jogos Contemporâneos

O livro identifica três pontos que costumam ser discutidos ao se avaliar se um jogo é “de verdade” ou não — a pedigree do jogo (seus desenvolvedores), o conteúdo do jogo em si, e sua estrutura de pagamento.

Isso nos ajuda a entender como um jogo como Free Fire consegue ter 150 milhões de jogadores em um dia mas ter zero presença na mídia de games (aqui focado na mídia estadunidense) — é um jogo de celular battle royale gratuito criado no Vietnã.

Pipocando os zé guaritinha

Mas acho que faltou ao livro um quarto ponto, um que raramente se discute abertamente, mas é tão importante quanto: quem joga esses jogos.

No caso de Kim Kardashian: Hollywood e Mystery Case Files, a maior parte são mulheres. No Free Fire, a maioria são pessoas do sul global — América Latina, Sul & Sudeste Asiático, Africa, Oriente médio, etc. É nóis.

O próprio livro já abre uma brecha para isso:

“Os primeiros estudos acadêmicos nos mostraram, pelo exemplo e pela omissão, quais jogos eram dignos de estudo e quais não eram. […] É provável também que esses jogos fossem os mais abordados porque eram aqueles que nós mesmos estávamos interessados em jogar.”

Se vivemos numa hegemonia estadunidense, onde mídias, pesquisas e culturas pautadas pelos Estados Unidos dominam o discurso, então é lógico que exemplos e omissões vem em sua maioria de americanos escrevendo sobre seus interesses.

O apagamento das experiências regionais

A Índia tem mais de 4 vezes a população dos Estados Unidos. Eles também jogam e, lógico, têm enormes sucessos como Real Cricket 20, um jogo de celular com mais de 50 milhões de downloads.

O Galvão Bueno indiano é narrador do Real Cricket 20

Porém jogos populares na Índia jamais serão discutidos fora do seu país a não ser que sejam apresentados por uma mídia estadunidense como a IGN, porque quase nenhum não-indiano consome mídia de jogos indianos — mesmo estando em inglês.

A China é outro ótimo exemplo — Black Myth: Wukong não é o primeiro sucesso chinês na Steam, o seu impacto veio do fato de ser o primeiro a capturar a atenção da mídia e dos gamers ocidentais.

Diferentes nacionalidades têm suas próprias histórias sobre vídeo game, suas memórias culturais, com seus próprios sucessos e particularidades, mas acabam invisíveis para quaisquer outros que não a si mesmos.

O gamer brasileiro médio tem muito mais em comum com um italiano, turco ou filipino que um americano, mas raramente nos comunicamos diretamente sobre nossas histórias. Tudo vem mediado pelos EUA.

Sabe quem mais jogava Tibia? Brasil e Polônia.

Com o tempo somos enganados a acreditar que esses elementos compartilhados não são importantes, que talvez nem mesmo existam… nossa história em comum é apagada e nos sujeitamos ao padrão centrado nos Estados Unidos.

Há muitos exemplos — um dos mais comuns nas discussões internacionais é como o riquíssimo cenário de computadores domésticos europeus nos anos 80 costuma ser apagado e substituído pelos eventos do “Crash dos Jogos Eletrônicos de 1983”, algo restrito à indústria Norte-Americana. Computadores como o Amstrad CPC, C64, ZX Spectrum, Amiga, MSX, etc… todos são substituídos pelo todo poderoso Nintendinho.

Se isso acontece lá na Europa, imagine no Brasil.

O apagamento das diferentes formas de jogar

Que fique claro, isso não é sobre a popularidade de jogos ou consoles específicos. É uma questão mais complexa, que compromete a forma que entendemos a nossa história, a cultura e a identidade em relação aos jogos.

Por exemplo, todo brasileiro interessado em games nos anos 2000 passou por uma LAN House — o lugar do bairro onde você pagava por hora pra usar a internet e jogar, normalmente jogos como Counter-Strike e DOTA. Havia também as locadoras de jogos, onde você podia pagar por hora para jogar nos consoles.

Nostalgia.jpeg

Isso não é algo só nosso, é parte da história de todo o sul global. Os nomes mudam — PC bang, game club, internet café, ciber, kafejka internetowa — mas é algo que se encontra da Africa do Sul até a Russia, do Paraguai até o Uzbequistão.

Podia ser Brasil, mas é o Egito.
Podia ser Brasil, mas é o Iraque.
Podia ser Brasil, mas é o Vietnã.

Faz total sentido quando você lembra que ter um console ou computador novo em casa era extremamente caro nos anos 2000 (e ainda é!).

Mas em países ricos era muito mais fácil. Por isso, era comum organizarem as famosas LAN parties. Várias pessoas levando seus computadores / consoles para eventos ou então para as casas de amigos para jogar coisas como Doom, Halo, Quake, Unreal, etc.

Linares Party 2005, uma LAN party na Espanha

Olhando para essas imagens você pode pensar que são as mesmas coisas — um bando de pessoas numa sala jogando juntas. Mas pense nos modelos de negócios e na cultura por trás delas:

  • Numa LAN Party, são pessoas que compraram seus computadores e seus jogos. Elas se reúnem de vez em quando, jogam títulos multiplayer juntas e então voltam para suas casas com seus PCs. Lá, talvez elas joguem outros estilos de jogos, mais focados em single-player.
  • Numa LAN House, as pessoas não compram computadores ou jogos. Com menos compradores, é mais difícil para a indústria local se desenvolver. E se essas pessoas jogam apenas nesses locais, num ambiente multiplayer, pagando por hora, é menos provável que irão jogar títulos single-player de longa duração como RPGs. Pra zerar Final Fantasy VII numa locadora, só pagando mais de 50 horas e comprando seu próprio memory card pra ninguém zuar o seu save.

Fora o fato de que LAN Houses e locadoras são espaços fixos, abertos, sociais. É onde você ia depois da escola encontrar os amigos e ver a galera jogando. Faz parte da forma coletiva de como vivemos jogos — o pessoal envolta assistindo uma partida de Winning Eleven, chamando prum X1, ou se juntando pra ver um Fatality de Mortal Kombat.

Então as LAN parties e as LAN houses podem parecer iguais, porém representam realidades econômicas completamente diferentes, que levaram a diferentes culturas sobre jogos, interações sociais e modelos de negócios. Mas como a mídia dominante é a norte-americana, livros, séries e canais do Youtube sobre história dos games só falam das LAN parties.

O apagamento dos diferentes modelos de negócios

O final dos anos 90 e início dos 2000 foi quando os MMOs explodiram em popularidade. O modelo de negócio para MMOs americanos como Ultima Online e Everquest era bem caro para os jogadores. Eles tinham que ter um computador com Internet, comprar o jogo numa caixa, comprar as expansões numa caixa e também pagar uma assinatura mensal para jogar.

Imagina chegar na LAN House com caixas de expansões de EverQuest

Mas na Coreia do Sul, pessoas jogavam em PC Bangs — a versão regional das LAN houses. As pessoas não vão comprar um jogo e trazer para instalar. E também não querem pagar uma assinatura mensal além da taxa por hora da LAN house.

Portanto as empresas coreanas precisaram buscar diferentes soluções de negócios. Primeiro tentaram vender licenças para franquias de PC Bang para que seus usuários tivessem acesso gratuito ao jogo, depois acabaram desenvolvendo o modelo free-to-play.

MapleStory chegou a ter quase 250 milhões de contas

Um modelo de negócio diferente dos Estados Unidos, adaptado para uma realidade diferente dos Estados Unidos. Parece óbvio, nós também vivemos isso —muitos jogos free-to-play fizeram sucesso no Brasil pois eram gratuitos e rodavam mesmo no computador mais lento da LAN House.

Mas nos EUA foi diferente. Acostumados a pagar por tudo de antemão, muitos americanos rejeitaram o modelo free-to-play, e se formou um certo elitismo que continua até hoje. É claramente a opinião de quem podia pagar o computador, os jogos, expansões e mensalidades.

De volta para Mia Consalvo & Christopher A. Paul’s em Real Games:

“A relutância geral daqueles que falam sobre e cobrem jogos online em levar os jogos free-to-play a sério é resultado de um conjunto específico de suposições sobre como os jogos deveriam funcionar e o que eles deveriam ser.”

Em cima disso, vieram o preconceito e o excepcionalismo americano: quem pegar livros, artigos e vídeos em inglês sobre história dos jogos online, irá ver que a história costuma ser MUDs -> Ultima Online -> EverQuest -> World of Warcraft.

Não há espaço para jogos Asiáticos. MMOs free-to-play como MapleStory e Fantasy Journey to the West sempre foram mais populares do que World of Warcraft, com muito mais jogadores, mas eles são apagados.

Assim temos décadas de estudos acadêmicos que têm ciência do tamanho dos títulos asiáticos, porém não engajam com eles. Isso levou os estudos subsequentes a também ignorá-los —você jogou Ragnarok Online, mas se nenhuma referencia menciona ele, talvez não seja importante né?

Hoje, temos gacha — um tipo diferente de free-to-play. E as coisas só pioraram. Enquanto jogos se expandem pelos cenários mobile e do Sul Global, o colapso da mídia de jogos leva cada vez menos vozes novas a entrarem na conversa. Muito do discurso da mídia parece estar preso em 2012, com as mesmas pessoas falando sobre os mesmos jogos para o mesmo público, com os mesmos vieses e interesses.

O apagamento da informalidade

Qual o jogo mais vendido do Brasil?

O mais popular de nossa história? O jogo que faz parte da nossa cultura e está em toda locadora, em todo camelô, em todo pendrive?

100% Atualizado

“Mas isso não é um jogo, é um mod” — digita o chato nos comentários.

Sim, é um mod. Os jogos mais populares no Brasil são mods em algum nível — seja para adicionar a língua Portuguesa em jogos como Skyrim e Breath of the Wild, seja para fazer conversões complexas. Ou gambiarras.

PokéTibia (em sua versão mais recente) é um MMO com mais jogadores do que muitos MMOs “de verdade” —incluindo o Tibia original. Ouso dizer que tem uma das maiores equipe de desenvolvedores da america latina. Outro exemplo são os GTA Motovlog, um tipo extremamente popular de ports de GTA San Andreas para Android. Muitos feitos por jovens sem acesso a computadores, que aprenderam a editar os arquivos e criar mods no celular mesmo.

Mods assim são o que acontece quando você tem desenvolvedores talentosos sem qualquer infraestrutura ou suporte para ajudá-los a fazer seus próprios jogos.

A maioria dos brasileiros conhece esses jogos. Entretanto, se você perguntar “qual é o maior jogo brasileiro?”, eles terão dificuldade para responder… talvez um jogo indie na Steam? Afinal, GTA Motovlog e Bomba Patch nem são “jogos de verdade”, né?

Counter-Strike, Day-Z, Garry’s Mod, DOTA… todos são mods, mas são considerados “jogos de verdade”. Por quê?

Aqui eu gostaria de citar outra leitura essencial sobre jogos, o livro de Brendan Keogh The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist (lit. A Indústria de Vídeo Games Não Existe). Aliás, é gratuito!

“Muitas pessoas criam vídeo games em diversos contextos, e algumas dessas pessoas ganham dinheiro com isso. No entanto, o legado da formalização rígida persiste e ainda exerce uma forte influência sobre as percepções do que é a criação de vídeo games entre pesquisadores, legisladores, estudantes e os próprios desenvolvedores de vídeo games.”

Os primeiros jogos eram experimentos tecnológicos e projetos pessoais, compartilhados gratuitamente em disquetes, folhas de código e revistas ao redor do mundo. Corporações se formaram com os anos, mas essa cultura de hacker nunca acabou — ela se manteve através de BBS games, MUDs, Freeware, jogos de browser, jogos de Flash, mods, homebrews, projetos de código aberto, crackers, emuladores, demoscene, romhacks, servidores privados, fangames, MiSTer, consoles e jogos piratas, RPG Maker, BYOND, AGS, Ren’Py, bitsy, etc…

Todos esses exemplos continuam sendo apagados pelo lado “da indústria”, que reforça um conceito de jogos formais, higienizados, facilmente digeríveis e — especialmente — monetizáveis.

Por isso que Counter-Strike é um “jogo de verdade” mas Bomba Patch não.

O auto-apagamento

A primeira vez que eu joguei Pokémon foi num emulador na LAN house da minha cidade, no interior de SP. Passei incontáveis horas ali, sei que LAN houses e locadoras são uma importante parte da nossa história. A influência delas é visível na cultura, nos e-sports, na mídia, nos artigos e documentários. No nosso jeito de jogar.

E eu já conversei com pessoas da Coréia, Espanha, China, Rússia, Itália, Filipinas, Malásia, etc que tiveram cada uma suas próprias versões locais.

Mas mesmo assim, na primeira vez que eu escrevi sobre a ascensão dos jogos multiplayer para o CRPG Book, eu não as mencionei.

Trecho da primeira edição do The CRPG Book (arrumei na segunda)

Por isso que esta questão do apagamento é tão importante para mim.

Décadas de vídeos, artigos, ensaios e livros sobre a história dos jogos que não se pareciam em nada com as minhas experiências me fizeram apagá-las — pensando que o que eu vivi não era importante… era uma coisa pequena e local.

A verdadeira história dos vídeo games era outra coisa:

Duas crianças estadunidenses ganhando um Nintendo 64 de Natal

E essa imagem homogeneizada da história dos jogos está se espalhando. Pessoas do mundo todo absorvem ela pela mídia americana e por fontes escritas por americanos — Wikipedia, Netflix, podcasts, livros, documentários, etc. Ou então por influencers locais que repetem as mesmas informações sem pensar — como se trocar Pokémon no recreio da escola com um GameBoy original, jogo original e um cabo Link (só o cabo já era uma fortuna) fosse a realidade brasileira.

É tão alienante quando assistir Friends e achar que aquilo era a vida do brasileiro médio nos anos 90. Mesmo nos EUA era algo idealizado.

Por isso achei tão poderosa a exposição em Taiwan que abre este artigo. Foi pequena, em uma biblioteca local, quase como um projeto pessoal dos curadores. Mas eu admiro profundamente o que conseguiram fazer — naquele espaço, os clássicos taiwaneses foram merecidamente exibidos entre os clássicos internacionais. Quanto mais espaços assim existirem, mais difícil será para que a história deles seja apagada.

Obrigado pela leitura!

— —

Obrigado também ao Belmonteiro, por me ajudar a traduzir este artigo do original em inglês.

]]> <![CDATA[The Gentrification of Video Game History]]> https://felipepepe.medium.com/the-gentrification-of-video-game-history-dfe11f1e08ae?source=rss-f5dd0a54b863------2 https://medium.com/p/dfe11f1e08ae Fri, 03 Jan 2025 12:35:55 GMT 2026-05-06T04:26:30.293Z We’re not all suburban kids who got a Nintendo 64 for Christmas

Last year, the New Taipei City Youth Library organised an exposition about the Golden Age of RPGs, celebrating games from 1980 to 1999.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYOc8jwmItE

It had all the classics you might expect — Wizardry, Ultima, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, Diablo, Fallout, Chrono Trigger, Baldur’s Gate, etc… But also many you probably never heard about, such as Legend of the Sword and Fairy, Xuan-Yuan Sword, Heroes of Jin Yong and The Twin Heroes.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaMq4l7xuXk

You see, during the late 90s and early 00s, Taiwan was a powerhouse of game development, arguably only behind the US & Japan. They produced hundreds of games, played by millions of Chinese language speakers, going as far as influencing local literature and TV. Modern hits like Naraka: Bladepoint are openly advertised as spiritual successors of that lineage.

But we don’t talk about Taiwanese games. For a myriad of reasons, from language barriers to plain old sinophobia, they are not part of the “video game canon”. They don’t matter, it’s a small, local thing.

And is not just Taiwan.

Which games matter and which don’t

In 2019, Mia Consalvo & Christopher A. Paul published Real Games. The book examines why some games are seem as legitimate and worth talking about but not others — why Counter-Strike, StarCraft and EverQuest are “real games”, but Kim Kardashian: Hollywood and Mystery Case Files aren’t.

Real Games: What’s Legitimate and What’s Not in Contemporary Videogames

The book identifies three main areas that are commonly discussed when assessing if a game is “real” or not — the game’s pedigree (its developer), the contents of the game itself, and its payment structure.

This helps us understand how games like Free Fire can reach 150 million daily users but have basically zero presence in gamer circles & media — it’s a free-to-play battle royale mobile game created in Vietnam.

Free Fire

But I think the book lacks a fourth area, rarely discussed openly, but just as important: Who is playing these games.

In the case of Kim Kardashian: Hollywood and Mystery Case Files, it’s mostly women. For Free Fire, is mostly low-income people from the global south — Latin Americans, South & South-East Asians, etc.

The book itself paves the way for this:

“Early scholarship showed by example and omission which games were worthy of study, and which were not. […] It’s also likely that these games were the ones we wrote about the most because they were the ones that we ourselves were interested in playing.”

If we live in a US hegemony, where US-based media, academia and culture dominates the conversation, then it’s only logical that the examples & omissions come mostly from Americans writing about their interests.

India has more than 4 times the population of the US. They also play games, of course, so they have huge hits like Real Cricket 20, a mobile game with 50+ million downloads.

Ad for Real Cricket 20

But popular games in India will never be discussed outside of the country unless they’re first presented via a US-based media like IGN, because few non-Indians read Indian games media — even if it is in English. China is another great example — Black Myth: Wukong isn’t the first Chinese hit on Steam, its impact comes from being the first one to grab Western media & gamer’s attention.

Different nationalities all have their own game history, their cultural memory, with their own hits and particularities, but they’re rendered invisible to anyone but themselves.

Even if we have things in common — and we often have — we rarely communicate directly. Over time we’re gaslighted into believing these shared elements aren’t that important, maybe they don’t even exist… our common history is erased as we submit to the default, US-centric one.

There are many examples of this — one of the most common is how Europe’s home computer scene in the 80s is often erased and replaced by the events of The Video Game Crash of 1983, an event mostly restricted to North America. The Amstrad CPC, C64, ZX Spectrum, Amiga, demoscene, etc… all get replaced by the all-mighty NES.

And if that’s happening to Europe, just imagine the rest of the world.

The erasure of different ways of playing

To be clear, this isn’t about individual games. It’s a more complex issue, that compromises our understanding of game history, culture & identity

For example, one of the most iconic images of gaming in the ’90s and ‘00s were LAN parties. A bunch of people taking their computers/consoles to events or friends' houses to play games like Doom, Halo, Quake, Unreal, etc.

