강진축구 (Gangjin Soccer)

~ the last words ~

Korean football games of this era are usually remembered as the management kind, where you sit above the pitch and buy midfielders. This was the other kind. You controlled one player, from the side, in two dimensions, on a pitch that could hold twenty people at once, and the match formats ran from one against one all the way up to ten against ten.

The design decision that defines it is that the rules barely applied. Fouling was a legitimate tactic rather than an infraction. There were items, and the items were not boots and jerseys: lightning shoes, poison gas, a cloak that made you invisible. Contemporary coverage described the art style as deliberately grotesque and comic, and the character roster included names that translate roughly to Fatty and Section Chief Man. You could take the ball off an opponent by kicking him. You could also do it by farting.

Adamsoft made it, under a president named Park Jong-man, and the trade press puts the launch in November 2000. The Korean Wikipedia article says October, cites nothing for it, and in the same breath claims the game ran for about eight years, which cannot be true against any launch date and any closure date either side will admit to. That article carries a cleanup tag and no inline citations at all, which is worth knowing before anybody repeats a number off it.

I was sixteen in 2000, on a modem at home in Turkey that topped out at 56k on a good night. A twenty-player real-time match was not a thing my connection could have held, and it was barely a thing anybody's connection could hold outside Korea, which by then had broadband penetration nobody else was close to. When I did get to a room full of networked machines a couple of years later it was a Turkish internet cafe and the game was Counter-Strike on a local network, where the latency problem is solved by the building. This was a game built for a country that had already solved it nationally.

~ the record ~

~ how it got paid for ~

It opened free and the money came later. In July 2001 Adamsoft signed a distribution deal with Battletop and a paid premium tier started on 1 August, with Fridays left free, which is a pricing idea I have not seen anywhere else and which tells you exactly how much the operator feared an empty server.

The second arrangement was the one that mattered. In May 2002 Netmarble took the license off Adamsoft, and the trade report uses the word 인수, acquired, rather than any softer word for a distribution agreement. Service under Netmarble began on 16 May 2002.

~ briefly, a professional sport ~

By October 2002 Netmarble was running an 온라인 강진축구 프로게임대회, an online Gangjin Soccer professional gaming tournament, held on the nineteenth. Korea in 2002 was the one country on earth where that sentence was unremarkable. The game had also been picked up as a World Cyber Games demonstration title and had taken an 우수게임상, an excellent game award, from the Ministry of Culture.

Netmarble's games head at the time said the plan was to keep the game's standing 매니아층을 중심으로, centered on a hardcore core. That is the thing executives say about a product whose broad audience has already gone, and it was said in 2002, less than five years before the end.

~ the record stops ~

April 2007 is where it ends, and that date exists in exactly one place: an unsourced sentence on Korean Wikipedia, repeated nearly word for word in a second article that redirects into the first. Two articles, one claim. No shutdown notice has survived, no Korean outlet seems to have covered the closure, and the Netmarble paths that would have carried a farewell are not retrievable, which is different from being empty.

One correction worth leaving here for the next person. The lead I was given credited this game to GameParadiso, a studio that is alive today and has been shipping a mobile shooter since 2017. The attribution comes from a single uncited line in GameParadiso's own encyclopedia entry, and the game's own entry, plus the 2002 trade coverage, both name Adamsoft instead. The two companies share the syllables 강진, which also appear in the name of a person who later ran GameParadiso. That is not evidence of anything, and I could find nothing connecting the firms. Adamsoft's own fate I could not establish at all.

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