MAIET Entertainment

» see maiet.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

GunZ never had a route into Turkey. Free to play in 2006 meant a regional portal with a regional account behind it, and the portals carrying this one were selling into North America and into Brazil. So it passed at exactly the wrong angle for me: close enough to hear the name argued about, never close enough to install.

MAIET started in 1998 in Seoul as a group of five, and for six years it was nobody in particular. GunZ: The Duel went out in Korea in 2004 through Netmarble: a free third-person shooter where everyone carried a sword and a gun, styled like a cartoon, paid for through a cash shop instead of a box. The international open beta followed in 2005. Brazil and India were on it by the middle of 2006, with North America and Europe arriving that November.

What made it matter was not the shooting. The movement system let you run along walls and dodge sideways in mid air, and somewhere inside the weapon-switch logic there were animation cancels that let you chain those moves faster than the game appeared to intend. Players found them and taught them to each other. Collectively they got called K-style, for Korean style, and within a year they were the actual game.

I write software for a living, so the part I keep turning over is that nobody in Seoul ever really got to decide about this. By the time it was a question, the exploit was the product. We had a smaller version of the same argument in the cafes here a few years earlier, where a Quake-derived engine let you gain speed by jumping in a particular rhythm, and half the room called it cheating while the other half practiced it. That argument has never once been settled by a patch note.

~ the case file ~

~ the bug that became the game ~

K-style split the population cleanly. A player who had drilled the timing could cross the room and be behind you again before the animation you were watching had finished. A player who had not was a target standing in an open room. The skill floor stopped being a floor and became a wall, which is fine for a competitive scene and terrible for a free game that lives on new arrivals.

It also gave the game a very long tail in places nobody had planned for. Brazil took to it through Level Up! Games and never really let go. In English it lived on ijji, the NHN portal that passed ten million registered accounts by November 2009. When ijji folded in 2012 the game moved to Aeria Games, which closed its GunZ service on 31 May 2013. Private servers were already running by then and some of them are still running now.

~ what came after ~

MAIET spent the back half of its life on two answers to the same question. RaiderZ was a monster-hunting MMO with manual aiming and boss parts you could cut off and carry as weapons, published in North America by Perfect World from November 2012 and in Europe by Gameforge. GunZ 2 was announced in 2010, tested in Korea from 2011, greenlit on Steam in March 2013 and released in the West across the following winter.

GunZ 2 was built without the accident. The movement was designed this time, which meant it was legible, teachable and nothing like the thing people had spent eight years learning. The audience that existed for GunZ was an audience for a specific set of animation bugs, and no amount of engineering could hand that back to them deliberately.

~ how anyone found out ~

There was no closing statement. In July 2015 Perfect World announced that RaiderZ would go offline in North America on 7 August, and the reason it gave was that the developer had ceased operations and the server problems could no longer be fixed. That notice is the closest thing to an obituary MAIET ever received, and it was written by a publisher in California about a game most GunZ players had never touched.

A Steam post on 4 September 2015 confirmed it in the other direction: MAIET was no longer operational and Masangsoft held the rights. Masangsoft announced on 31 March 2017 that most GunZ 2 servers would close on 10 May. The original outlasted all of it and turned up on Steam in 2024 under the new owner, seventeen years after the wall runs started, with the founder long gone to a new studio.

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