Linares Party 2005, a LAN Party in Spain

As celebrated as these LAN Parties are in media, it’s important to remember that owning a gaming PC was still extremely expensive for most of the world at the time — especially for those in the Global South.

There, unless you came from a wealthy background, it’s likely that you instead went to places called LAN houses, Cyber Cafes, Locadora de Jogos, PC Bangs, Game Clubs, Игровухи, 包机房, etc. There, you would pay hourly to play, either on PC or consoles. In US media it’s an image often associated with Korean e-sports, but it’s far more present globally than LAN parties ever were.

Brazil
Vietnam
Iraq
Russia
Egypt
China
Indonesia

Looking at these images you might say they’re the same thing — a bunch of people in a room playing games together. But think about the business and cultures behind them.

  • In a LAN Party, you have people who purchase computers and who purchase games. They gather once in a while, play multiplayer games together, and then return home with their PCs. There, they might play other styles of games, more single-player focused.
  • In a LAN House, players did not purchase the computers or the games. With less people buying those, it is harder for a local industry to develop. And if they are only playing there, in a multiplayer environment, paying by the hour, it’s less likely they will play lengthy single-player games such 60+ hour RPGs.

Moreover, LAN houses and game clubs are permanent places. Social hubs where people gather every day after school or work, similar to an arcade. The communal aspect leads to particularities such as shared memory cards / save files and local tournaments, while the high piracy rates meant traditional metrics such as official sales numbers are irrelevant when analyzing these environments.

So LAN Parties and LAN Houses might look the same, but they represent entirely different economic realities, that lead to different gaming cultures, social interactions and business models.

The erasure of different business models

A good example is the rise of MMOs during the late ’90s and early ’00s. The business model for American MMOs like Ultima Online & EverQuest was quite costly for the player. They would buy the game in a box, buy the expansions in a box, and then pay a monthly subscription to play the game.

There are SO MANY EverQuest expansions

In South Korea, people played on PC Bangs — the local version of Internet Cafés. They did not own the computers, so why would they own the games? And why would they pay a monthly subscription on top of an hourly fee?

So Korean companies had to try different business solutions. They first tried charging the PC Bang companies license fees so their users had free access to the game, then ended up with the free-to-play model.

MapleStory would reach over 250 million accounts

A different business model from the US, adapted for a different reality than that of the US. It sounds obvious, but for years free-to-play was vilified as something uniquely evil — while gatekeeping online games behind owning a PC and paying $60 plus expansions plus subscription was the morally superior way — a stance obviously taken by people who could afford all that.

Moreover, it is a stance that ends up obfuscating how many aggressive monetization techniques originated from “premium” American online games, such as 1986's Habitat’s daily login bonus.

Back to Mia Consalvo & Christopher A. Paul’s Real Games:

“The general reticence of those who talk about and cover videogames online to take free-to-play games seriously has been a result of a particular set of assumptions about how games are supposed to work and what they are supposed to be.”

Asian free-to-play MMOs like MapleStory and Fantasy Journey to the West have always been more popular than World of Warcraft, but prejudice erased them. Just as well, it did not benefit Western developers, journalists and academics to concede that they weren’t the centre of the MMO world. So you have decades of academic works that are aware of the size of Asian titles but do not engage with them. This led subsequent works to also ignore them — after all, if they were important, surely the reference works would’ve examined them, right?

While gaming audiences grew exponentially the past decade, with mobile free-to-play (including gacha) games conquering the Global South, the dire situation of games media and academia means few new voices get added to the conversation. A lot of the media discourse seems stuck in 2012, with the same people talking about the same games to the same audience, with the same biases and interests.

The erasure of informality

To this day there are LAN Houses and game clubs in Brazil where people gather to play PS2 soccer games modded with updated teams — the legendary Bomba Patch, arguably the best-selling game in Latin America.

Super Bomba Patch 2025–100% Atualizado!

“That’s not a game, it’s a mod!” — types the reply guy in the replies.

Yes, it’s a mod. The most popular games in Brazil are mods of all sorts — from adding Portuguese language to games like Skyrim & Breath of the Wild, to elaborate full conversions. PokéTibia is a Pokémon MMO with more players than many official MMOs, while GTA Motovlog is a branch of extremely popular GTA San Andreas ports for Android focused on driving bikes. It’s what happens when you have talented devs but no local structure to support them to make their own games.

GTA Motovlog

Most Brazilians know about these games. But if you ask them “what’s the most popular game from Brazil”, they will struggle to answer … maybe an indie game on Steam? After all, we’ve been told over and over again that GTA Motovlog and Bomba Patch aren’t “real games”.

Counter-Strike, Day-Z, Garry’s Mod, DOTA… these are all mods as well, but they are considered “real games”. Why?

Here I would like to bring up another essential reading about games, Brendan Keogh’s The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist (BTW, it’s free!)

A lot of people make videogames in a lot of different contexts, and some of those people make money doing so. Yet, the legacy of aggressive formalization persists and still strongly influences perceptions of just what videogame creation is among researchers, policymakers, students, and videogame makers themselves.

The first video games were technological experiments and hobby projects, shared freely in disks, code sheets and magazines around the world. Corporations formed over time, but this hacker culture never went away — it carried over to BBS games, MUDs, Freeware, browser games, Flash games, mods, homebrews, open-source projects, crackers, emulators, demoscenes, private servers, fangames, MiSTer, bootleg consoles & games, RPG Maker, BYOND, AGS, Ren’Py, bitsy, etc…

All of those are continuously erased by the “industry” side, which enforces a formalized, sanitized, easily digestible and — especially — fully monetized concept of video games.

That’s why Counter-Strike is considered a “real game” but Bomba Patch isn’t.

The erasure of self

The first time I played Pokémon was on an emulator at my local LAN House. I spent countless hours there, I know they’re an important part of Brazil’s culture, their influence has been extensively documented in local news, essays and documentaries.

And I spoke with people from Korea, Spain, China, Russia, Italy, the Philippines, Malaysia, etc who all had their own local equivalents. But even so, when I first wrote about the rise of multiplayer games for the CRPG Book, I didn’t mention them.

Excerpt from the CRPG Book 1st Edition (I fixed it on the 2nd ed)

This is why this topic is so important to me.

Decades of videos, articles, essays and books on game history that failed to mention experiences like mine made me erase my own experiences — to think what I lived didn’t matter… it was a small, local thing.

TRUE video game history was something else:

Two kids get a Nintendo 64 for Christmas

This homogenized, US-like image of gaming history is spreading. People across the world learn it from big US-based sources — Wikipedia, Netflix, influencers, podcasts, books, etc — or from local influencers parroting those sources. Some Brazilian influencers now say things like “in 1998 we were all playing Pokémon on original hardware and trading monsters at school with the Link Cable”, erasing our cultural memories and replacing them with an idealized copy of US-based experiences.

This is why I admire that exhibition in Taipei so much.

It was small, held at a local library, like a passion project from the curators. But in that space, their history is proudly told and their games are rightfully placed among the worldwide, all-time classics. The more spaces like that exist, the harder their history will be to erase.

Thanks for reading!

]]> <![CDATA[The history of 橙光 / 66RPG]]> https://felipepepe.medium.com/the-history-of-%E6%A9%99%E5%85%89-66rpg-3d3879a105ed?source=rss-f5dd0a54b863------2 https://medium.com/p/3d3879a105ed Sun, 07 Apr 2024 08:30:52 GMT 2024-04-26T22:08:13.346Z 橙光 / 66RPG — How an RPG Maker forum became the “Roblox of Visual Novels”

(This was originally a Twitter thread that I’ve expanded upon and edited so people can easily find & read it)

I’ll start with a disclaimer: I do not speak Chinese.

That said, I find it absurd that there’s no English information on this, so let me do my best to tell you the history of 橙光 / 66RPG — a website with 80M active users, 8,000 paid developers and 100,000+ games.

It all began in 2005, when 柳柳/LiuLiu, a student at Tsinghua University in Beijing, created www.66RPG.com as a forum to share RPG Maker info.

The forum in 2006, taken from the Internet Archive

LiuLiu had a lot of skill with RPG Maker, sharing various scripts and tutorials. His first game, Legend of the Black Sword (2005), drew a lot of attention, and 66RPG soon became a hub for China’s emerging indie dev scene, where people could share game design tips, learn how to make/rip art and play each other's games.

It grew to over 1,500 RPG Maker games, including several that became cult classics in China — here’s a short selection:

  • 黑暗圣剑传说 / Legend of the Black Sword (2005). A fan-made remake of 魔武王 / Dark Knight Saga, a 1994 Taiwanese RPG. It was created by LiuLiu and showed what was possible to do with RPG Maker.
Legend of the Black Sword / 黑暗圣剑传说
  • 仙剑奇侠传之灵儿续传 / The Legend of Sword and Fairy: Ling’er’s Story (2006), a fan-made sequel to the first Chinese Paladin / Sword & Fairy RPG, an all-time classic across Asia.
仙剑奇侠传之灵儿续传 / The Legend of Sword and Fairy: Ling’er’s Story
  • 梦幻西游单机版之梦幻群侠传 / Fantasy Westward Journey Standalone Version (2006), a single-player version of Fantasy Westward Journey / 梦幻西游, one of China’s most popular MMORPGs.
梦幻西游单机版之梦幻群侠传 / Fantasy Westward Journey Standalone Version
  • 雨血之死镇 / Rainblood: Town of Death (2007), a high-profile game inspired by Wuxia novels and arguably China’s 1st indie title to reach the West (it was officially released in English in 2010).
雨血之死镇 / Rainblood: Town of Death
  • 格斗纹章 / Fighting Emblem (2011), a Tower Defense/RPG by LiuLiu using characters from series like Street Fighter, Final Fantasy, King of Fighters and Hokuto no Ken.
格斗纹章 / Fighting Emblem

(You can go here to find a Hall of Fame of Chinese RPG Maker games).

After many server issues, attacks from hackers & trolls and even a temporary shutdown in 2009, 柳柳/LiuLiu began to turn the website into a business that no longer depended on RPG Maker.

The first step was creating their own RPG Maker-like editor. Their initial attempt was called 彩虹文字游戏制作精灵 (Rainbow Text Game Creator), a free Visual Novel maker that offered additional features and assets at a cost (that could only be paid with 66RPG VIP credits).

彩虹文字游戏制作精灵 (Rainbow Text Game Creator), 2011

After several updates, this editor became the 橙光文字游戏制作工具 (Orange Light Text-Adventure Game-making Tool), advertised as a fully free tool that allowed anyone to “make a Visual Novel in a single day”.

橙光文字游戏制作工具 (Orange Light Text-Adventure Game-making Tool), 2013

This new editor proved itself quite successful. By 2014 the RPG Maker content of 66RPG was moved to a different section of the site (and later removed entirely), while the front page changed into 橙光游戏 (Orange Light Games), a site specialized in Visual Novels made with the new editor —it hosted over 5,600 of them by the end of 2014.

66RPG.com in 2014 — the highlighted game is a VN based on the CDrama adaptation of the first Gu Jian (古剑奇谭) game

Isabella Jiangcheng at SuperPixel wrote a great article in English examining this new identity and some of the stand-out games.

She writes that the majority of users “are women and use the site as a tool to express their romantic fantasies and desires” — what many call “otome games” — but also notes that the website also allowed for content that could be “improper and sensitive on the modern Chinese Internet”:

Espionage: The Red Route was the first piece to break people’s view of 66RPG as being just a fangirl’s pajama party. The game adapted from the real-life stories of a legendary covert agent Yuan Shu, depicting the intelligence warfare during the second Sino-Japanese war, the China theater of WWII.
潜伏之赤途 / Espionage: The Red Route (2013)

This new version of 66RPG quickly grew in users and features. They added a payment system to reward creators for successful games, made so they could be played on mobile and also added a licensing system.

This is one of the most interesting aspects of 橙光 — you can license their assets, get editors to help you, sell your VN to players and license it for adaptations — films, books, comics, TV & audio dramas, etc.

For example, 绝世千金 / Unique Lady is a 2014 VN that became a TV drama in 2019.

绝世千金 / Unique Lady (2014)

On March 29 2024, 66RPG/橙光 made a post giving more details about its size and operations: https://66rpg.com/t_114/Uzo1XtcI338.shtml…

It has 100,000+ Visual Novels, 80 million active users and 8,000 authors under contract. It also has 12 editors in charge of recruiting new writers, with all content split into 5 sub-genres.

The modern 橙光 editor

66RPG/橙光 is now a media powerhouse. Even NetEase is trying to rival it with its own Visual Novel portal, 易次元 / Yi Ci Yuan, which currently holds over 5,000 games.

NetEase’s 易次元 / Yi Ci Yuan

Of course, it’s not all sunshine, as there’s debate about how fair 橙光’s business practices are. Like Roblox, it’s a platform for creating & publishing games that owns the copyright of anything made with it.

Also, as you might have guessed by now, unfortunately, you likely cannot play any of these. Not only they aren’t translated, but you also need a Mainland China phone number to play.

Still, I think it’s a fascinating side of video games most people never even imagined existed.

It’s worth remembering that there are various of these “isolated worlds” out there — Japan had the Game Atsumaru (ゲームアツマール) website, a hub for indie developers where millions of people enjoyed games like Your Turn To Die — Death Game By Majority and Our Island (ぼくらのアイランド), played over 35 million times.

ぼくらのアイランド

Sadly, Game Atsumaru closed down in June 2023. It died as it lived —unknown to Western gamers, critics and media. It’s as if Newgrounds died and no one outside the US reported on it or even knew it existed.

Finally, if you enjoyed this article, I invite you to check out my other articles on the history of Chinese RPGs, the history of Korean RPGs, the birth of Japanese RPGs, the history of MUDs & MMOs or follow me on Twitter. Cheers!

]]> <![CDATA[How a 25-year-old German MMO became a Pokémon fangame]]> https://felipepepe.medium.com/how-a-25-year-old-german-mmo-became-a-pok%C3%A9mon-fangame-6ac8d60c4442?source=rss-f5dd0a54b863------2 https://medium.com/p/6ac8d60c4442 Fri, 30 Sep 2022 09:32:07 GMT 2022-09-30T12:36:52.844Z AKA Brazilians strikes again

When talking about the pioneer MMORPGs of the 90s — Meridian 59, Ultima Online, EverQuest, etc — there is a name that is often overlooked: Tibia, a German free-to-play MMO first released in 1997.

More than just curiosity or historical artefact, Tibia has one of the longest and most interesting stories among MMOs.

Tibia 1.0, from January 1997

The game was created by students at the University of Regensburg in Germany. In 1995 they began planning to develop something similar to MUDs (text-based online games), but with graphics and more elements from single-player RPGs:

“We were inspired by the Ultima series, especially Ultima VI and the possibility to interact with everything in the world of the game. Every item that was there could be taken and used — we wanted to combine that with the possibility to be on the move together with others in the game world.”
— Stephan Vogler, CipStudio’s Founder

Just like Ultima, Tibia has a very interactive world, allowing you to move objects around and combine them. Even on the very first version you could combine flour with milk and place it over the fire to bake cookies.

While Tibia would go online on January 7th, 1997 (predating MMOs like Ultima Online and Everquest), the truth is that this first version was an alpha release with barely any content. It would take six more months until enemies and NPCs were added, and only in May 1998 would classes, skills and spells be introduced.

The game ran on the university’s servers, and for a while, it was just a hobby project, with new content being added by volunteers such as Arndt Bednarzik, aka Knightmare:

“When I started Tibia it was quite different and 10 people online at once was ‘crowded’. I was active in the growing community and with the transition to a Tibia similar to that what you know I became one of the first gamemasters. When Cip (not Cipsoft by then) was looking for help to edit parts of their world I volunteered. The first version of the worldbuilding tool was incredibly clumsy and difficult. Many volunteers gave up without submitting anything significant. […] When Tibia turned from a student project into something commercial I, along with others, was tasked to supervise some of the gamemasters. All the while I continued to contribute content like areas and NPCs. When Tibia became more and more a success Cipsoft decided to hire employees for certain tasks and I was asked to join as the first content creator.” — Knightmare
Tibia around 2000-2001

In 2001 the developers started their own company, CipSoft, and Tibia began to really grow into a professional MMO, played around the globe.

The game client was very small (about 4MB in 2001), meaning it could be downloaded even over very slow Internet connections. The controls and gameplay were also simple, and basic combat only required you to right-click on an enemy. And it could run on even the weakest computers.

“When the Internet Café I went to first started, the owner didn’t have money to invest on graphics cards. Only 2 of the 10 machines had graphics cards, so the business survived on people going there to copy documents and on Tibia players.” — William Oliveira

Above all, it was a free game, while other MMOs like EverQuest required you to buy the base game, multiple expansions, and then a monthly fee. All this combined to make Tibia an extremely accessible game.

In turn, it also led to some prejudice among gamers, as the game was seen as crude and simplistic, so primitive it didn’t even have sound (yes, Tibia didn’t have music or sound effects until 2022). “Go play Tibia” was used as an insult among hardcore gamers, just like “go play Candy Crush” or “go play Minecraft” would be years later.

Still, the game had features that would be considered quite hardcore today. For example, you needed to type incantations like “exevo flam hur” to cast spells, and type your dialogue when speaking with NPCs — saying “hi” to start talking then type keywords like “buy torch”, “sell rapier”, “dungeon”, “king”, etc. NPCs could only talk to one player at a time, leading to long lines in front of key NPCs.

Originally designed for a few dozen players, Tibia is an MMO that feels closer to single-player games like Ultima or old-school JRPGs — it’s not as dependent on social interaction as Ultima Online, or on group battles as EverQuest.

The game’s quests were particularly well-designed for an MMO of the time: the Lighthouse Quest in the city of Thais had you find a book hinting at a secret dungeon. You had to locate the secret entrance, activated by a hidden switch, then cooperate with another player to activate pressure plates that unlock a teleporter. This teleporter leads to a room with two captive Cyclops, who protect a powerful warhammer and a shield. For context, this was in 1999, when the newly-released EverQuest only had quests like “bring me 5 wolf fangs”.

The switch for the secret entrance is hidden under a box.

However, this small-scale design led to issues dealing with its sudden spike in popularity in the 2000s. Its servers had no queue system, so when they were full players would spend several minutes repeatedly typing their login & passwords as fast as possible, trying to enter the server.

To monetize the game, a premium subscription was added later in 2001, offering an extensive list of benefits from bonus XP gain and faster HP regen to exclusive quests, areas, items, spells and in-game housing. More than half of the game’s cities are only accessible to premium players.

