앨리샤 (Alicia)

» see alicia.gametree.co.kr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The Korean title is 말과 나의 이야기, 앨리샤, my story with a horse, Alicia, and the title is the most misleading thing about it. Everything in that phrasing points at a stable-management game, the kind where you brush an animal and watch a stat go up. I came to this one expecting that and the trade coverage corrected me fast. It was a racing game, billed as action riding, with a speed mode and a magic mode where you fought each other mid-race, plus gliding and jumping. You could feed and groom your horse, and the designer said plainly in a 2011 interview that doing so had no effect whatsoever on how the horse performed. The care was there because people wanted to do it.

Ntreev Soft made it, on its Gametree portal, and the lead was Seo Gwan-hee, whose previous work included White Day and PangYa. The PangYa inheritance is visible: the art direction was reportedly developed out of PangYa's character videos, and the team built over a thousand motion files for the horses alone. The ambition was openly stated too. This was pitched as something that could sit beside KartRider, which in Korea in 2011 was the bar for a casual racer.

It had been coming for a long time. The game was first shown at G-Star in November 2007 under the working name Project Alice, took a closed beta in December 2009, another in April 2010, then an open party in February 2011 before the open beta on the 24th of that month. Paid items arrived on 31 March 2011. From first public showing to open beta is three years and three months. The live service that followed ran for two years and eleven months.

~ the dossier ~

~ the famous face ~

From November 2010 the exclusive promotional model was IU, who by then was on her way to being one of the largest pop stars in the country. Hiring her was a statement about how much Ntreev expected from this, and the company needed it: the studio had made two games that mattered, Trickster Online and PangYa, and had been looking for a third one ever since. Alicia was a serious attempt at that third one.

The early signs were good enough to quote. During the pre-open-beta period the concurrent user count beat PangYa's best month inside two days, and one trade report puts the early figures above twenty five thousand at once. Then it settled, and what it settled to is not recorded in any source I could reach.

~ the second attempt ~

On 10 January 2013 Ntreev converted the game to free-to-play and shipped it as a 2.0, which is the standard Korean move for a title that launched below expectation. It bought twelve months. The closure notice, written a year and three days later, opens by marking that anniversary: 2013년 1월 10일, 무료 서비스 전환 이후 벌써 1년이라는 시간이 흘렀네요. Already a year has passed since the switch to free service.

~ the denial, then the date ~

On 31 December 2013 a game master announced in the global chat channel that the service was going to end. Ntreev's response, reported in the gaming press that week, was that this had been an internal mistake. Thirteen days later, on 13 January 2014 at 14:58, the company posted notice number 456, titled 앨리샤 서비스 종료 안내, and wrote 앨리샤는.. 2월 13일을 마지막으로 여러분과 작별을 하게 되었습니다. Alicia will say goodbye to you with 13 February as its last day. The line beneath it gives the time: 오후 12시, twelve noon, on a Thursday.

The money section is worth reading for how it is argued. Unspent items bought with the game's currency were converted back into that currency, good for a year from closure. The notice then states that because the game had been free for over a year, there was no refund obligation.

~ noon, and after ~

The site's inner pages began returning 404 from 21 February. What the root redirected to was End.aspx, a page of about three and a half kilobytes whose header image carries the whole statement in its alt text, which is where I found it: thank you for using 말과 나의 이야기, 앨리샤, the service ended as of 13 February 2014, and a promise to do better for newer and more enjoyable games in future. The wordmark on this page, winged, is the one shown here.

A fan team later ran a private revival called Story of Alicia, and a 2018 write-up of it notes that it had already gone offline by then. Ntreev itself outlived its horse game by ten years: NCSoft, which had bought the studio in 2012, wound it up in February 2024 after eleven consecutive years of losses. The third hit never arrived.

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