Asda Story

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

~ the eulogy ~

MaxOn Soft in Korea made it and mGame ran it at home from July 2008. The characters were the short wide-headed kind the Korean market was making a lot of that year, drawn against a world that stayed relentlessly bright. Money came out of an item shop instead of a monthly fee. Publishers picked it up in six territories. GamesCampus took North America with a closed beta from 15 to 21 July 2008 and an open server on 5 August, Play Media Group took Europe, and the other three went to houses as far apart as Brazil and the Middle East.

Turkey was not one of the six. The closest thing on offer was the English European client, which meant finding out the game existed from an English MMO site, and there was no shortage of competition doing exactly the same thing in 2008. Nothing about this one traveled.

Season 3 landed in 2010 and the numbers started sliding afterward. mGame's answer was a follow-up, Asda R, which ran closed beta through January and February 2011 and opened on 30 March. Two weeks before that opening the company announced the original would close on 15 March. It did not.

~ the dossier ~

~ the soul mate system ~

The feature the game was built around paired two players at the account level, so every character on one account was soul mated to every character on the other, and there was no penalty for breaking it off. Time spent together raised the bond, and the bond unlocked things: pulling your partner to where you stood, resurrecting them the instant they died, taking seventy percent of their attack power onto your own, and a shared song that lifted every stat for half an hour.

There was also a golden apple. Kill monsters near your soul mate and an apple grew nearby, filling with a cut of the experience, and either of you could eat it. If one of you had to log off, you could leave your soul behind in a stone for the other to carry, and the experience it collected while you were gone was waiting when you came back. For a game with an item shop, an unusual amount of design went into making two people want to be online at the same time.

~ the reprieve ~

March 2011 is the interesting month. The closure notice went up, the players objected loudly enough that mGame reversed it, and the compromise was that the servers stayed on with the paid half turned off. For six months Asda Story ran as a free thing with nobody selling anything in it, which is not a state online games are usually allowed to exist in. Then on 15 September 2011 mGame confirmed the second date and this one was final.

~ the rest of the family ~

The Japanese service under MicMac had gone first, on 30 September 2008, barely two months after launch. GamesCampus closed North America on 1 August 2011, ahead of the Korean original by six weeks. Asda R became Asda 2 Evolution in the West and carried the name another four years until it shut on 15 July 2015, which put the whole franchise at seven years and a bit from the first Korean login to the last.

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