The very first area of the game, Rookgaard, was expanded with the infamous King’s Bridge, which only premium players could cross. It would lead into a special area with special shops, quests and dungeons, giving a headstart to premium players.

A new client and UI would be implemented in 2002, and Tibia would peak around 2007, with about 250,000 monthly active players. Some players complain that afterwards the game changed too much and lost its RPG roots, with CipSoft removing all GMs, streamlining the overall game experience and pushing too hard on the “pay-to-win” aspect.

Tibia after the 2002 client update

Tibia is still ongoing, and it’s particularly popular among Brazilians and Polish players, who together make up more than half of the active players. In 2015, Cipsoft added a premium currency called Tibia Coins, which is purchased with real money but can also be exchanged back into money.

While item-selling always existed, the currency became a new venue for players seeking to profit. Mafia-like guilds began to appear, hunting and repeatedly killing characters unless they paid monthly protection fees in Tibia Coins. This in turn led to anti-extorsion guilds, and large-scale wars inside servers — some actually financed by real-world money.

One of such investors spent more than 50,000 Brazilian Reais (about 10,000 USD) over two months to finance his guild:

“It’s a hobby, right? People who go out to party also spend money. I work the entire day, while kids have lots of time. It was a way for me to help them, and then be able to play when I arrived home at night. […] I hired 20 Venezuelans to play. They earned more money than their parents, they were paid about 4 US dollars per hour. People think it’s absurd to spend so much money on this game, but you can get part of it back, there are items that are worth over 10,000 reais, if you control the server is easier to adquire these items.”
Tibia in 2022

Like any MMO, there are many other stories of iconic events across the game’s long history — the Sword of Fury that no one knows how to obtain, the mysterious door that only Lv 999 characters can cross, the Serpentine Tower puzzle people are still trying to solve, in-game weddings, guild wars, hacks, etc. A particularly bizarre one is Tibiaball: since the game allows players to push objects around, they began using the feature to play soccer tournaments… using the massive corpse of a bear:

The other half of Tibia’s history: Open Tibia

Everything so far is part of the official history of Tibia, the one developers are happily celebrating this year in the game’s 25th anniversary.

Still, Tibia’s biggest legacy might not be on its official servers, but rather on its offsprings: in 2001 a group of fans began reverse-engineering the game and creating an open-source client called OpenTibia. By 2004 the first private servers began appearing, led by Tibia Dark Age (TDA).

Over the years, the project evolved into several branches and was used to create thousands of servers. Some are ready-to-run packs that anyone can use to start their own classic Tibia server, others add new custom features or try to match the developments on the official servers. Even a mobile version was made, something the official Tibia does not support.

OTClientV8 on Android

To give a sense of the scale of Open Tibia servers, the otland.net forums were created in 2007 to gather people interested in the OT project. From 2007 to 2022 over 230,000 people registered in the forum and 10,000 OT servers were advertised on it.

According to OTserverlist.org, as of 2022, there are 495 servers in activity. Monitoring it over a week, the combined player count regularly goes over 20,000 online players, while the official Tibia servers peaks at 15,000 players. And some of the biggest OT servers block tracking to hide their numbers and avoid legal issues. So far more people play on OpenTibia servers than on official Tibia, despite both being free.

These OT servers come in all shapes and forms — some are simple recreations of the official servers but with increased XP rates, others add small changes like new classes and spells, and some offer entirely different experiences, such as capture the flag tournaments, PvP arenas, and recreations of famous series such as One Piece, Dragon Ball Z and Naruto (these are often called ATS — Alternative Tibia Servers).

Naruto Story, based on Naruto.
OtPiece, based on One Piece.

Some would last only a few days until the creator would give up — never visited by a single player — others would gather thousands of players over many years of activity.

Among these, the most famous today are the Pokémon servers. Also called PokéTibia, these servers began appearing in 2008, pioneered by a Brazilian project called Pokémon Online, created by SvkE (aka TuRtLe):

It contained the original 151 pokémons, allowing players to capture them, use them to battle across a large open world and even ride them. In many ways, it’s similar to what Nintendo would do years later with Pokémon Legends: Arceus. However, Pokémon Online was famous for being extremely difficult, requiring hundreds of hours of effort to capture the most powerful pokémons. The most hardcore players would parade across town with rare pokémons like Dragonite and Snorlax.

These servers follow a similar monetization system to Tibia, being free to play but having a monthly premium subscription that unlocked useful features, such as being able to fly on your pokémon or teleport across the world. This premium time could be purchased with real-world money and then traded with other players for in-game money or favours. Players who couldn’t afford the premium price would grind for weeks to make enough in-game money to buy a premium subscription, and then record videos and screenshots of them flying over the world with their rare pokémons.

One of the jobs that was created was the role of healer. They appeared because it was too expensive to buy potions to heal your pokémon while hunting, it would take a significant amount of money. So you would hire other players as healers, and when your pokémon was low on life they would heal them. The only pokémons that could heal were Wigglypuff, Chansey, Jigglypuff, Clefairy and Clefable, if I remenber correctly. As a reward, they would be paid 1,000 dollars [the in-game currency, not USD] per hour, and would get all the loot that other pokémons dropped — incluiding evolution stones, which were the rarest of all items. But it wasn’t really like that, usually if an evolution stone dropped people would hide it… I did that.” — InfoGames 67

The game grew to such popularity that it was running seven different servers by 2011 (OT servers support about 1,000 to 2,000 players) when it was hit by a Cease and Desist letter from Nintendo and had to close down. On the final three days before closing, the admins changed the rules to make everything easier and for more shiny pokémon to appear, creating a rush of people doing everything they wanted before the server went down.

Pokémon Online SvkE would soon be replaced by PokeXGames, which is still running as of 2022, now sporting 11 servers. Dozens of other PokéTibia would also appear and evolve over the years, adding new features such as improved UI, achievements and new pokémons.

PokeXGames in 2022

In some ways, these games became more polished than the official Tibia. PxG is kept by a team of over 100 staff members and volunteers (Tibia has 59 staff members), almost all from Latin America or Poland. It has features such as a fully-voiced tutorial where Professor Oak guides new players through the game mechanics and first quests. Meanwhile, Tibia’s tutorial just asks you to choose a class and grind in a small area until level 8.

Moreover, while Tibia’s four classes are all combat-focused (Knight, Paladin, Druid & Sorcerer), PxG goes for a more diverse approach, offering four professions: Adventurer, Professor, Engineer and Stylist. While all can battle, the Adventurer is specialized in exploring, Engineer is focused on mining and crafting, the Professor can manage students who do tasks for him, and the Stylist makes money by crafting exclusive accessories for pokémon to wear:

Your move, Fortnite.

While these servers are now a profitable commercial enterprise of dubious legality at best, they are also free, run on any computer, and are available in languages like English, Portuguese, Spanish and Polish (to date, not a single mainline Pokémon game was ever released in Portuguese or Polish).

It is not hard to see why they grew so popular over the last decade and might be the only Pokémon game some people ever played.

]]> <![CDATA[The history of RPG Maker & its games]]> https://felipepepe.medium.com/the-history-of-rpg-maker-its-games-c93685f41ae6?source=rss-f5dd0a54b863------2 https://medium.com/p/c93685f41ae6 Sat, 11 Dec 2021 16:37:53 GMT 2026-04-26T12:17:15.110Z RPG Maker: History & Games

A look at the last three decades of this legendary indie dev tool

Creating a tool to allow regular gamers to make their own game is not a new idea. It has been done several times, from ancient titles like Eamon (1980) and Pinball Construction Set (1982) to things like ZZT (1991), Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures (1993), Neverwinter Nights (2002) and Roblox (2006).

Marvel & DC heroes fight Galactus in a fan game for Forgotten Realms: Unlimited Adventures (1993)

But RPG Maker is the absolute king of this hill.

Its history spans three decades across multiple platforms, with thousands of released games — both free and commercial — including dozens of all-time classics.

Packed with pre-made art, music and gameplay systems, the over 30 versions of RPG Maker allow anyone to easily create a JRPG in the style of 16-bit titles like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. A user can import their own art and customize every part of the gameplay, or just use the included assets and systems to focus on other parts of the game.

A map from RPG Maker VX Ace, build using only included assets

Of course, it wasn’t long before people began ripping sprites, music and other assets from their favourite series to create their own Earthbound sequel or Dragon Ball Z RPG. This is definitely a huge draw of the tool and the reason why many first began making their own game — especially in the 2000s, when packs of ripped resources for RPG Maker were widely available (since then, companies like Nintendo began to DMCA big fangames like the Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes romhack and parts of the RPG Maker community began a strong “no-rip” policy).

However, this also led to a lot of prejudice towards the tool, as people would find ripped assets on commercial RPG Maker games, or get tired of seeing Steam and itch.io being flooded with hundreds of poor-quality Final Fantasy clones using the same default RPG Maker art.

Still, these are just side-effects of the popularity and accessibility of the tool — so friendly that it was the first tool of many developers. And in the hands of skilled developers, the tool can be pushed to its limits to create something truly unique.

So let’s take a look into the history of RPG Maker, and highlight some of its most important games.

The birth of the maker

The story of RPG Maker (or RPGツクール) begins back in January of 1987, when Japan’s Login magazine published Adventure Maker (アドベンチャーツクール), a tool that allowed users to create text-adventures for the PC-88 Japanese computer.

As it was common at the time, the software’s entire code was printed on the magazine’s page — four pages of code for people to type into their own computers and use!

The full code for 1987’s Adventure Maker

The software was successful, and the magazine would create other versions of it, such as 1987’s Dungeon Manjiro (ダンジョン万次郎), a tool to create Wizardry clones, and 1988’s Mamirin (まみりん), that could create RPGs in the style of Ultima. The name “Danjyon Manjirō” is a pun with the name of John Manjirō, one of the first Japanese to visit the US. Mamirin was also named after a historical figure, the explorer Mamiya Rinzō.

The main menu, map editor and dungeon editor of Mamirin

While they had a few interesting features such as a custom sprite creator, these tools were still very primitive. Dungeons, for example, could only have walls or doors. Similarly, NPCs could only repeat a few lines of text.

Login magazine was published by the giant ASCII Corporation, and in 1990 the company would release RPG Construction Tool: Dante (RPGコンストラクションツール Dante). Released for MSX2 computers, it was a much more powerful tool, allowing users to add music, customize spells and details like the stat progression, as well as craft complex stories.

A scan from MSX Magazine #2 of 1990, explaining how to use Dante

As a side-note, Dungeon Manjiro, Mamirin and Dante were also distributed in Japan via software vending machines called TAKERU. These ATM-like machines were early digital distribution platforms — you would insert money, select the software, and the machine would download it and copy it onto a blank floppy disk or CD-ROM:

After Dante’s release, several sequels and ports were produced, for platforms as diverse as the PC-98 Japanese computer, the Super Nintendo / Super Famicom, Windows, PlayStation and Gameboy Color.

The series would also shorten its title to RPGツクール, or RPG Tsukūru — again a pun, mixing the sounds of “tsukuru” (to make) and “tool”.

RPGツクール Super Dante, the Super Nintendo / Super Famicom version

And while RPG Maker is the most famous branch of the series, ASCII also published several other “Maker” tools, such as Fighter Maker, Action Game Maker, Love Sim Maker and Shooting Maker.

Originally a Japan-only title, RPG Maker first reached the West in the early 2000s, when a Russian student called ‘Don Miguel’ released fan translations of RPG Maker 95 and 2000. He was threatened with a lawsuit and forced to stop distributing them, but it was too late — his translations were already spread all across the Internet.

The splash screen for Don Miguel’s translation of RPG Maker 2000

An official English release would arrive only in 2005, when a company called Protexis released RPG Maker XP in English. If you’re interested, PC Gamer has a nice article detailing the evolution of each English version, and how the community reacted to each.

The games

After this brief intro establishing how RPG Maker appeared, let’s take a look at its main attraction: the games. The list below is not a ranking of the best things ever made in RPG Maker, but rather some of the most important and iconic, that represent the evolution of the games over the years.

WARNING: Many of these games involve adult themes.

Cock-A-Doodle-Doo (クック・ドゥ・ドゥル・ドゥー, 1995)

It was common in Japan to have magazines and game publishers create design contests for their readers/gamers — that’s how many industry legends began, such as Dragon Quest’s creator Yuji Horii.

In 1995, ASCII released RPG Maker: Super Dante, a version for the SNES / Super Famicon, and held a game design contest to celebrate it.

They received 3,447 entries. Yes, over three thousand Japanese in 1995 made a game in RPG Maker and sent it to a contest!

The winner was Cock-A-Doodle-Doo, which got around the severe limitations the tool had by making a comedy RPG where you play as Pal, the pet rooster of a rich boy gone broke. Together with a cat (that calls himself “God of Death”), you must work to help the kid recover his finances, alternating between the three characters.

Arguably the first noteworthy RPG Maker game, it was distributed for free using the Japan-only Satellaview modem for the Super Famicom. Later it was remade for RPG Maker Dante 98 (released in 1992 for the Japanese PC-98 computer). You can use this Dante 98 Player to try it on Windows computers.

Corpse Party (コープスパーティー, 1996)

Created by Makoto “Kedwin” Kedouin in RPG Maker Dante 98, a 1992 version of the tool for the PC-98 Japanese computer, Corpse Party was the winner of ASCII’s second contest. And it showed just how flexible RPG Maker could be.

A horror game set in a Japanese High School, it’s heavily focused on dialogue and atmosphere, abandoning most RPG elements — characters have stats, but they’re mostly useless, and there’s only one battle in the entire game. It established many tropes of the RPG Maker horror genre: the simple key-and-lock puzzles, a monster that chases the player, and multiple endings based on which characters survived.

Corpse Party became a poster boy for RPG Maker, an icon among doujin (hobbyist games) and a cultural phenomenon in Japan, with seven sequels and several best-selling adaptations into manga, anime, novels, drama CDs and live-action movies.

The original PC-98 version was never translated, but the game was later remade in RPG Maker XP and then translated.

Azusa 999 (1997)

After Corpse Party, RPG Maker began being used to create all kinds of games and experiences. Azusa 999 is one of them: an award-winning story about suicide, created in 1997 by Ichiro Sogabe, a 19-year old Japanese student.

Set inside an afterlife train, with no combat or puzzles, Azusa 999 is about meeting several other characters, learning about their lives and the choices that led them there. A precursor to “walking simulators”, it’s a heavy and extremely sad game, but its message is a hopeful one.

The game was translated into English in 2020.

Peret em Heru: For the Prisoners (囚人へのペル・エム・フル, 1998)

Inspired by Corpse Party, this horror RPG has an obsessed professor using a group of eleven tourists to explore a hidden chamber in the Giza Pyramid.

The game has a few RPG elements such as random battles, stats and level ups, but the focus is on solving its puzzles by using Adventure game-like commands (Pull, Push, Take, Crouch, etc) to save as many of the characters as possible. Created by Makoto Yaotani using RPG Maker Dante 98 II, it won several game awards and became a cult classic.

Only available for PC-98, it was translated by fans in 2014 and can be downloaded bundled with an emulator.

Palette (パレット, 1998)

Winner of the 4th annual ASCII contest, Palette shows the RPG Maker tool began to be pushed further and further into new territories. Made by Nishida Yoshitaka in RPG Maker 95, Palette tells the story of a psychiatrist trying to help a girl that lost her sight and memory in an accident.

The game has no combat and plays like an adventure/puzzle game, asking you to explore scenes in the girl’s “mind palace” and collect key items to recover her memories without causing too much emotional stress. It was remade for PlayStation 1 in 2001, under the name Forget me not -パレット.

Palette got an English translation in 2012.

A Blurred Line (2001)

One of the first big western games to be made with RPG Maker, A Blurred Line is often voted one of the best free titles created with the tool. It puts you in control of Talan, a man on the run, accused of murdering The Director. Desperate, he has only one clue: “seek Paradise”.

Developed by Lysander86 using a fan-translated version of RPG Maker 2000, it delivers a solid Sci-Fi story, full of twists and branching paths that will affect the narrative and the companions you find. The game was planned to be a trilogy, but the last part was never complete, leaving some plot threads unresolved.

You can download it here.

Vampires Dawn: Reign of Blood (2001)

Created by Alexander “Marlex” Koch using RPG Maker 2000, Vampires Dawn has you play as Valnar, a human turned into a vampire. A traditional JRPG with multiple endings based on your actions and morality, it became one of the most famous German RPG Maker titles, widely distributed in local CD-ROM magazines.

A sequel was released in 2005, followed by two novels, three mobile game spin-offs, two browser games and several fangames. In 2018, Koch would also crowdfund Vampires Dawn III: The Crimson Realm, released in 2021.

You can download it here.

Aëdemphia (2003)

In development since 2002, Aëdemphia is one of the most famous games among the RPG Maker community. It tells the story of Irzyka, the last survivor of her world, as she journeys across parallel dimensions.

Created by French developer Sylvanor using RPG Maker 2003, the game has been drawing attention and winning awards since its first demo version in 2003. Its presentation truly stands out, with long hand-drawn animations, original music, and worlds that look truly alien and mysterious.

In the years since he kept steadily updating and expanding the game. As of 2021 the game is still unfinished, but offers 7 chapters and over 40 hours of an epic journey across multiple alien worlds, with some of the best visuals and music ever presented in RPG Maker.

You can download it here.

Yume Nikki (ゆめにっき, 2004)

A legendary cult game, Yume Nikki is truly an oddity. You play as a girl inside her bedroom. There’s little to do, and she doesn’t want to leave the room. By going to bed, you travel to a dream zone with 12 doors, each leading to a different dream world.

Created by Kikiyama in RPG Maker 2003, Yume Nikki has no combat, no dialogues, no story, no objectives… you just roam the dream worlds, finding all sorts of interesting landscapes while listening to some excellent and varied background music, in a meditative and introspective journey.

However, fans found out items hidden across the dreams, such as a bicycle, an umbrella, a knife and multiple costumes that the character can wear. Moreover, by gathering all items in the zone with the 12 doors, a special ending is unlocked. The meaning of the dreams, the items and the ending are all open to speculation, making it an Internet sensation in the 2000s and leading to multiple fan theories and fan games.

Super Columbine Massacre RPG! (2005)

A highly controversial game created by Danny Ledonne in RPG Maker 2003 as a “game-documentary” about the 1999 Columbine school shootings. It cast the player as the two shooters and recreates that tragic day in hopes of gaining a better understanding of it, using real photos of the event.

