Crazy Arcade

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

~ the goodbye ~

In 2002 I was in internet cafes in Turkey playing Counter-Strike, and Crazy Arcade was the same room in Seoul running a completely different game. Same year, same furniture, same reason for being there, which is that the machine at the cafe was better than the machine at home and the people were there too. Korean PC bangs got a cartoon game about water balloons and we got men with rifles. I have thought about that difference more than once.

It opened on 16 October 2001 with a single mode. Eight players maximum, a small grid with breakable blocks, and a button that drops a water balloon which bursts in a cross a couple of seconds later and traps anyone caught in it. Pop the trapped player before they wriggle out and they are gone. If you have played Bomberman you already know all of it, which turned out to be a legal problem.

The numbers came fast. By October 2002, one year in, Nexon was counting thirty-five million registered accounts and a peak of 330,000 people online simultaneously. Later figures from the company put the global concurrent peak nearer a million with about 400,000 of those domestic (roughly). For a free game with one mode and no story that is an absurd result, and it is the result that turned Nexon from a company into an institution.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the lawsuit ~

Hudson Soft, who made Bomberman, noticed. In 2003 they sued Nexon over the resemblance, and the resemblance was not really arguable: the grid, the timed blast in four directions, the powerups sitting inside breakable blocks. Nexon had swapped bombs for water balloons and death for capture, and had made the whole thing free and online at a moment when Bomberman was still a boxed console product.

It settled, with Nexon paying. still. What is interesting is what happened afterward, which is nothing: Crazy Arcade kept running for another twenty-three years and Bomberman did not become the online game of record in Korea. The clone won on distribution. That is usually how these end and it does not make the original wrong.

~ what came out of it ~

The important thing Crazy Arcade produced was not Crazy Arcade. In August 2004 Nexon shipped CrazyRacing KartRider, which took the same characters and put them in go-karts, and KartRider became one of the largest games in Korean history and the closest thing the country has to a national pastime on a keyboard. Crazy Shooting Bubble Fighter followed in 2009 on the same cast. A mobile version, BnB M, arrived in March 2019.

Outside Korea it never landed the same way. It went to China with Shanda, to Taiwan with Gamania, to Vietnam with VNG, and to Russia with Innova. North America got it as PopTag!, which ran an open beta from January 2010 and closed in July 2011. The characters that a whole Korean generation can name on sight are a footnote everywhere else.

~ the last day ~

Nexon announced it on 11 June 2026 and the reaction was loud. The company had a new chairman, Patrick Söderlund, and a stated policy of selection and concentration, which in practice means a minimum profitability number that every live title has to clear. Crazy Arcade did not clear it. Bubble Fighter had already gone on 24 June. KartRider had been switched off back in March 2023 in favor of a sequel that then failed and got shut down itself.

The servers went down on 13 August 2026, twenty-five years and change after they came up. The comment section on the official site filled with people asking for a reversal, and others organized last sessions to be in the grid one more time, which is the same thing that happens every time and has never once worked. A game can run for a quarter of a century, be the thing an entire country learned multiplayer on, and still get closed because it came in under a number on a slide.

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