4LEAF (포립)

» see 4leaf.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The site's own title bar called it 처음 만나는 Game Society, the game society you meet first, and the name came from the four-leaf clover. Softmax built it in 2000 as the place its two kinds of customer would overlap. The studio sold boxed role-playing games, chiefly the War of Genesis series, and it wanted an online address where the people who bought those boxes and the people who only played online would be in the same lobby. The preview coverage at the time said eight titles were planned to sit inside it by 2003.

What you did there was pick an avatar and play small games. The avatars were characters out of 룬의 아이들, the Children of the Rune novels, seven male and seven female, with names like 루시안 칼츠 and 이스핀 샤를. The games included a racer called 드림체이서 and a 2D arena brawler called 젤리삐워즈 built out of Softmax's own worlds. Underneath all of it was chat, which is what a game society mostly is.

I have no personal distance to claim on this one and no honest way to pretend otherwise. It was Korean-language only, it never left Korea, and the thing that unlocked its best feature was owning physical objects that came inside PC games sold on shelves in Seoul. In 2000 I was sixteen in Turkey, dialing up at 56k, and the only boxed game culture within reach of me was whatever the local shop had imported.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the dice ~

The centerpiece was a board game, 주사위의 잔영, the afterimage of the dice. You rolled in turn and raced to the goal, which is every board game ever made. The part worth recording is what you played it with: character cards from the War of Genesis games, and you got those cards by buying the boxed products. You could also buy them in the shop, and Softmax's own trade coverage is unusually frank that the cards were seen as a revenue idea.

So a physical card that shipped inside a retail PC game had an identity inside a web service, long before anybody had a vocabulary for that. It also meant the community had a hierarchy you could not grind your way into, because part of it was decided at a till. 주사위의 잔영 went commercial on 18 May 2001 and it died with the client it ran inside.

~ it died twice ~

On 15 December 2003 Softmax converted the whole thing to run in a web browser, and on 12 February 2004 the 포립 브라우저 service ended, which in the timeline's own phrasing means the downloadable client was switched off. The board game went with it. The browser version kept going, picked up two more avatars, and lasted another five years and change before the entry for 30 April 2009 that reads 웹 서비스 종료.

~ the address now ~

There is no farewell page. The Archive holds the working portal through August 2008 and then nothing until 2011, by which time the host was returning small error stubs. No Korean outlet appears to have written about the closure, the encyclopedia entry has no citations on it at all, and the reason the service ended is simply not on record.

Softmax itself kept going for a while and its domain answers today, under a different name, selling an engine. There is no mention of 포립 anywhere on it. The 4leaf.com address has since passed to a parking page advertising something else entirely. The one thing that did survive is a fan memorial site someone put up at a Korean free-hosting subdomain, which is the usual arrangement: the company keeps the trademark and a stranger keeps the records.

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