In 2007, SCMRPG! was chosen as a finalist for the Slamdance Guerrilla Gamemaker Competition. But it was later pulled from the contest on alleged “moral obligations”. In protest, a group of other competitors — including the developers of Braid, flOw and Castle Crashers — wrote an open letter to the Slamdance organisers, arguing that the decision was “[…] hurting the legitimacy of games as a form of expression, exploration, and experience”.

Danny Ledonne further explored these events with a 2008 documentary titled Playing Columbine, focused on the controversy surrounding SCMRPG! and the perception of games as children’s toys.

You can download it here.

Sunset Over Imdahl (2005)

Artist Teo Mathlein raised the bar for RPG Maker games with Sunset Over Imdahl, a combat-free adventure about a city under siege and ravaged by a mysterious plague. You travel back in time and must investigate the city to find the origin of this plague before it kills everyone.

The gameplay is based on exploring, talking to people and solving minigames. The game is only a few hours long, but it left a mark on the community. Made in RPG Maker 2000, it combines ripped Chrono Trigger sprites with hand-drawn backgrounds, creating a striking visual, far beyond other RPG Maker games at the time. And the soundtrack uses Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, complementing the cinematic tone of the game.

You can download Sunset Over Imdahl here

Wilfred the Hero (2006)

Right after Sunset Over Imdahl, Teo Mathlein joined forces with developer/composer Brandon Abley to create Wilfred the Hero, one of the most famous unfinished RPG Maker projects. Unlike other games at the time, it didn’t use a single ripped asset, creating custom hand-drawn art, a new combat system, and a fully original soundtrack.

It once again raised the bar for RPG Maker games, impressing players in with its presentation and touching story of a legendary hero who feels inadequate. Chapter 1 was created on RPG Maker 2003, then the developer moved on to Unity but the full game was never completed.

You can download Wilfred the Hero here.

Aveyond I: Rhen’s Quest (2006)

In 2004, writer Amanda Fitch released Ahriman’s Prophecy, her first RPG Maker title. Aveyond is a continuation of that story, now as a commercial product. The game tells the story of a village girl that gets sold as a slave and goes through several adventures that will reveal her destiny.

While its graphics and gameplay are simple, Aveyond succeeded in delivering a captivating story and a solid “16-bit JRPG” flavour during a time when these types of games had fallen out of style. It was also one of the first commercial RPG Maker titles outside of Japan, released when indie games were extremely rare. Aveyond grew into a rather popular series, with seven games — all done in RPG Maker XP.

You can buy it here.

Alter A.I.L.A. (2007)

Created by Neo Kuriyo in RPG Maker 2003, it tells the story of nine prisoners forced to battle in a virtual arena. As they escape, the plot branches into three entirely different routes, each offering unique twists and betrayals.

While it still used a few assets taken from commercial games (like music from Chrono Trigger), it’s a highly polished free title and one of the most iconic among the early western RPG Maker games. From its character designs to the dialogues and soundtrack, the entire game is like a time portal back to the Internet culture of the 2000s.

In 2010 the developer released Alter A.I.L.A. Genesis, a remake that was also popular, adding side-scrolling exploration and a more complex combat system.

You can download it here.

Ruina: Fairy Tale of the Forgotten Ruins (Ruina 廃都の物語, 2008)

Created by Shoukichi Karekusa using RPG Maker 2000, Ruina is one of the most popular RPGs created with the tool in Japan.

It combines traditional JRPG combat with inspirations from tabletop RPGs and Choose Your Own Adventure books — you explore dungeons room by room, dealing with illustrated encounters and battles. The game features four playable characters, each with their own story, and was later adapted into a two-part novel.

Ruina was translated into English by fans in 2021, and a full remake was announced in 2022.

OFF (2008)

A surreal RPG created by Belgian duo Mortis Ghost and Alias Conrad Coldwood, OFF cast you as The Batter, a cryptic man with a baseball bat who wishes to purify the world of spectres.

The game became iconic for its quirky characters with surreal designs, excellent soundtrack, a lot of 4th wall breaking (like messing your save files), and a clever plot twist about pointless violence in video games (a big novelty at the time). And if all that sounds familiar, yes, OFF was one of the main inspirations for 2015's Undertale.

Released first only in French, an English release would arrive in 2011.

Ao Oni (青鬼, 2008)

Created in RPG Maker XP by noprops, Ao Oni (meaning “blue demon”) is probably the most famous horror game created with the tool. You play as Hiroshi, a Japanese teenager that goes into a haunted mansion with other schoolmates and gets locked inside, chased by the eponymous demon while trying to solve several puzzles and escape.

While the original version was released in 2008, the developer kept updating it during the next years, changing story elements, redesigning the mansion and the puzzles. The game exploded in popularity in the early 2010s, when Youtubers and streamers like PewDiePie, Markiplier and HikakinGames had millions of views playing Ao Oni and games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010), Slender: The Eight Pages (2012) and Five Nights At Freddy’s (2014).

Riding on its explosive success, the game got several sequels, many novel adaptations, a 2016 anime and two live-action movies.

You can download it here.

Rainblood: Town of Death (雨血之死, 2008)

Created in RPG Maker XP by Soulframe, an architecture student in Beijing and part of the massive 66RPG.com community of RPG Maker creators in China — by 2013 the website hosted more than 1,500 games.

Rainblood is one of the first internationally available indie games from the country, telling the story of Soul, a powerful assassin being chased by a mysterious organization. Inspired by a Gu Long novel and praised for its art and story, the game was a hit in China and got over 500,000 downloads. Its creator released an RPG Maker sequel in 2011 — Rainblood 2: City of Flame — and a 2013 prequel made in Unity — Rain Blood Chronicles: Mirage. The series then changed its name to Phantom Blade (影之刃) and became an ongoing side-scrolling Action-RPG series.

The game was translated into English in 2010 and sold for 9.99 USD, and the prequel was released on Steam, PS3, Xbox 360 and iOS in English.

Exit Fate (2009)

An epic and elaborate 25+ hours RPG heavily inspired by Suikoden II, created by SCFWorks in RPG Maker XP. Over a decade later, Exit Fate is still one of the biggest and most ambitious projects made with the tool.

The game blends the traditional JRPG battles — here with a party of six characters and a formation system — with large-scale tactical battles where you control armies, as well as a castle that the player must manage. In true Suikoden form, it offers a massive cast of 75 recruitable characters, plus some very challenging post-game content.

You can download it here.

Space Funeral (2010)

Created by thecatamites in RPG Maker 2003, Space Funeral is a weird game. And it came out in a time when people weren’t used to weird games (OFF’s English release wouldn’t arrive until 2011).

You play as Phillip, a crying boy wearing pajamas. His world is a surreal land full of ugly creatures, graphical errors and blood — a lot of blood. Expelled from home, he joins forces with Leg Horse, a creature made only of amputated legs, to travel to the City of Forms and try to restore the world.

The game itself is very short and easy, but that’s beside the point. The surreal presentation, the excellent soundtrack and the game’s protest against the obsession with retro games still are powerful and thought-provoking. As the developer puts it:

It wasn’t so much about the sprites or art in particular of RPG Maker so much as a kind of classicist way of dealing with that stuff, which is like the idea that videogames reached their peak in the output of a few large companies in the 90s and ever since it’s all anyone can do to ape those things as closely as possible […] — thecatamites

You can download it here.

Fighting Emblem (格斗纹章, 2010)

Developed by 柳柳 / Liu Liu, the founder of 66RPG.com, Fighting Emblem is a turn-based tower defence game made in RPG Maker VX.

It features a diverse cast of characters taken from series like Street Fighter, King of Fighters, Final Fantasy, Fist of the North Star and Yu Yu Hakusho. Each character has a different attack area or skill, and each turn the player must re-position them in order to stop the advancing enemy waves. Points are awarded based on the player’s performance and can be used to improve characters & unlock new skills.

The game became very popular, with fans making expanded editions that add more characters and game modes. Liu Liu would re-use the combat system in a follow-up game, Jiang Taigong Island (姜太公的小岛, 2011), and develop several other RPG Maker titles famous across China.

You can download it here (Chinese only).

To the Moon (2011)

Lying on his deathbed, Johnny hires a service that will rewrite his memories, granting him his most inner desire: going to the moon.

You play as the two scientists that execute this operation, travelling back in Johnny’s memories to learn more about his obsession and then asking the player how to best rewrite his life so he can achieve his dreams.

Created by Freebird Games using RPG Maker XP, its combination of nostalgic 16-bit graphics with a heavy, emotional and touching story felt like video games were growing with their audience, delivering more mature stories to an older audience.

The spotlight was later taken by Dear Esther (2012), Gone Home (2013) and other “walking simulators”, but To The Moon’s influence cannot be ignored.

You can buy it here.

Middens (2012)

RPG Maker has been used to create many “artsy” games, but Middens is perhaps the most challenging— not in a gameplay sense, but as an art piece.

Created by myformerselves in RPG Maker XP, you start the game by talking to a sentient revolver, which will be your guide and main weapon in your journey across the void. The void is a surreal landscape that is hard to navigate, and there are no goals at first, giving it a Yume Nikki feeling. It’s not clear even what is an enemy and what is just a bizarre NPC, but your revolver keeps asking you to shoot everything — in and out of combat.

Dense, divisive and absolutely unique, Middens remains one of the most visually striking RPG Maker games.

You can download it here.

Ib (イヴ, 2012)

A horror game about a girl lost in a twisted art gallery, Ib feels like a maturing of RPG Maker horror games, focusing more on atmosphere, characters and story than on jump scares.

The game features three characters: Ib, a 9-year old girl that was visiting the gallery with her parents; Garry, an extravagant young man that was also visiting the gallery; and Mary, a mysterious blond girl that befriends Ib.

Each character carries a rose, that withers as they take damage. You explore the twisted gallery, solving puzzles and making story choices that lead to several different endings.

Created by kouri using RPG Maker 2000, Ib became a cult hit and had translations into multiple languages — by 2014 the game already had more than 2 million downloads.

You can download it here.

Star Stealing Prince (2012)

A free fantasy RPG about a young prince who uncovers a dark secret behind his kingdom’s prosperity. Created by Ronove in RPG Maker VX, Star Stealing Prince is not a revolutionary, avant-garde or thought-provoking title, but it’s a great example of traditional RPG Maker games still being created, with solid art, challenging battles and a cute story — all available for free.

A popular release, the game was translated into Russian and Korean, and got a sequel in the form of a web novel. As of 2021, the author is working on a remaster of the game.

You can download it here.

Pom gets Wi-Fi (2013)

Created in RPG Maker 2003 by Brianna Lei when she was 19-years old, Pom gets Wi-Fi is an extremely funny game about a very online Pomeranian. Killed in a fire, she goes to heaven and hates it — there’s no wi-fi.

Short and based on very basic puzzles, what really sells it is the sharp writing of its obnoxious and overly-dramatic main character. To this day it’s the most popular game at RPGMaker.net, with over 200,000 downloads.

You can download it here.

OneShot (2014)

While puzzle games had been done before in RPG Maker, such as Professor McLogic Saves the Day (2008) and the previously mentioned Palette, OneShot stands out among them.

The game stars a catgirl who wakes up in a decaying world. In the basement of a house, she finds a lightbulb — the last hope of this world.

To save the world she’ll have to solve many complex puzzles, using the help of a special companion: you, the player. OneShot breaks the 4th wall in novel ways — the catgirl will talk directly to you, and some puzzles might require tinkering with files on your computer!

Also, as the name suggests, you only have one shot. There are no fail-states but, if you close the game outside of special areas, the catgirl dies and the world is doomed — the game becomes forever unplayable!

Originally a free game, in 2016 OneShot was re-released on Steam as a commercial product, softening the “one-shot” mechanic. A critical and sales hit, it has over 20,000 reviews on Steam and was nominated to several awards.

You can buy it here.

LISA: The Painful (2014)

The LISA series began in 2012, with LISA: The First, made by Dingaling in RPG Maker 2003. The game was a simple but extremely dark experience about exploring the dreams of a girl who suffered serious abuse and trauma.

The author then made a 2013 Kickstarter for a sequel, LISA: The Painful, raising just over 13,000 USD. The game tells of a post-apocalyptic future where every woman disappeared. Brad, the main character, finds a baby girl and raises her in secret, until she is kidnapped and he must rescue her.

What made it one of the best RPGs of the decade is its tone and writing — a mix of the most grotesque and toxic masculine behaviours with genuine and sincere signs of affection between very humane characters. There are scenes that are hilarious, but also scenes that are brutal and horrific. The game itself won’t pull any punches, permanently killing your party members and pushing Brad to the absolute limit. It’s all necessary, in order to deliver an ending that will really stick with players.

Like many other RPG Maker titles, LISA is a niche game — too extreme for a wider audience, but absolutely unmissable for certain groups.

You can buy it here.

The Last Sovereign (2014)

RPG Maker has long been used for Adult games, especially in Japan,
and the scene grew with the arrival of online stores and subscription services like Patreon and Ci-en.

The Last Sovereign began as a short RPG Maker VX Ace project, created by Sierra Lee to deconstruct the “Chosen One” trope. The support she received on Patreon allowed her to continuously expand the game for nearly a decade — eventually becoming a full-time developer. TLS evolved into a 50 hours+ Adult RPG based around empire building, tough choices and complex dialogues, exploring the moral framework of RPGs.

You can download it here.

Hylics (2015)

Following in the footsteps of games like OFF, Space Funeral and Middens, Hylics is a surreal RPG Maker VX Ace title, created by Mason Lindroth. While the structure is that of a traditional JRPG, the content itself is always like a fever dream—the world is created from a fascinating mix of claymation and motion capture, while part of the confusing dialogues is just gibberish from a random generator.

Together with its sequel, it’s a game not about the gameplay, but about immersing yourself in what feels like a JRPG from another dimension.

You can buy it here.

Pokémon Uranium (2016)

In 2007, a group of fans put together Pokémon Essentials, a pack of assets & resources for anyone trying to make a Pokémon game in RPG Maker XP.

Thanks to these community efforts, dozens of Pokémon fan games were made in RPG Maker, each offering some new twist to the formula: Pokemon Fire Ash recreates the anime’s plot, Pokemon Infinite Fusion lets you combine DNA to create new monsters, and Pokémon Wack features over 5,000 monsters (including Digimons lol).

Among these, Uranium stood out for its high quality and polish, being on par with the best official Pokémon games. Developed during 9 years, the game adds 150 new Pokémons (for a total of 200 playable monsters), many difficulty options, and a new Pokémon type, Nuclear. A viral sensation, the game got over 1,5 million downloads, then was shut down by a Nintendo DMCA.

Uranium also made headlines in 2017 for being nominated to The Game Awards as “Best Fan Creation” — then being quietly removed from the awards.

You can download it here.

Your Turn To Die — Death Game By Majority (キミガシネ -多数決デスゲーム, 2017)

An episodic horror game in the style of Danganronpa, where a group of 11 characters is kidnapped and sent to a facility, where they are forced to play various games and challenges that decide who will die.

Created by artist Nankidai using RPG Maker VM, it combines visual novel presentation with Adventure game elements. Extremely polished, it’s one of the most popular recent indies in Japan, with over 4 million online plays and adaptations into novels and manga.

New episodes are still being released in 2021, and an English translation began in 2019.

Fear & Hunger (2018)

An extremely dark RPG Maker MV game about doing everything to survive a deadly dungeon. You choose a class, go through a short CYOA segment that will define your stats, and then venture into the dark.

Inside the dungeon, you will have to scavenge food to survive, deal with diseases, phobias, and brutal monsters that might mutilate or even decapitate you in a single blow. Not for the faint of heart, the game features scenes of rape, self-mutilation, necrophilia and cannibalism. The sequel, Fear & Hunger: Termina, is currently under development.

You can buy it here.

Omori (2020)

Omori began in 2011 as a series of illustrations and blog posts about a depressed character, created by an American illustrator called Omocat. It grew into a comic book, and in 2014 became a Kickstarter project for an RPG. The project raised over 200,000 USD and was released in 2020.

Made in RPG Maker MV, the game is a surreal psychological horror RPG, mixing influences from Earthbound and Undertale with a heavy focus on the character’s emotions. Travelling between the real world and an idealized, nostalgic dream world, the game explores themes of depression and anxiety.

You can buy it here.

Of course, these are only a fraction of the full RPG Maker library. Sites like RPG Maker Network and itch.io host over 5,000 titles each.

Moreover, RPG Maker has a very fractured community, spread across many forums, groups and languages. Countries like France, Japan, Germany, Poland, Vietnam, Italy, Thailand, China and Brazil have their own communities, with hundreds of games only available in their languages, as well their own websites, podcasts and online magazines.

RPG Maker Cola, a podcast dedicated to RPG Maker, with many developer interviews.

Because of this fractured community, a game like Vampires Dawn: Reing of Blood (2001) can be a classic in Germany, with several sequels, novels and spin-offs, but remain mostly unknown elsewhere. Same for Indonesia’s Petualangan DivineKids (2004) or China’s Tower of the Sorcerer fangames scene.

二律背反, a Tower of Sorcerer fangame made in RPG Maker XP

Another example is the Japanese website called Game Atsumaru (ゲームアツマール). Created in 2016, it’s an official RPG Maker website that allows users to play games directly from their browsers. There you can find games like Our Island (ぼくらのアイランド, 2018), a semi-idle crafting game that has been played online over 35 million times:

Our Island (ぼくらのアイランド, 2018)

While this lead to a lot of diversity and unique subcultures like もしも games, it also makes it extremely hard to truly grasp the scope of the RPG Maker scene, especially since several communities and forums no longer exist, such as GamingW, GamingGroundZero, RPGsource, 66RPG, rpg2knet, Mundo Maker, etc.

On top of all that, there are still things like WOLF RPG Editor, a free alternative to RPG Maker that also has a few classic games like Misao (2011), Mad Father (2012) and LiEat (2016).

If you’re still not overwhelmed and want to look for more games, check the annual Misao award, the (now gone) Official Masterpiece Gallery or these two community polls. And if you want to dig deeper into communities & games from the past, try this thread or the RPG Maker Historia blog.

Finally, a huge shout out to translators like vgperson, Memories of Fear and Samuel Messner, who translated several games on this list.

I hope you enjoyed this article, if you’re looking for more video game history be sure to check my other articles on the history of RPGs in China, of RPGs in Korea, the birth of Japanese RPGs, the history of MUDs & MMOs or follow me on Twitter. You can also check my CRPG History book! Cheers!

