아이엘: 소울브링거 (IL: Soulbringer)

» see il.gpotato.kr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Gala Lab opened it on 26 May 2010 as 아이엘: 소울브링거, IL: Soulbringer, and sold it under a phrase invented for the occasion: 포스트모던 RPG. Asked what that was supposed to mean, the producer dropped the marketing and called it a casual RPG you played alongside a companion. The ratings board had cleared it two months before, for all ages. Gala Lab both built the game and ran it, a point the trade press singled out at the time, and it exported the thing to somewhere between thirteen and sixteen countries depending on which paragraph of the same 2010 trade article you happen to read.

The company itself is worth getting right, because the wikis do not. Gala Lab was formed in 2010 out of a merger between two Korean studios, nFlavor and Aeonsoft, under Japan's Gala Inc., and it is still operating today with Ragnarok Universe in development. Korean Wikipedia credits IL to nFlavor, which is the same company one name earlier.

Where this game lived shows up most clearly in what you paid with. Items came out of 감자, potato, the wallet of a portal called gPotato that Gala ran for its own titles, and inside the game you spent 에그, eggs. Anyone outside Korea and Japan reached it only through a local licensee, and the licensees were in Taiwan and Thailand, with a separate deal covering China and southeast Asia. There was no European service and no reason there would have been. The only way I was ever going to meet this game is the way I did meet it, which is by reading its own notice board fifteen years after it stopped answering.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the companion you hatched ~

The companion was the design, not an accessory to it. Monsters dropped a substance called 에테르, ether, and you banked enough of it to hatch a 피오, a Pio. From that point the Pio's abilities resolved your fighting and your skills instead of your character's, so advancing meant tending a creature you had incubated rather than a column of numbers belonging to you. How to combine Pios, and what the odds on a hatch actually were, are the questions the game masters spent their time answering on the board.

~ the word that changed ~

On 6 October 2011 the notice board carried post 567, titled 아이엘 서비스 일시 중단 안내. A temporary halt. It fixed the date at 4 November, said the database would be reset, and then went out of its way to state what the event was not: 일시적인 중단일 뿐, 영구적으로 서비스가 종료 되는 것이 아님. Only a temporary halt, not a permanent termination of the service.

Post 573 went up on 4 November, titled 아이엘 게임 데이터(DB) 초기화 진행 및 서비스 종료 안내. The execution date in it is the same date. The compensation table under it is the same table. The word in the title is 종료, terminated, and the body does not soften it: the data was initialized that day and access was blocked from then on. Twenty-nine days sit between the two posts, and neither of them explains what happened in between.

The rest of the company never caught up with its own notice board. A GameMeca interview at G-Star nine days later still had the game as 중단, suspended for a renewal. Gala's Japanese parent was still telling investors in January and February 2012 that IL had gone into 一時休止, a temporary rest, three months after the Korean subsidiary had published the word for death. The chronology on the corporate profile settles on a fourth description and files the whole episode as 명칭 변경, a change of name.

~ what came back instead ~

The promised reopening did arrive, carrying a different name and an empty guest list. Eternal Blade began Korean commercial service on 16 February 2012, 104 days after IL went dark, and Gala's own Japanese announcement is blunt about the lineage: 旧タイトル, the former title, with IL as its 前身, its predecessor. It arrived with a third-person camera and non-targeting combat, sold on the pleasure of pulling large groups of monsters. The one thing it could not restore was anybody's character, because the database those lived in had been zeroed in November.

A smaller ending is folded inside this one. The Japanese service had opened on 8 June 2011 and lasted 149 days, dying with the Korean original rather than outliving it. Eternal Blade itself ran until 30 June 2014, when Gala Lab left a tombstone at its own address confirming the service had ended as of that Monday, after a refund window that covered everything bought in the previous four months whether it had been used or not. Korean Wikipedia files that June 2014 date as IL's own, which is the single claim in this story that the company never made.

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