]]> <![CDATA[RPGs in South Korea —A brief history of package, online and mobile games]]> https://felipepepe.medium.com/rpgs-in-south-korea-a-brief-history-of-package-online-and-mobile-games-759478508a1c?source=rss-f5dd0a54b863------2 https://medium.com/p/759478508a1c Wed, 11 Aug 2021 23:32:43 GMT 2023-04-05T23:50:44.542Z To talk about games in South Korea usually brings to mind legions of hardcore gamers playing StarCraft, or maybe MMORPGs such as Lineage, Ragnarök, MapleStory, Black Desert Online, Dungeon Fighter Online, etc…

However, before the reign of eSports and online games, Korean gamers enjoyed a brief but very productive era of domestic single-player games — called “packages” due to being sold in physical packages.

Yes, Koreans weren’t just playing StarCraft, they made their own RTS too!

The Forgotten Land (광개토대왕, 1995), Jurassic War (쥬라기 원시전, 1996), Three Kingdoms Divine Destiny (삼국지 천명, 1998), Lord of the Sea (해상왕 장보고, 2003)

The history of the Korean game industry is told in detail by Sam Derboo at HG101. If you are interested in this subject, I fully recommend reading the entire piece, this article would’ve been almost impossible without his research. Here I’ll just briefly mention the start of the PC era, to contextualize the appearance of the first Korean RPGs.

THE FIRST RPGS

As Derboo tells, early home computers begin to appear in Korea in the early 1980s. These were supported by local companies like Samsung, who also helped promote computers in the country by organizing contests between students to push them to learn this new technology.

A computer room in a Korean school and a Samsung SPC-1000 computer ad, both from 1983

By the mid-1980s the several competing standards of early computers would mostly be replaced by Apple II and MSX-compatible machines. This made it easier to import games from abroad — mainly Apple II games from the US and MSX games from Japan. The MSX machines came in two varieties: either as computers with a keyboard and a cartridge slot or as consoles with just controllers and the cartridge slot, such as the Zemmix.

A CPC-300 computer and a Zemmix console, both from Daewoo and capable of running MSX cartridges.

Since there were no software copyright laws at the time, Korean companies would simply pirate & re-release foreign games as their own.

It’s important to point out that at this time Korea had a ban on culture from Japan. After the brutal Japanese occupation of Korea ended in 1945, the country decreed a “Law For Punishing Anti-National Deeds”, banning the consumption of Japanese media such as music, TV shows, and games. This didn’t mean it was impossible to get Japanese games — Korean companies would simply hack games to remove any Japanese text or logo.

Valis: The Fantasm Soldier (1986) with the Japanese logo removed.

The popular games at the time were mostly arcade-like titles, so translation efforts were minimal, at most a few lines of text in the title screen — there were no bootleg translations of complex games like Taiwan had done with Dragon Quest.

However, by July 1987 the country adopted software copyright laws, so local game companies were forced to start developing their own games. This is when reportedly the first fully-Korean RPG appears: 1987’s Dream Traveler Part 1 (or Legend of the Holy Sword / 神劍의 전설) for the Apple II. Created by a high school student named Nam Inhwan (남인환), it’s basically a simple Ultima clone. Nonetheless, it was the first time Koreans could play a complex RPG developed in their country and in their own language.

Dream Traveler Part 1 (神劍의 전설, 1987)

While an important first step, it would take a while for more original RPGs to appear. Korean companies could no longer re-publish foreign games, but the law was loose enough to allow them to re-create these games from scratch.

Zemina was a company that specialized in these clones, producing several Mario clones for the MSX as well as the Family Cart, an MSX accessory that allowed the computer to run Famicom games:

Zemina’s Brother Adventure (1987), Super Boy 3 (1991), and Family Cart accessory.

One of the few companies focused on fully original games was Topia, Korea’s largest chain of computer stores. They would hire developers to create original titles to be sold in their stores, such as 1989’s Romantic Paladin (風流俠客 / 풍류협객), an Action-RPG in the style of Hydlide.

Romantic Paladin (風流俠客 / 풍류협객, 1989)

Reportedly Korea’s first RPG for IBM PCs, it was still a monochrome game, primitive even when compared to the original Hydlide, from 1984.

As a whole, Korean PC games were seen as too simple and outdated, unable to match the know-how and technology of developers from the US and Japan, who had easy access to computers like the Amiga and the Japanese PC-9800.

ENTERING THE VGA ERA

The early 90s saw an end of the dispute between multiple home computer standards, with IBM PC compatibles becoming the global standard, thanks in part to the new VGA graphics cards that allowed for much better graphics:

Much more accessible than machines like the Amiga, they allowed developers across the globe to produce far more advanced games.

This is when Hong Gildong (홍길동전, 1993) was released. It’s a colorful RPG heavily inspired by Dragon Quest, but with a much larger focus on narrative, telling the story of the titular character, Hong Gildong:

Hong Gildong (홍길동전, 1993)

The game is based on The Story of Hong Gildong, a popular Korean novel from the 16th century about the illegitimate son of a nobleman from the Joseon kingdom era. Despite being a gifted child with magical powers, he cannot even refer to his father as “father” due to being an illegitimate son, so he ventures into the world, becoming the leader of a group of bandits, rescuing maidens, and then forming his own kingdom.

This is a very influential novel, and we’ll see other RPGs based on it. If you’re curious about it, it was re-translated into English by Penguin Classics in 2016, and it’s just about 70 pages long.

While Hong Gildong was still a bit primitive, it was a giant leap in quality from previous Korean RPGs, and told a story dear to Koreans. It set a new standard, and in the next years, several high-profile Korean RPGs would follow.

THE FIRST CLASSICS

In 1994 Astonishia Story (어스토니시아스토리) would be released. The debut of studio Sonnori, it was a very popular title, that impressed Korean gamers and sold over 50,000 copies. As a Korean gamer describes:

At that time, foreign RPGs such as Ultima and Ys were difficult for domestic users to enjoy because of the language barrier. People were enthusiastic about the arrival of full-scale Korean RPGs at this time. Just being able to fully understand the story of the game was already a huge blessing.
Astonishia Story (어스토니시아스토리, 1994)

While at its core the game is a very traditional JRPG, its combat is tactical, closer to Western RPGs like Pool of Radiance and Ultima III than to games like Fire Emblem, something that would be a trend among Korean RPGs.

Still fondly remembered, Astonishia Story got a remake in 2002 and a PSP port in 2005, which is also available in English.

The 2005 release for PSP

Another influent title from 1994 is Ys II Special (이스 II 스페셜). In 1992 Studio Mantra did a translation & port of Princess Maker for the Korean market, and soon after scored the license to Ys II, a popular 1988 Action-RPG by Japanese developer Falcom. Instead of just porting the game to IBM computers and translating it, this time they redid most of the game, adding plot elements from the Ys anime, new areas, quests, songs and even hiring manwha artist Lee Myungjin (이명진) to do the art.

Ys II Special (이스 II 스페셜, 1994)

While some of the changes bothered die-hard Ys fans — like how they added an attack button to a series (in)famous for not having one— Ys II Special was a landmark for the Korean industry: a team of local devs had managed to license an important Japanese series, remake the entire game, translate it into Korean and even add their own content!

These kind of projects are extremely important for emerging developers, as allows them to put their foot on the door and acquire a lot of experience. One of the developers, Kim Hakkyu (김학규), would move to start Gravity Studios and create important games we’ll talk about later.

In 1995, The Romance of Forgotten Kingdom (망국 전기: 잊혀진 나라 의 이야기) is released, another game inspired by The Story of Hong Gildong. This time it’s not a direct adaptation of the novel, but rather a continuation of it, set in the kingdom founded by Hong Gildong and offering multiple endings depending on your actions.

The game’s story was actually written by a High School student, who wrote a 300-page manuscript by hand and won a 1993 public contest organized by the government to promote Korean culture in the national video game industry.

The Romance of Forgotten Kingdom (망국 전기: 잊혀진 나라 의 이야기, 1995)

BTW, this is one of the few games in this article you can actually play in English, thanks to the fan translation by Derboo. Among all the games in this article, The Romance of Forgotten Kingdom is the best starting point to those looking for an RPG in English that is representative of Korean culture.

All these games mentioned so far were important and helped to establish the Korean RPG scene. But the biggest one comes next.

THE START OF A GOLDEN AGE

In 1995 Softmax released The War of Genesis (창세기전), the start of Korea’s biggest single-player RPG series. The game is a tactical RPG, telling the story of a kingdom trying to resist invasion by a powerful empire.

While you can freely explore some towns like in a JRPG, you’ll spend most of the time in large-scale tactical battles. Unlike other similar games, each character can perform various actions per turn, drawing from a pool of action points (somewhat similar to the original X-COM).

The excellent pixel art and the artwork by manhwa artist Kim Jin (김진) earned much praise, but the game suffered from bugs, balance issues, and an incomplete story, as it had to be rushed out due to financial issues.

The War of Genesis (1995)
The War of Genesis (창세기전, 1995)

While the first game got a good reception, it was the sequel that conquered people’s hearts. The War of Genesis II (창세기전 II, 1996) is actually a full remake of the first game — what they wanted to achieve with the original but couldn’t — retelling the original story alongside a separate storyline, until both converge into an epic plot full of twists and a deeply emotional ending.

The War of Genesis II (1996)
The War of Genesis II (창세기전 II, 1996)

Thanks to the experience and money earned from the first game, The War of Genesis II is highly polished. The combat mechanics were greatly improved, sea and air battles were added and the shift from floppy disks to CD allowed for a great soundtrack:

War of Genesis II is arguably the most important “package” ”RPG in Korea. It was on par with what was being released in the US & Japan and likely would’ve become a worldwide hit had it ever gotten an English release.

Another title that could’ve been a global success was Sonnori’s Forgotten Saga (포가튼사가, 1997). A very unique game, it’s a rare example of a developer trying to create what’s basically a Western RPG under a JRPG presentation.

Forgotten Saga (포가튼사가, 1997)

While it looks like your typical JRPG, you start the game by creating a party of 4 characters, rolling their races, classes, and stats. The game is open-world, you can travel freely, get quests from NPCs, and even recruit some of them to your party depending on your actions, leading to multiple endings.

The game was delayed multiple times and plagued by bugs on release, but it still managed to sell well, and later re-releases (with bug fixes) helped to set it as one of Korea’s most respected and interesting RPGs.

These games stand out for their quality, but it’s important to have a sense of scale of the Korean game industry: while it wasn’t as massive as the Chinese, it was still one of the biggest in the world. Including shareware titles, over 80 single-player Korean RPGs were developed in the 90s and early 00s:

While most were very derivative (and famously rather buggy), ranging from very typical “JRPGs” and Ys-clones early on to Diablo-clones in the late 90s, there are some interesting obscurities to be found:

  • Liar: Legend of Sword II (LIAR: 신검 의 전설 II, 1995) is the sequel to Nam Inhwan’s Dream Traveler Part 1. Once again taking A LOT of inspiration from Ultima, it’s a simplified but well-presented Ultima VII clone.
  • The Story of Atria Land (아트리아 대륙전기, 1997) is a JRPG where combat is fought as a beat-'em-up, with your party entering a small arena. The 1998 sequel added 2 player co-op but isn’t as good.
  • Cybermercs: The Soldiers of the 22nd Century (에일리언 슬레이어, 1998) is a mix of Diablo and Crusader: No Remorse, where you create a mercenary, equip yourself then venture into missions, shooting aliens in an isometric view. Was also created by Nam Inhwan, and had an English release.
  • Koko Look (코코룩, 2002) is an RPG for young girls, about a girl who wants to be a fashion designer. Combines JRPG battles with Princess Maker elements, offering multiple endings.
  • Xenoage: Knight of the Rihas (제노에이지, 2000) is a very standard tactical RPG. It’s noteworthy for being licensed to a Japanese company and then edited to become 風と大地のページェント, a +18 eroge RPG.

It’s also important to remember that by this time Korea already had a rich animation and manhwa (Korean comics) industry. As such, several popular manhwa and TV shows were adapted into RPGs:

Red Hawk — 협객 붉은매, Sky Blade — 파천일검, Taoist Mutul — 머털도사, Cheollang Yeoljeon — 천랑열전, The Ruler of the Land — 열혈강호, Mr. Son / Flying Superboard — 미스터 손 / 날아라 슈퍼보드, Legend of the 8 Dragon Gods — 팔용신전설, Soul Frame Lazenca — 영혼기병 라젠카, Kung Fu Jungle Boy — 까꿍

Finally, it’s interesting to note that Korea was closed to Japanese games but open to Chinese ones, with popular RPGs like Book of the Sword Saint (天外劍聖錄, 1992), Heroes of Jin Yong (金庸群俠傳, 1996) and Legend of the Chivalrous Hero 3 (侠客英雄传3, 1997) being translated into Korean.

THE IMF CRISIS

In most parts of the globe, the golden age of single-player PC games would collapse by the early 00s, driven by multiple factors such as the massive popularity of the Playstation 2 and online games, the rising cost of game development thanks to 3D graphics, piracy, the 2000s dot-com bubble, etc…

Korean developers had to face an additional issue: the 1997 IMF crisis.

Also known as the Asian Financial Crisis, it was a huge investment bubble that affected several countries. Korea was hit hard — the country went from an economic boom to a recession, going from a 9,6% annual GDP growth in 1995 to a -5,1% contraction in 1998.

This led to countless companies going bankrupt, including Daewoo and large game companies such as HiCom, a publisher with multiple studios under its wing. It was a domino effect and even successful companies that managed to survive the crisis were crippled, as we’ll see below.

It’s also important to note that 1998 is also when Korea finally ended the ban on Japanese media, allowing games like Pokémon to be officially sold in the country and its anime to air on TV. While it gave more choice to gamers, it also increased the competition from Japanese games.

THE POST-CRISIS

In 1998, riding on the success of War of Genesis II, Softmax would release The War of Genesis: The Rhapsody of Zephyr (창세기전 외전: 西風の狂詩曲), a spin-off set in the same universe.

Heavily inspired by The Count of Monte Cristo, it tells the story of Cyrano, a man unjustly sent to prison, who many years later manages to escape, acquires great power (a demonic sword, in this case) and plots his revenge.

The War of Genesis: The Rhapsody of Zephyr (창세기전 외전: 西風の狂詩曲, 1998)

This more personal story scaled-down the battles from large armies into a small group of characters, adding mechanics like weapon durability and gun ammunition, as well as four different endings depending on your choices.

The game was a huge hit in Korea, selling over 100,000 copies and competing with Blizzard’s StarCraft. Later it was later also released in China and Japan, with ports for Dreamcast in 2001 and PS2 in 2004. Oddly, the Japanese ports chose to redo the characters’ appropriately grim art:

The original Korean portrait of the main character and the Japanese one.

Overall, it was a huge achievement for the Korean game industry. However, in a cruel twist publisher HiCom went bankrupt during the IMF crisis, with Softmax reportedly never receiving the sales of Rhapsody of Zephyr.

Desperate for a successful title, they took another project they were working on called Tempest and changed it into a War of Genesis game only six months before release. As such, The War of Genesis: Tempest (창세기외전2 템페스트, 1998) was originally a “raising sim” like Princess Maker, inspired by Shakespeare’s plays.

Instead of being top-down, most of the game is shown in a 2D side-view. You explore the world walking around as if you’re in a side-scrolling beat’em up, and the combat is also in side-view, with big head SD sprites fighting in small-scale tactical battles set on a narrow horizontal grid.

The War of Genesis: Tempest (창세기외전2 템페스트, 1998)

While The Rhapsody of Zephyr feels like a JRPG, Tempest is closer to a visual novel with tactical combat. Its dialogs are long, presenting a 2D portrait against a static background, and a lot of its exploration is done by menus. While not a bad game, it’s clear it was never a War of Genesis title.

In the following year, The War of Genesis III (창세기전 3) would conclude the original series with a big finale — so big that it was split into two parts, one released in 1999 and the other in 2000, for a total of 8 game CDs.

The War of Genesis III — Part I & Part II

It’s still a tactical RPG, now with an even bigger scale and unit count — thanks to the addition of AI-controlled mercenary squads and much higher screen resolution. The story also greatly expands the series’ setting, with a much bigger focus on storytelling and lots of long dialogues.

The War of Genesis III — Part Two (창세기전 3: 파트 2) goes full sci-fi, continuing the story into the far future, with spaceships, androids, and elaborate themes about humanity’s role. While the shift in setting was controversial, and it had glaring issues like the lack of a skip button in its long events & animations, it remains a good ending to an iconic series.

Another series to suffer from the IMF crisis was Corum, developed by HiCom itself. The first game, Corum: Legend of Anpnentria (코룸: 저주 받은 땅) was released in 1997, the same year as Diablo, but was one of several Action-RPGs following a formula similar to Ys II Special, showing how influential that game was among Korean gamers.

Corum (코룸: 저주 받은 땅, 1997)

As mentioned before, HiCom would go bankrupt in 1998, but managed to reform after being saved by an investor. Corum would still get two sequels, Corum II: Dark Lord (코룸 2 : 암흑 군주, 1998) and Corum III: Chaos Magic (코룸 3 : 혼돈의 마법 쥬마리온, 1999), all following the same combat style, plus Corum Another Story ( 코룸 외전 : 이계의 강림자들, 1999), a spin-off set in a post-apocalyptic world and using turn-based combat.

Corum II (1998), Corum III (1999), and Corum: Another Story (1999)

After Corum: Another Story, HiCom would abandon single-player games to focus on MMORPGs, releasing Corum Online (코룸 온라인) in 2003.

THE END OF THE ‘PACKAGE’ INDUSTRY

After the IMF crisis, the surviving RPG developers faced a dire scenario. Korea was taken by piracy, game magazines with cheap ‘full game’ CDs and ‘PC bangs’; Internet cafés where millions of Koreans gathered to play StarCraft (1998) and MMOs like Lineage (리니지, 1998).

Licensed cheap by foreign publishers who didn’t care about the Korean market, magazines would include several older full games and demos for a fraction of the cost of a new Korean game.

To survive in this world, they decided to either go big or go home. And so was born Arcturus (악튜러스), one of the most ambitious Korean RPGs ever, made by the combined effort of two studios, Sonnori (creators of Astonishia Story and Forgotten Saga) and Gravity (formed by former Ys II Special devs).

The game’s main focus is its complex story and charismatic cast of characters, which are quite well executed. However, its open-world nature and obscure objectives mean you can spend hours lost, fighting respawning enemies while trying to figure out what to do next.

Arcturus: The Curse and Loss of Divinity (악튜러스, 2000)

While it sold well, moving over 60,000 copies, Arcturus was also plagued by issues, from several bugs to a plagiarism scandal that led to the company having to recall 15,000 copies of the special edition pre-orders, delay the game and remove enemies copied from Japanese artist Yasushi Nirasawa:

The game had an English demo showed at the 2001 E3, but was never released in English. However, it did get a fan translation thanks to Helly.

The game was also released in Japan, published by Nihon Falcom. Since Falcom would create The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky (2004) soon after, it’s often speculated that they were heavily influenced by Arcturus, given how similar both games look — especially their rotating 3D camera.

And if the sprites above also look familiar, it’s because a year later Gravity reused the game’s engine to create Ragnarök Online (라그나로크 온라인, 2002), one of the most popular MMOs of the 2000s.

Ragnarök Online (라그나로크 온라인, 2002)

It’s no coincidence that Gravity and HiCom entered the MMO scene at this point. By 2000 MMOs were already dominating the Korean market and “package” games were withering. Arcturus was one of the last big single-player Korean RPGs for PCs. The other would be Magna Carta: The Phantom of Avalanche (마그나카르타, 2001).

Having finished the War of Genesis series on a high note, Softmax’s ambitious next title had the company entering the 3D world, with aspirations to make something that could rival foreign titles like Final Fantasy X.

Magna Carta: The Phantom of Avalanche (마그나카르타, 2001)

However, Softmax was used to making a game per year, and Magna Carta suffered from this rushed development — not only the story and battle system was confusing, but the game was extremely buggy. Many Korean RPGs have a reputation for being buggy, but here the situation was so bad that they had to recall thousands of installation CDs due to a game-breaking bug.

The game later got patched and still had decent sales, but had already shattered player’s faith in Korean RPGs, becoming an icon for the downfall of the “packages” market.

I could end the article here, but I think it’s interesting to give a brief look into what came after. From this point onwards, our story splits into three main branches: MMORPGs, mobile games, and console games.

Going online — The kingdom of MMORPGs

While I’m focusing on single-player games, the online scene of Korea was already rapidly expanding during the 90s. I wrote about MMORPGs in another article, but it’s important to repeat some information here so you can see the bigger picture.

In the early 90s, Korea already had some people creating MUDs (text-based online games). The most famous was a MUD called Jurassic Park (yes, with dinosaurs!), which went live in 1994:

A screenshot of Jurassic Park / 쥬라기 공원
By 1996 there were over 100 MUDs available to Korean players, with an estimated 200,000 people playing them regularly. Jurassic Park was the most successful, quickly generating over 20,000 visits per day and earning $20,000 in the month of July, 1994. Its growth would eventually reach over $200,000 per month in revenue for Samjung Data Systems. — Jong H Wi (Innovation and Strategy of Online Games, 2009)

Imagine 20,000 visits per day when the most popular single-player Korean games were selling 50,000 units total.

Behind Jurassic Park was Jake Song (송재경), the Korean father of MMOs. Inspired by the success of the game, he partnered with his college friend Kim Jung-ju to create Nexon and release their first commercial game, Nexus: Kingdom of the Winds (1996), set in the world of Kingdom of Winds (바람의 나라), a popular manhwa.

Nexus: Kingdom of the Winds proved itself popular, but Jake Song would leave the company and join NCsoft, where he would work on a landmark in MMO history: Lineage (1998).

From 1998 to 2004, Lineage was bigger than every single western MMO combined.

  • Ultima Online peaked at 240,000 monthly subscribers.
  • EverQuest at 460,000 monthly subscribers.
  • Lineage at 3,250,000 monthly users.

It was WoW before WoW. But why are we comparing subscribers to users? Because Lineage wasn’t “just” 13 times bigger than Ultima Online, it also revolutionized the Korean MMORPG industry. Korea’s Internet Cafés (aka “PC bangs”) were booming when Lineage came out in 1998, so they decided upon a novel business option: PC bangs would pay monthly license fees so that its clients could play Lineage for free:

In 2000 Internet café sales accounted for over 70% of NCsoft’s annual revenue, more than 3 times the revenue that came from individual users on home computers. — Jong H Wi (Innovation and Strategy of Online Games, 2009)

We already saw how Lineage crushed Ultima Online and EverQuest’s numbers, but other Korean MMORPGs like Ragnarök Online, Mu Online, MapleStory, and Dungeon Fighter Online also had huge numbers.

Mu Online, Ragnarök Online and Maplestory

They are harder to track but, in 2005, when WoW had almost 6 million monthly users, MapleStory was already at 13 million. It would peak at 18 million users in 2008, dwarfing WoW’s 12 million.

Sadly, there are still few resources in English on the Korean MMO market. Dal Yong Jin’s book Korea’s Online Gaming Empire is good, but it’s from 2010, leaving a huge gap in the progress in recent years.

While a lot has changed since then, Korea is still a powerhouse in the MMO market, with some of their most popular games being Lineage M (2017) and 2M (2019), now mobile-only versions of their classic MMOs:

Going mobile — The smartphone pioneers

Korea is the country of LG and Samsung, so they always had a strong mobile industry. In the early 2000s, service providers would offer exclusive games as an incentive for you to choose their services, leading to competition between companies to offer the best games and the rise of mobile developers like Gamevil and Com2uS.

While its easy today to downplay how relevant a game from an early 2000s cellphone can be, Korea saw some massive hits during this era, such as Gamevil’s Nom (놈) series, an endless runner that sold over 1 million copies in 2003, making it one of the best-selling games in the world— and yes, it’s an endless runner several years before Canabalt (2009) and Temple Run (2011)!

Nom (놈, 2003)

RPGs also played a part in this, with the development of original titles such as The War of Genesis CROW (2003) and CROW 2 (2005), as well as ports of older hits, such as a three-episode port of Astonishia Story in 2004–2005.

In 2005 there was even a mega-project: Sonnori and Softmax joined forces to create Norimax Heroes (노리맥스 영웅전), a tactical RPG featuring characters from The War of Genesis and Astonishia Story:

Norimax Heroes (노리맥스 영웅전, 2005)

After that, Sonnori’s mobile team split into its own company, Ironnos, and released Astonishia Story 2 (어스토니시아스토리2, 2006) for GXG phones (a shortlived standard of Korean cellphone focused on gaming and made to be played horizontally). The game was later remastered for PSP in 2008, released worldwide as Crimson Gem Saga.

Astonishia Story 2 (2006) and its PSP remake Crimson Gem Saga (2008)

In 2007 they even ported the massive War of Genesis III-Part 1 to phones. It was split into 4 episodes, the first arriving in 2007, the last only in 2011 (Part 2 was never ported). Here’s the first episode running on a Samsung SCH-V890, a phone from 2006:

War of Genesis III: EP 1 (2007)

All this celebration of “package” RPG series would soon be eclipsed by new series of mobile RPGs such as EA’s Heroes Lore (영웅서기), a series of 6 Action-RPGs from 2005 to 2014, and Gamevil’s Zenonia (제노니아), which began in 2008 and is still going strong, with 7 games released and World of Zenonia announced for 2022.

Heroes Lore Zero (2007) and Zenonia (2008)

The iPhone officially arrived in Korea in 2009. While Koreans already had their own smartphones, like the LG Prada from 2006, Apple’s app store completely changed the logistics of game distribution, no longer tying them to specific service providers.

From there on we see the start of the modern mobile industry, with the shift to free-to-play games with microtransactions, the arrival of platforms like Kakaotalk & LINE, and the rise of massive hits like Summoners War, Dragon Blaze, Lineage M, CrossFire, etc…

The Kakaotalk app, released in 2010

It’s a market much bigger than the “package” market ever was and deserves its own article. If you’re interested in reading more about it, check Dal Yong Jin’s book Mobile Gaming in Asia: Politics, Culture and Emerging Technologies.

As a side note, we spoke before about how Korea had several RPGs based on manhwas, but manhwas themselves have since evolved into webtoons made to be read on smartphones —scrolling vertically instead of having pages. Of course, these are a valuable source for mobile game developers, with recent webtoons titles like Gosu (고수) getting adapted into mobile RPGs.

Gosu (고수, 2019)

Going consoles —A small & late arrival

Korean developers had long been unable to create games for consoles (at least official ones), but this finally changed in 2004.

While Softmax had a very rocky start with their Magna Carta series, the game sold well enough to become their new main product. For the sequel, they managed to land the first deal among Korean companies to develop games for Sony’s Playstation 2, with Magna Carta: Tears of Blood (2004) — later re-released for the PSP as Magna Carta Portable (2006).

A worldwide release, it was available in the US, Europe and Japan. Although the western reviews were lukewarm at best (its attack system based on timed button presses was widely criticized), it was a hit in Japan. On the other hand, the Korean PC market was long gone by then, so the game was released as a console exclusive, selling poorly in its home country.

Magna Carta: Tears of Blood (2004) and Magna Carta II (2009)

The last game of the series would be Magna Carta II (마그나카르타 2, 2009), now as an Xbox 360 exclusive. Once again it was a global release, once again it was successful in Japan, mostly ignored in Korea and considered a mediocre-at-best JRPG in the rest of the world.

If Magna Carta failed to impress western audiences, there’s at least one Korean RPG series that succeeded: Kingdom Under Fire.

Developed by Phantagram, the series began on PCs in 2000 with, Kingdom Under Fire: A War of Heroes, an unusual combination of RTS levels with levels where you controlled only 1-3 heroes, in a mix of Diablo & Baldur’s Gate. The game got a worldwide release in 2001, becoming the first Korean game of many gamers.

Kingdom Under Fire: A War of Heroes (2000)

Like Magna Carta, the sequels moved to consoles, with Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders (2004) and Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes (2005) offering a unique blend of RTS and Dynasty Warriors-like battles for the original Xbox, then Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom (2007) becoming a pure beat’em up/Action RPG for the Xbox 360.

Kingdom Under Fire: The Crusaders (2004), Kingdom Under Fire: Heroes (2005) and Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom (2007)

While not the only Korean RPG on consoles, Kingdom Under Fire remains the most popular series abroad and arguably the only one to successfully make the jump from PCs to consoles. Ironically, the latest entry, Kingdom Under Fire II, is actually a PC exclusive, having been originally announced in 2008 and in closed beta since 2011, it suffered several delays and was released only in 2019, with all console ports canceled.

While not considered a Korean game, Phantagram was also co-developer of 2006’s Ninety-Nine Nights, one of the Xbox 360’s launch titles, famous for having a large number of enemies on screen.

No, they weren’t involved with the sequel that had one million troops.

The legacy of Korean RPGs

While it’s undeniable that Korean games like Lineage defined MMORPGs and still dominate mobile games, the legacy of their “package” RPGs isn’t as clear.

Some differentiated themselves by telling local stories like Hong Gildong, but they never developed their own style, apart from favoring tactical combat and Ys-like Action-RPGs. And they often suffered from buggy releases, which gave them a bad reputation when compared to foreign games.

Moreover, most of the teams and series from the golden age of single-player RPGs have vanished — including The War of Genesis’ creator's Softmax.

Their last effort was in 2016, with the release of The War of Genesis 4. The game was an MMORPG where you controlled 5 characters at once, which already enraged old fans, and also had several gameplay & server issues. It sold poorly, ending with Softmax itself being sold in November 2016 and changing its name to ESA Co.

In the end, The War of Genesis 4 stayed live for only about a year, then was killed and the War of Genesis IP was sold by ESA Co.

The new owners would make The War of Genesis: Battle of Antaria (2018), a more successful mobile MMO, and just recently announced The War of Genesis: Remnants of Gray — a remake of the first two War of Genesis games, scheduled for release on the Nintendo Switch in 2022:

So far, there’s no PC version or English release announced.

Regarding single-player PC games, while Korean indie games are still rare, the last couple of years saw a few recent ones have been quite successful, led by indie studios like Devespresso Games and ProjectMoon:

In order, the above games are Lobotomy Corporation (2018), Dungreed (2018), Vambrace: Cold Soul (2019), The Coma 2: Vicious Sisters (2020), Library of Ruina (2020), Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children (2020), Scarlet Hood and the Wicked Wood (2021), 8Doors: Arum’s Afterlife Adventure (2021) and Riffle Effect (2021).

Among these, Troubleshooter stands out by being an excellent tactical RPG, being voted 3rd best RPG of 2020 by the RPG Codex. The developers mentioned it was inspired by War of Genesis, so maybe we’ll see more of the legacy of Korean “package” RPGs once its newborn indie scene grows. Time will tell.

(BTW, you should also try 8Doors, it’s a really good metroidvânia in the vein of Hollow Knight.)

And if you enjoyed this look at the history of Korean RPGs, check out my other ones on the history of RPGs in China, the birth of Japanese RPGs, the history of MUDs & MMOs or follow me on Twitter. Cheers!

]]> <![CDATA[Digital Tulip Warriors: The story of Turkey’s video game pioneers]]> https://felipepepe.medium.com/digital-tulip-warriors-the-story-of-turkeys-video-game-pioneers-a29607fb86a6?source=rss-f5dd0a54b863------2 https://medium.com/p/a29607fb86a6 Thu, 13 May 2021 23:38:45 GMT 2021-05-13T23:38:45.221Z An interview with Özgür Özol

Sadly, I can’t read Turkish. You, dear reader, probably can’t read it either. This means that we can’t properly play İstanbul Efsaneleri: Lale Savaşçıları — aka Legends of Istanbul: Tulip Warriors — a first-person dungeon crawler first released for the AMIGA in 1994. But what makes Tulip Warriors fascinating is not its gameplay, is everything else.

One of the first games developed in Turkey, Tulip Warriors is an RPG that takes players to modern-day Istanbul, where your party of workers, teachers, punks, prostitutes, intellectuals and government officers join forces to battle against a wave of ignorance & lies taking over the city.

Made by Turkish & for Turkish, it features very niche cultural references, such as how the game’s spells are nothing more than local slangs and insults. For example, “gel babana” (come to papa) works as a “Dominate” spell, being checked against the target’s “Superstition” stats.

It’s an extremely unique oddity: not only it’s an RPG set in the modern era, but it’s the direct result of local social, cultural and political anxieties. All made by a small team in a developing country, struggling with the lack of access to technology and information. As a Brazilian, I can relate to that.

Since there’s almost no information about this game in English, I reached out to its designer, Özgür Özol, who graciously replied to all my questions and told a fascinating tale.

I struggled at first, trying to edit this into a shorter and more streamlined read, but soon gave up. Mr. Özol is a great storyteller, and I would be doing readers a disservice. Thus, here’s the full interview:

Legends of Istanbul: Tulip Warriors first came out in 1994 and was one of Turkey’s first computer games. What were the challenges of developing a game in Turkey back then?

Özgür Özol: The development of Tulip Warriors was a two staged process. The first version was developed for AMIGA platform by our amateur group named Siliconworx — myself and Özgür Doğu Gürcan and the art and graphics were created by Tuncay Talayman. That version can be regarded as a “garage project”.

Özgür Özol in the AMIGA version of the game

After about 1 year of its release (and by “release”, I mean us literally visiting game shops in Istanbul, with backpacks full of game boxes that were hand copied and assembled by us and our families) things got different. Turkey’s largest music production company back then was RAKS and they were entering the computer gaming market. Tulip Warriors was their choice of “local brand” for this new field. They really did not have that much choice of brands anyway, because it was a rare thing to develop computer games in Turkey.

Around the time this company offered us to produce the game for PC platform on CD (complete with movies and all sorts of shiny stuff), we were already on the way of developing a PC version, with the addition of new staff from another amateur group (Compuphiliacs): Gökhan San, Cengiz Günay, Aleks Pamir, while Emre Erdur was recruited to recreate the concept artwork. This also was an amateur, garage project until the company entered the scene.

The main challenge for the first period was us (18–20 year olds) trying to handle our lives, college and all the teenager stuff, while maintaining the development process. Almost every aspect of developing a computer game was a challenge: The market was tiny, people didn’t really play computer games, let alone developing them. We had no source of technical help — the internet was merely an experiment those days. We did not have any financial support besides our families, and had no real means of mass producing and distributing. So it was an amateur challenge, one which proved to be real creative and fun. All three of us, with the help of many friends, had to contribute to the script, rules, maps, concept art, coding and even marketing.

Tulip Warriors is a first-person dungeon-crawler, with tactical turn-based combat

The challenges of the second version (RAKS, PC platform, 1995) were somewhat different. The team was larger and all the new recruits were talented, hardworking people. As the company handled the production and marketing aspects, the team (now 9 strong) concentrated on the artistic and technical stuff. We worked in RAKS studios and had some technical and financial support. The challenge of this period was to enhance the game to a level that could compete with the rapidly developing computer games of its time, while trying to cope up with concepts like “budget” or “deadlines” which were totally alien to the team. Besides the rules, every aspect of the game was recreated.

But though we had somewhat improved conditions, it should be noted that all the technologies we used were new and unknown to us. A perfect example on our confusion: The game would be printed on CD-ROMs but none of us in the team had a CD reader, let alone a CD writer. The CD reading routine had to be written blindly, depending solely on theory, without access to actual hardware and could only be tested months later, when we had access to actual CD readers. This can be said for most of the technological advances of the day (which were rapidly expanding) and we could not have instant access and support in Turkey for some time.

The team behind Legends of Istanbul: Tulip Warriors

So, in summary, the first challenge was to assemble a group of young people, crazy enough to develop a computer game with almost no formal training and technical support, in an environment that would certainly treat them as madmen. The second was to rapidly train and equip this team to the level that they could cope up with contemporary competition, while persuading the environment (Turkish market) that computer games were a thing and that we could even develop them. All of these were considerable challenges and we were glad and proud to be able to handle every one of them.

The game is a first-person dungeon-crawler with tactical combat, somewhat like Realms of Arkania. Which games inspired the team?

The inspiration came from varied sources, of course. The main problem about this inspiration was also the fact that Turkey was following the gaming world from behind. Supply and promotion of games was erratic, even random. Many of us gamers in Turkey bought and played a game, only to discover in surprise that it was in fact the expansion pack of the second episode of a quadrilogy. So, the games that inspired us followed a somewhat random pattern.

Realms of Arkania was absolutely one of the games we played. But as I recall, it was the third episode [NOTE: Shadows over Riva came out only in 1996, so it was probably the second game, 1994’s Star Trail]. I played the first episode, Blade of Destiny years later. Other games that inspired us followed a similar pattern. The SSI Dungeons & Dragons series had an absolute impact. In fact, Tulip Warriors has a quest (the quest in Sarıyer) of getting rid of the “old school” SSI game characters that emerged from a broken AMIGA. As I recall, Death Knights of Krynn, Legend of Darkmoon, Pools of Darkness and Shadows Over Riva had the most impact on us. As the computer gaming market developed rapidly in the country, we realized that every one of these games were part of a series but none were the first episode and we played all of these series from scratch.

Eye of the Beholder II: Legend of Darkmoon (1992) & Realms of Arkania: Shadows over Riva (1996)

Also, those were the days we discovered that somewhere in the world, people were playing a tabletop game called Dungeons & Dragons (yes, we discovered this about one year after playing the computer game versions). Up until this day, we all remember the first D&D product that we could get our hands on (Tales of the Lance boxed set). As always, we realized that this was not a stand alone game in itself but an expansion to a much larger game “after” we bought it. So the usual cycle of learning from scratch restarted. The PC version of Tulip Warriors was developed while we were frantically playing tabletop AD&D 2nd edition.

The Tales of the Lance boxed set

While most RPGs are set in fantasy or sci-fi settings, Legends of Istanbul is all about the city of Istanbul and its inhabitants, with characters like teenagers wearing Helloween T-shirts, teachers, government officials, etc. Why did the team choose this setting?

In fact, the setting is not entirely about the city of İstanbul, but rather is a reflection of most of Turkey at the time, melted in a fantasy land we called “İstanbul”.

The reason we chose İstanbul was because we were living in it. It is a huge metropolis, with millions of people rooted from very different cultures living together in a miraculous relative rapport. The city is a writer’s dream which contains many interesting stories by itself and never hesitates to spill out some of these to your face if you get close enough.

The game opens with the heroes playing soccer, kicking the ball into a building and finding a portal

The main monsters (“dragons”) of the setting were social and economical problems of Turkey like “Inflation”, “Ignorance” and “Mismanagement”. These were not our inventions, it was already being called as the “inflation monster” by the media and everybody was used to many of these terms. We merely pulled them a little out of context and the humour was standing right in front of us.

The characters were also symbolic manifestations of sociocultural groups. The endurance capability of the overworked civil servant, the harsh attitude of the desperately underpaid teacher, the coarse and uncivilized manners of the man from the slums were not our inventions but merely reflections of what we experienced in everyday life.

Fantasy tropes were replaced by modern day Istanbul and its social classes.

In short, the setting in which we were living and the fact that this setting was actually working, was already “fantastic” enough that we probably did not need any other place to draw interesting ideas from.

Legends of Istanbul is a humorous, but also very political game. It talks about how the city has fallen to bigotry and fanaticism under the rule of the evil “Sheik Ignorance”. Please tell us a bit about the political climate at the time.

First of all, in the game, the city has not fallen to bigotry and fanaticism… Yet.

In fact, as the story opens, the city is just slightly different from its normal state, but is on the verge of falling under the influence of Ignorance if someone does not stop him, but nobody is aware of this imminent, insidious danger. His evil plan is convoluted but basically depends on some windmills blowing the “winds of ignorance” to the whole city. If this occurs, the agents of Ignorance will spread all kinds of lies and malarkey to the populace and everyone will believe any bullshit they are told. The heroes succeed in stopping this malignant plan, thus, save the city. So, the plot mainly carries a concerned, intervening theme.

This, of course is about the political and social climate of those days. The country, and the the city was in a very similar state in the 90’s. While the general populace was not fully aware of the situation, the country was tumbling down into an under-education, under-awareness crisis.

In order to understand the transformation and its throes, one needs to study Turkish history deeply and it is a long story, indeed. In short words, a newly prospering and thriving wealthy class was emerging rapidly and they lacked the cultural tools to sustain and maintain the social and political direction of the country. Things were bound to change fast and any learned person could sense the potential dangers and traps lurking in this rapid change. The story of the game was meant as a warning to those probabilities.

Games with such strong political tone are rare, as companies don’t want to lose sales to offended customers. What was the main goal behind Legends of Istanbul? Sending a political message, starting a business or just having fun?

Well, it certainly was not starting a business, I can tell you this much. I don’t believe any of the team members considered what we were doing “business”. On the other hand, as we all invested so much time and effort (years, literally) to the project, “just having fun” wasn’t the main goal neither. In fact, I guess during the years we were involved in the project, total number of times that we had “fun” was much less and shorter than we had problems, fights, struggles and general distress.

So, I guess this leaves sending a message. And that message was simply: “Hi everybody, how about we all stop acting like dunderheads?” This was not a political message, because the political climate of Turkey in that time (last decade of the century) was not restricting nor inhibitive. The main problem we felt was not political but it was rather social and psychological. We were young and to be honest, we too were somewhat ignorant. So, with our limited knowledge and limitless courage, we dared to share that vague feeling of “something rotten cometh this way” in a humorous manner.

Time proved us right and in the following decades people saw that “thing rotten” was mainly the wayward and antagonistic postures of various social structures in Turkey. In the end, I feel every smart person in the country began to understand that the problem was not in one particular group, but rather in the minds of everyone who firmly believed they were “right”. This is the definition of ignorance in the game.

How was the reception to the game? Was there any problems with people being offended or threatening you?

To my personal astonishment, the game was received as a real marvel right off the start. This accelerated in the coming years and even after 25 years, it is still held in great regard and respect.

The idea of some young Turkish students coming up with something like that with so limited resources, excited even the mainstream media (there was little exclusive media on the computer gaming subject anyway). People appreciated the presentation of a valid social issue in creative humour. Totaling the release, second printing and bundling of the game, a total of 50.000 people (so large a number for its day) played it and nearly every one had positive feedback. After the dust settled, it came to pass as the “first and last humorous game made in Turkey, featuring many catchy characters and a visionary social message”.

An article about the game in Turkey’s Aktüel magazine, from August 1995

In truth, I cannot say many people were offended or we were really threatened. Even after this many years, I still encounter people wishing to listen to the stories of the developers being threatened by “fundamental evil powers”, but saying that would be an exaggeration. Of course, as seen against all forms of criticizing humour, some minor and local “rigidity” arose in the early days but none were real, solid threats.

The reason of that reaction was generally the false notion that the game had a statement specifically against religion. But the game quickly proved itself that it was not religion that created the problem, but stupidity and ignorance. Throughout the story, our heroes had to struggle with the pompousness of highbrow types, as well as the ignorance of roughnecks and louts. So, those sensibilities calmed down quickly, as it became clear that the game was not against a specific political or social group, it was rather satirizing any and all kinds of ignorance and illiberality.

The game ends in a cliffhanger. Was there plans to make a Part 2?

Of course there was! The main storyline of Part 2: Time of the Tulip was already in discussion at the time of release of Part 1.

Tulips have been the symbolic flower of İstanbul for three centuries; since the so called “Tulip Era” (early 18th century) of the Ottoman Empire. It was a period in which scientific innovation and fine arts were being promoted as a government policy. A grueling effort to transform the elite into a European-like bourgeois, while keeping the moral values of the society mainly intact was underway. The social preservation aspect of the movement was unsuccessful and the elite was quickly alienated from the common people. This era ended in a fanatical uproar and the effort was delayed for almost two hundred years.

Part 2 was to be set in that time of İstanbul, right in the middle of the social uprising. After transforming into the Ignorance Monster, the defeated Sheik Ignorance enters a portal he creates and of course the heroes follow him. They enter an İstanbul of the 1700’s and try to make their way back, while constantly battling against the problems set by this brutal uprising.

This project was abandoned because of two reasons: First, the team was dispersing, mainly going to colleges abroad. Second, despite the obvious fun that being in an İstanbul of 300 years ago would bring, we felt the message of the series should be expanded, not shrunk. So, in the coming years, another project was formed gradually. Legends of İstanbul Part 3 was a vivid subject for many years among the team, which was then scattered all around the world. It had the motto: “ignorance never dies, it merely transforms” and the main plot was about to find out what the heck happened to Part 2.

This is the last known position and vision of the project and is still valid as a distant dream. So, I should not give away too much information, I guess. But I can safely say that the approach is a less localized, more global approach to the concept of ignorance in the 21th century. Of course, the city of İstanbul is still at the heart of all things.

Do you feel that Legends of Istanbul is still relevant in today’s Turkey?

Legends of İstanbul is not all about İstanbul, nor Turkey per se. It is about the concept of ignorance and ignorance has many faces. The social, economical and cultural problems of Turkey at the end of the century has transformed, so has all the world. In my opinion, even if Turkey (and Middle East in general) suffered in the decades following the release of the game from the problems we pointed out, nowadays ignorance in another form has rooted more firmly in the Western cultures, especially after the spread of social media.

The Turkish people and government has suffered from the effects of the dangerous blind acceptance that we were trying to point out, in the last 30 years. They are gradually realizing the errors of that way and struggling to find means of reversing them. Meanwhile, for example in the USA and Britain, people are not even beginning to consider the destructive effects of the ignorance their cultures are tumbling down in the guise of security and stability. So, maybe we should try to warn them, like we tried here 30 years ago, that the problem is not all about religion or fundamentalism as they are taught to believe, but it is in the feeling of “righteousness”.

My definition of ignorance is: “not knowing that you do not know”. It is a dangerous condition and is often accompanied by a sense of pride, comfort, security and uniformity.

Sheik Ignorance, the game’s villain.

So in summary, today’s Turkey may still be suffering from the aftershocks of these symptoms but I believe it is on the verge of recovery, while the common people of many “developed” countries are only just beginning to enter an era of not knowing that they actually do not know. Given the political and military might of these countries, I am sincerely hoping for the whole world, that I am a bit over-pessimistic.

What are you working on today? Did you make any other games?

Tulip Warriors was in fact the second computer game I made. The first one was Fields of Hope (in Turkish: Umut Tarlaları) which was published in 1993. It was a strategy game about farming which was inspired from corporation running games of the day, like Oil Imperium and Ports of Call. It is still considered to be one of the first “real” games made in Turkey.

After the release of Tulip Warriors, I started on Fields of Hope 2: Revenge of the Farmer, with some members of the team. This project was abandoned right after the research phase, because we decided to start up the first gaming cafe of Turkey in İstanbul.

It was called “Sihir Kafe” (magic cafe) and became the rallying point of gamers from all around the city. First started as a club of tabletop roleplayers, it quickly evolved into a gaming center, filled with RPG, boardgame, miniature wargaming, LARP and computer gaming fans. It lasted for 7 years (1997–2004) and during that period, I developed many board games, as well as RPGs but these were not published, rather distributed among the patrons of the club.

Özgür Özol in 2014, teaching about game design

After that, I started developing a fantasy world named ILGANA. The setting is based on nomadic Turkish culture and Ancient Anatolian history. The first product of the setting was a novel that I wrote, was published in 2010. We gradually formed a core team composed of a historian (me), a linguist, and two concept designers. Besides the novel, we developed an RPG tabletop game two years ago but we were not satisfied with the result and abandoned it.

Nowadays, I am starting to work on a sequel novel, as well as another tabletop game that has much simpler rules and is more compatible with the setting itself. Maybe one day, when our over-perfectionist team finally decides it is ready, we will make a computer game out of it.

Thank you very much for your time, and for this amazing story. *I would also like to thank Yamaç Kurtulus for the help and passion in researching about this game.

Originally published in 2018 at https://www.gamasutra.com.

]]> <![CDATA[Before Genshin Impact: A brief history of Chinese RPGs]]> https://felipepepe.medium.com/before-genshin-impact-a-brief-history-of-chinese-rpgs-bc962fc29908?source=rss-f5dd0a54b863------2 https://medium.com/p/bc962fc29908 Fri, 23 Apr 2021 00:30:36 GMT 2025-12-29T23:45:27.711Z If you were interested in learning about movies, music, poetry, or any art form from China, you could easily find hundreds of books, articles, documentaries, essays, and videos on the subject.

Sadly, if you’re interested in Chinese video games, the story is quite different. Asian game markets outside of Japan have long been ignored, not only historically, but still in modern days — you hear all the time about how popular Fortnite is, with its 30 million daily users…. and then you find that a game from Vietnam has 150 million daily players.

Yes, 150 MILLION players. In a single day.

This article is part of my attempt to help improve that, expanding the “canon” of video game history. So let’s delve into the rich history of Chinese RPGs, meet the oldest RPG series still around and one of the most influential games in history — that you probably never heard about.

For starters, to talk about “Chinese games” is to deal with three main regions — mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan — each with very unique socio-economical scenarios and regulations. For example, consoles were banned in mainland China from 2000 until 2014 (of course, there was still a black market) but could still be legally purchased in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Moreover, it means dealing with two writing systems: Traditional Chinese, used in Taiwan and Hong Kong (and Macau); and Simplified Chinese, used in mainland China (and Singapore).

Since the 2000s games usually offer both systems in the options menu, but before that it means that a game from mainland China would be weird for a Taiwanese person to read, for example.

Lastly, most of these games never were translated so have no official English titles. I will post the original Chinese title and a crude translation (sorry for butchering them!).

THE BOOTLEG TRANSLATIONS

The Chinese gaming industry began in the mid-80s in Taiwan, mostly centered around the Apple II and IBM PC, but having difficulties due to importation costs and the lack of support for the Chinese language.

Some western games like Ultima and King’s Quest would reach the country (usually via copied floppy disks), but the language barrier made them very hard to play. To solve this, a group of Taiwanese gamers began printing translated manuals and guides to sell alongside pirate copies of the games (copyright laws were very loose at the time, this wasn’t even illegal):

A translated manual for Ultima III

By 1986, this group expanded into Jingxun Computer Magazine (精訊電腦), a magazine focused on PC games that advertised new releases (which they were selling) and gave tips on how to play them, translating menus and the overall story, sometimes even providing full walkthroughs:

Issue #2 of Jingxun Magazine from 1986, teaching how to play The Bard’s Tale.

Similar to what happened with companies like CDProjekt in Poland, GSC Game World in Ukraine and Akella in Russia, Jingxun would move from pirate copies to bootleg translations and then to original titles.

Under the name Kingformation Co., they used the magazine to reach out to the emerging domestic developer scene, commissioning two college students to create bootleg versions of Dragon Quest I, II and III for the MS-DOS:

Without access to the original code, they recreated the entire game by hand.

In 1987 they would also publish MX-151 (星河戰士), an ambitious sci-fi RPG for the Apple II and possibly the country’s first original RPG:

MX-151’s title screen, overworld map and combat screen.

One of Jingxun founders would leave in 1988 to start his own game magazine +game publishing combo, Softstar (大宇資訊). However, due to threats of sanctions from the US, Taiwan revised its copyright rules in July 1989, allowing US companies to sue pirate groups in the country.

Seeing the writing on the wall, Kingformation abandoned the magazine and pirate imports to become just game publishers, and other Taiwanese pirate groups would soon follow, such as Soft-World (智冠科技), who began making official publishing deals with US developers.

THE EARLY YEARS

Now full-time game publishers and with strong bonds with developers across all of Taiwan, these companies would start releasing several games per year, with a few early hits such as Softstar’s Monopoly (大富翁, 1989) helping them grow into one of the country’s biggest developers.

The RPGs would really begin in 1990, led by Softstar’s Xuan-Yuan Sword:

  • Xuan-Yuan Sword (軒轅劍, 1990). Although it’s a Dragon Quest clone with a simple story, Softstar’s first RPG is already quite professional, with nice artwork and presentation. Its setting stands out, mixing martial arts with fantasy elements (a genre known as Xianxia).
  • Legend of the Chivalrous Hero (俠客英雄傳, 1991) is a more primitive Dragon Quest clone, this time developed by Kingformation. You play as a lone martial arts hero that travels the land to defeat evil-doers and can choose one of five maidens to marry.
  • Eight Swords of Shenzhou (神州八劍, 1991) is a simple King’s Bounty clone created by Soft-World, with you visiting cities to recruit armies, battle enemies and earn money for larger armies until it can unite the land and defeat the evil emperor.
  • Fantasy Zone of Computer (電腦魔域, 1991) by Softstar has a gamer being dragged inside his computer, exploring the circuits and battling demon-virus. Despite the unique setting, the gameplay is still very basic.
  • Book of the Sword Saint (天外劍聖錄, 1992) was created by Dynasty International and offers a plot far more complex than its peers, telling the tale of the last surviving member of a martial arts sect, trying to uncover the mystery behind the sect’s destruction. At release it was praised as a Wuxia (martial arts fantasy) novel in RPG form, showing a path forward for Chinese developers.
  • Empire of the Angel (天使帝國, 1993). Also created by Softstar, it’s one of the first Strategy RPGs to come out of Taiwan, featuring only female warriors. Inspired by games like Fire Emblem and Langrisser, it got several sequels in the following years and a remake in 2000.

This is just a sample, there were dozens of RPGs released in the early 90s. Yet, none of these games can be called great classics, being far behind what other countries were developing at the time. But they served as the foundation for the industry, establishing developers and series that would last for decades, such as Softstar’s Xuan-Yuan Sword series (BTW, “Xuan-Yuan” is The Yellow Emperor, a legendary figure considered to be the father of Chinese culture).

I’m only covering RPGs here, but know that there were also other genres, such as 1993’s Legend of Condor Heroes (射雕 英雄 傳), an adventure game by Soft-World that plays like a lost cousin of the King’s Quest series.

THE FIRST CLASSICS

In 1995, Softstar releases the most popular and important of all Chinese RPGs: 仙劍奇俠傳, known as Legend of Sword and Fairy, Chinese Paladin or simply PAL95:

Chinese Paladin (1995) — Fan translation patch

A polished, engaging and emotional game, it tells the story of a man who travels to a mystical island in search of medicine for his aunt, then meets and marries a young woman, only to lose his memory the next day.

There are many reasons why it’s such a landmark for the industry, but perhaps the most important is how it established a model for what a Chinese RPG should be, similar to what Dragon Quest did in Japan.

Moreover, not only the game was on par with what was being released internationally, in some ways it was ahead of them — its narrative was far more mature than that of other games from the era telling an emotional and romantic story without relying on traditional RPG tropes like an ancient evil or evil empire to defeat.

More than just an important game, Chinese Paladin’s influence reaches far beyond the video game realm, receiving novel adaptations, several sequels, a remake in 2001, a 2005 TV series, and now a second TV series in 2021.

The 1995 version and the 2001 remake

TIP: If you want to try a game from the list, this is definitely the best one to start. It was never officially translated but has an excellent fan translation.

Xuan-Yuan Sword: Dance of the Maple Leaves (軒轅劍外傳：楓之舞) is another all-time classic from 1995. The game is set in a period known as The Hundred Schools of Thoughts, a time around 400 BC when multiple philosophers roamed China. The player is an apprentice of famous philosopher Mozi (founder of Mohism), who will explore this world full of historical and mythical figures such as Lu Ban (a legendary inventor), trying to prevent a war.

Xuan-Yuan Sword: Dance of the Maple Leaves (1995)

For comparison, remember that western RPGs by this time barely had any story. Apart from games like Betrayal at Krondor and the Ultima series, it was still mostly “create a group of heroes, enter dungeon & kill evil wizard”.

Released in 1996, Heroes of Jin Yong (金庸群俠傳) is another example of the more literary flavour of Chinese RPGs from this era. Developed by Heluo Studio, it’s an open-world RPG where your character is a gamer sent into a world formed from the novels of famous Wuxia novelist Jin Yong (one of China’s best-selling authors — his most famous work, Legend of the Condor Heroes, was officially translated into English in 2018). You must learn martial arts and collect all of his novels, with characters from those novels helping or attacking you depending on your moral choices.

Heroes of Jin Yong (1996)

The game is also noteworthy for its large and still active modding scene. Fans edited the game to introduce other novels and stories, then started making several remakes and even entirely new games, such as Heroes of Jin Yong 5:

Heroes of Jin Yong 5, a free fan-made game released in 2018.

(As a curiosity, the developer of the fangames Heroes of Jin Yong 2 & 3 recently released his own Wuxia RPG, Hero’s Adventure: Road to Passion)

THE GOLDEN AGE

The evolution of China’s developers was extremely fast. The early 90s had them making simple clones, by the mid-90s they had found their voice and by the late 90s/early 2000s they would be at their peak, releasing great classics that are still held as the pinnacle of the industry.

One of these classics, Xuan-Yuan Sword: Mists Beyond the Mountains (軒轅劍參：雲和山的彼端, 1999) tells the story of a Frankish knight who is tasked by King Pepin the Younger to find a mythical way to win all wars. His journey takes him from Venice to Damascus, then all the way across The Silk Road into China, recruiting a colorful cast of companions inspired by Chinese folk tales, Christianity and Buddhism. It’s considered one of the best and most accessible games in the Xuan-Yuan Sword series (and was remastered & translated into English in 2023).

Xuan-Yuan Sword 3: Beyond the Clouds and Mountains (1999)

Heluo Studio’s second game, Legend of Wulin Heroes (武林群俠傳, 2001), would expand the non-linearity of Heroes of Jin Yong, mixing it with mechanics from Princess Maker to create what’s basically a “Wuxia Hero Maker”: your character gets accepted into a martial arts school, where each week you choose how to train, which weapon & martial style to follow and get lessons on Chinese culture:

Legend of Wulin Heroes (2001) — Images from Nyaa’s excellent translate Let’s Play: https://lparchive.org/Legend-of-Wulin-Heroes

Between lessons, you venture into the world, helping people, befriending other martial artists and carving your own path into legend — or infamy, since the game has many different routes and endings.

The game was remade in 2015 as Tales of Wuxia and even got a sequel but, sadly, the poor quality of the translation means part of the game’s charm is lost. A spin-off, Path of Wuxia, is currently on Early Access and turns the martial arts school into something like Harry Potter’s Hogwarts:

Tales of Wuxia (2016) and Path of Wuxia (2021)

Another few classics from this era:

  • Tribulation of Heaven and Earth - Prequel: Legend of the Phantom Blade (天地劫序傳：幽城幻劍錄, 2001), aka “Castle: The Forbidden Divines”, is part of the popular Tribulation of Heaven and Earth trilogy. A cult classic with great visuals, it's known for its extreme difficulty, multiple endings, satisfying combat and complex story about the pursuit of love vs the burdens of fate. This game has a very devoted fanbase, a fan translation into English was in the works but, sadly, seems to be dead now.
  • Swordsman’s Romance: Moonlight Destiny (剑侠情缘外传：月影传说, 2001) is the third game in the series, a real-time isometric RPG that focuses on a romantic story with multiple endings (ranging from a harem to suicide!). It’s also famous for its soundtrack, and for being released in Japan.
  • Xuan-Yuan Sword: The Millennial Destiny (軒轅劍外傳：蒼之濤, 2004) is another high point in the series. Set 500 years BC, its complex narrative mixes Chinese history with time travel and questions about ambition and nationalism. With no romances or comic relief, it left many players bored or lost in the plot, leading to sequels being more lighthearted. But those who manage to delve into its heavy writing defend it as a masterpiece.
Tribulation of Heaven and Earth — Prequel (2001), Swordsman’s Romance: Moonlight Destiny (2001) and Xuan-Yuan Sword: The Millennial Destiny (2004)

THE B-SIDES

While I’m only highlighting a few games, it’s important to understand that China’s production during this era is MASSIVE — over 200 Chinese single-player PC RPGs were released in the 90s & 00s! (Not to mention A LOT of strategy games, especially turn-based ones)

You can see more screenshots of all these games at http://kudgame.blogspot.com/search/label/%EF%BC%B2%EF%BC%B0%EF%BC%A7?&max-results=20

The games above are more traditional RPGs, often inspired by JRPGs. However, there was also a massive fanbase for Tactical/Strategy RPGs.

Series like Empire of Angels (天使帝國), Super Space-Time Heroes (超時空英雄傳說) and The Legend of the Fancy Realm (幻世錄) are still held in high regard among domestic releases, having several sequels and mobile ports even today. Fantasy Wind series (風色幻想) ran from 1999 to 2009 with 8 mainline games, several expansions, remakes and an MMO!

Empire of the Angel (1993), Legend of the Hero of Time and Space (1996), The Legend of the Fancy Realm (1995) and Wind Fantasy 5 (2006)

Speaking broadly, in traditional Chinese RPGs the most popular settings are Wuxia & Xianxia stories — often adapted from novels or comics — and historical eras of China, such as the Warring States or Three Kingdoms eras (it’s impossible to overstate how many Three Kingdoms games there are).

But those aren’t the only options, with many Tactical RPGs following European-style fantasy tropes. The art style was also diverse, with some games presenting heavily stylized designs, like the cult classic Flame Dragon series (炎龍騎士團), perhaps China’s most beloved Tactical RPG series.

Flame Dragon II, The Fighting Blast and Thunder Force

The series was created by Taiwan-based studio Dynasty International, which would be acquired by Softstar in 1998 and renamed Zealot Digital, later releasing the High School RPG The Fighting Blast and the cyberpunk RPG series Thunder Force (致命武力).

Other interesting examples are:

  • 1998’s Tun Town (阿貓阿狗), a kid-friendly RPG about a boy who can talk to animals. Made by Chinese Paladin developers, is extremely polished, with a style and tone similar to LucasArts Adventure games.
  • 1999’s Bodhidharma (達摩), an RPG where you play as the titular Buddhist patriarch (also known as Daruma in Japan).
  • 1999’s Battle for North Korea (决战朝鲜), a tactical RPG where you control Chinese troops in the Korean war, dealing with supply lines, limited ammo, permanent injuries and far better-equipped enemy forces.
  • 2002’s Heroine Anthem: The Elect of Wassernixe (聖女之歌～人魚的新娘), a really unusual RPG about a girl that gets turned into a mermaid, combining freely swimming across the ocean with turn-based battles.
Tun Town (1998), Bodhidharma (1999), Battle for North Korea (1999) and Heroine Anthem (2002)

It’s interesting to point out how the focus on PC hardware allowed for gameplay and visuals that consoles of the time couldn’t replicate, making even very JRPG-inspired games stand out from actual JRPGs. A good example is 1997’s Legend of the Chivalrous Hero 3, the last RPG from Kingformation. While it was still an MS-DOS game running at 320x200 resolution, it features huge sprites and combat animations that are unlike any console JRPG:

A special attack animation in Legend of the Chivalrous Hero 3 (1997)

I mentioned that the industry was almost entirely focused on PC games, but they also had a few console RPGs. China is famous for its bootleg scene, with companies like Waixing (福州外星电脑科技有限公司) and Shenzhen (深圳市南晶科技有限公司) porting games like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VII to the humble NES, a cheaper & more available hardware (you see something similar in Brazil’s 1997 port of Street Fighter II for the Master System).

However, they also produced original titles such as Water Margin (水滸傳, 1995), The Story of Arthur (亞瑟傳説, 1995), The Devouring of Heaven and Earth III (吞食天地Ⅲ, 1996) and Investiture of the Gods (封神英傑傳, 1996).

Water Margin (1995), The Devouring of Heaven and Earth III (1996) and Investiture of the Gods (1996)

They also had a rather unique game scene — electronic dictionaries!

Created to help students study languages, these devices also began offering complex games in the 2000s — from Tamagotchi clones to several RPGs, such as Altar of Heroes (英雄坛说, 2003):

Altar of Heroes (2003)

These games are easy to overlook or dismiss as not being “real games”, but to many students, this was their equivalent of a Gameboy with Pokémon.

The folks at Chaoyang Trap have a detailed report on these electronic dictionary games.

(ALMOST) GOING GLOBAL

The early 2000s was also when a few exports began to happen, with a few Chinese games reaching the US, Russia, Korea and Japan.

A huge challenge in making all these gems reach the global market is their heavy focus on story, romances and Chinese culture/history, making them difficult and costly to translate. They are wordy, with several games having moments when the heroes recite poetry and Buddhist teachings or reference obscure events from China’s extensive history. Not to mention how the language itself is one of the hardest to translate.

Even Genshin Impact’s excellent translation can’t capture the sheer density of the language — if you’re curious, check this video comparing the English translation with the original and explaining some cultural references:

That briefly changed with the arrival of Diablo-inspired Action-RPGs such as Blade & Sword (刀剑封魔录, 2002), Prince of Qin (秦殇, 2002) and Seal of Evil (复活之秦殇前传, 2004). Prince of Qin and Seal of Evil are actually more similar to Baldur’s Gate, having a party of characters, real-time-with pause combat and far more elaborate stories. Still, the focus on action made publishers quickly translate these games and promote them as “Diablo with a history lesson”, making them some of the few Chinese RPGs to ever be officially released in English:

Blade & Sword (2002), Prince of Qin (2002) and Seal of Evil (2004)

While some of the translations are quite poor, with terrible voice acting, this could’ve been the start of more regular exports. Alas, it was too late — the entire single-player market was about to vanish.

THE ONLINE BOOM

While all these classic single-player games were being released, a new world of online gaming was taking shape. Internet cafes were booming, not only with Counter-Strike, StarCraft, Diablo II and other international titles, but also with Meteor Blade (流星蝴蝶劍.net), a 2002 martial arts action game that could be played online, leading to fierce arena duels:

China also already had some experience with MUDs, online text-based role-playing games. One of its most popular, King of Kings (萬王之王), began in 1996 at the National Tsing Hua University of Taiwan, then in 1999 was turned into a graphical MMORPG, quickly growing popular — reportedly, reaching 10,000 concurrent players a month after release, at a time when Ultima Online and EverQuest had around 100,000 total subscribers each.

The MUD version of King of Kings and the graphical one. The bottom of the screen is filled with MUD-like text commands.

This growing online scene was first dominated by MUDs such as Eastern Fantasy 2 (東方故事2, 1994), and Ode to Gallantry (侠客行, 1995) then began being taken by imports such as Japan’s Stone Age Online (ストーンエイジ,1999), Korea’s The Legend of Mir 2 (미르의 전설 2, 2001) and private servers of Ultima Online and other American MMOs.

As Internet and computer access expanded, China’s MMORPG market would grow exponentially. Fantasy Westward Journey (梦幻西游) was released in 2001 and is one of the most profitable game series of all time, with $6.5 billion in lifetime revenue and over 400 million registered users.

Fantasy Westward Journey (2001)

And it’s not “just” that online games were insanely popular and profitable, they also solved a long-lasting challenge: piracy.

China has the biggest internal PC market in the world, but most of its players pirate games. The developers tried many types of copy-protection, from codes to hiding quest information in the manual to having players pick colours to match illustrations that came with the boxed copy. With the shift to 3D graphics, fully voiced dialogues and orchestral soundtracks, development costs kept rising and higher and higher legitimate sales numbers were required.

Online games solved that. The game CDs were distributed for free, the important part was the fees paid to play and, later, the in-game purchases.

Cards sold with MMO game time

All this leads to a massive shift towards online games, later transitioning partially into mobile games with similar monetization systems. These became the backbone of most of the Asian game industry, and I’ll not get into them here. It’s something that deserves a much more detailed examination.

If you want to read more about China’s mobile and online game industries, check out Mobile Gaming in Asia: Politics, Culture and Emerging Technologies by Dal Yong Jin, and A Critical Cultural History of Online Games in China: 1995–2015, by Matthew M. Chew.

Honkai Impact 3rd (2016)

It’s important to mention that this was a global event, not something exclusive to China or to RPGs. In Japan, Square and Enix had to merge in 2003 to be able to handle the ever-increasing development costs, while in the US dozens of companies like Origins, Interplay, Sierra and Westwood Studios closed down or were purchased. Classic RPG series like Ultima, Wizardry, Quest for Glory and Might & Magic all died, with surviving studios like BioWare and Bethesda moving the focus from PCs to consoles.

https://web.archive.org/web/20070216205153/http://pc.ign.com/articles/092/092316p1.html

It wasn’t “the death of PC gaming”, as many analysts said, but it was undeniable that online games and console games were a more attractive market. And the ever-increasing costs and risks of game development meant that companies went for the safest bet. The lack of access to the (official) console market means Chinese developers didn’t have that option, betting all their cards on online games.

Graph showing the decline of offline PC gaming, from ‘Video Games Around the World’ by Mark J. P. Wolf

During this era, South Korea saw all its single-player RPGs disappear, but China actually managed to endure, with a small indie scene at sites like 66RPG and a few popular and critically acclaimed professional releases, such as Wind Fantasy 5 (風色幻想5～赤月戰爭, 2006), Chinese Paladin 4 and 5 (2007 and 2011). New series such as Fantasy Sango (幻想三國志, 2003) and GuJian (古剑奇谭, 2010) also managed to gain popularity around this time.

Fantasia Sango 2 (2005), Chinese Paladin 4 (2007) and Gujian 2 (2013)

While some series survived thanks to the income from online counterparts, developers also found a new way to monetize these RPGs by doing movies and TV series adaptations, with several games of the Xuan-Yuan Sword, GuJian and Chinese Paladin series being adapted since 2005.

2016's Chinese Paladin 5 Tv series, based on the 2011 game of the same name.

It’s a concept seen everywhere from the Pokémon TV show in the 90s to the recent The Witcher series on NETFLIX, banking on the game’s popularity but also selling it to those coming fresh from the TV series.

Still, it was a time of decline in the single-player RPG market, with veteran studios like Heluo Studio temporarily disbanding and Zealot Digital leaving the single-player market to focus exclusively on online games.

GOING TRULY GLOBAL

Last year’s Genshin Impact (原神) was a landmark, not only as a single-player RPG that managed to bridge the mobile, console and PC markets but also for its localization and marketing efforts. The biggest international Chinese release ever, it successfully went from “Chinese Breath of the Wild clone”, as the international press initially reported it, into a global phenomenon that made more than 1 billion dollars in less than 6 months.

Genshin Impact (2020)

It’s not a simple feat. The traditional Chinese RPG series have long been struggling to keep up with the standards of the global industry and get attention from foreign fans and the press.

Chinese Paladin 6 (仙劍奇俠傳六, 2015) was praised for its plot but heavily criticized for being outdated and full of technical issues, with a Chinese reviewer concluding “Why not just make a TV series?”

Chinese Paladin 6 (2015), Gujian 3 (2018) and Xuan-Yuan Sword VII (2020)

Xuan-Yuan Sword VII (軒轅劍柒, 2020) tried to deliver next-gen graphics and a more modern Dark Souls-esque combat, but was ignored by the western mainstream press and criticized by players both domestic and foreign for its poor animations, lack of enemy variety and empty, linear world.

Gujian 3 (古剑奇谭三, 2018) is actually a great RPG, with a good translation, challenging combat and gorgeous AAA graphics — personally, I consider it far superior to recent western RPGs like Greedfall and Vampyr. However, even after selling 1.3 million units, its Metacritic page remains empty:

The big Chinese RPGs from the past years, all available on Steam in English, all struggling for attention.

Clearly, there are a lot of issues to be faced, from internal production challenges to properly marketing and localizing the games — Steam has dozens of interesting RPGs that are Chinese-only, and even the famous titles above only have Chinese voice acting, relying on English subtitles of uneven quality.

On the other hand, more and more indie Chinese RPGs like My Time at Portia (波西亚时光), Tale of Immortal (鬼谷八荒), Amazing Cultivation Simulator (了不起的修仙模擬器), Sands of Salzaar (部落与弯刀) and The Scroll Of Taiwu (太吾绘卷) are selling well and offering/promising English translations on Steam, which itself now has almost 25% of its user base coming from China. Not that surprising when you consider the country has over 312 million PC gamers.

The Scroll of Taiwu (2018), Sands of Salzaar (2020) and Tale of Immortal (2021)

A rising trend in these indie games is the “cultivation” theme — a sub-genre of Xianxia focused on people who practice martial arts and cultivate their inner energy (ki) to obtain special powers and longer life, often mixing in “isekai” tropes and following progression systems straight out of MMORPGs.

These stories have been extremely popular in webnovels and manhua (Chinese manga), with titles like 2014’s I Shall Seal the Heavens (我欲封天) and 2016’s Library of Heaven’s Path (天道图书馆) having hundreds of millions of views in China and across various portals that post their translations:

Library of Heaven’s Path page on webnovel.com, with 2,268 chapters and 172 million views

After Genshin Impact, Black Myth: Wu Kong (黑神话：悟空) seems to be the next candidate for a global blockbuster, but there are other big titles coming, such as Chinese Paladin 7 (仙剑奇侠传七), that just released a demo on Steam (sadly, Chinese only for now), or the recently announced GuJian 4.

Even if they fail, seems clear by now that Chinese RPGs are going to play an increasingly large role in the global market.

And if you enjoyed this look on the history of Chinese RPGs, check out my other ones on the history of Korean RPGs, the birth of Japanese RPGs, the history of MUDs & MMOs or follow me on Twitter. Cheers!

PS: Special thanks to @OrangePeelPanda and @closer1976 for checking the article and helping with the hanzi.

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