네오다크세이버 (NeoDarkSaver)

» see win.mgame.com/game/neodark as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Combat ran on a budget. Every attack and every step spent from a pool the game called ticks, and when the pool was empty your turn was over. The label its makers used was real-time turn-based, which reads like a contradiction and in practice meant that skill showed up as thrift: two equally ranked characters got very different amounts of work out of an identical allowance. That is the kind of system that keeps a small game alive for years on the people who have gotten good at it.

It was the third name in a line that started in 1997. A room-based strategy RPG called 어둠의 성전 ran over the Korean text terminals, turned into Dark Saver as a full-field game in 1998, and NeoDarkSaver arrived in 2002 as the version with the new graphics. The camera moved to an isometric view, the characters were two heads tall and drawn like something out of a picture book, and WizGate's vice-president said at launch that he expected teenagers and women to take to it. The company renamed itself Mgame the following April.

Closed testing had been running since November 2001. Open beta started on 11 April 2002, and the contemporaneous trade report is worth preferring over the encyclopedia here, which gives the 2nd. In January 2003 the game went free apart from cash items. By October of that first year it was holding ten thousand people online at the same moment, which Mgame thought was worth a press release.

~ the case file ~

~ the word they would not use ~

On 25 March 2005 a notice went up on the game's own board, headed 라피스 업데이트 일정 안내, a notice of the Lapis update schedule. It opens cheerfully. At last, it says, NeoDarkSaver breaks a long silence. The date given is Thursday 31 March.

Then comes a section headed 주의사항, caution, and it is the most carefully written paragraph Mgame ever produced about this game. This update is not the server-merger concept our members may be imagining, it says. The NeoDarkSaver servers are kept exactly as they are, and no character is transferred to any Lapis server. Characters and items will not be reset. What changes is the content, from NeoDarkSaver into Lapis.

So nobody moved and nothing was wiped. I pulled the archived page and counted: 업데이트, update, appears eleven times. 종료, the word a Korean operator uses when a service dies, appears zero times. 통합, merger, appears once, inside the clause that exists to deny it. The encyclopedia's chronology for Lapis logs the same day as 네오다크세이버 서비스 종료, service termination, with "merged with Lapis" in brackets. Both of those words are an editor's later summary, and both are ones the company went out of its way to avoid.

~ ten thousand at once ~

That concurrent figure is the only hard number anybody published. WizGate announced it on 21 October 2002 and dated it to the 19th. After a large Alaska-themed content patch in January 2004, Mgame's vice-president told the trade press that concurrents were up by more than half, without saying up from what, which is the standard shape of a figure that is doing public relations rather than accounting.

MapleStory opened in 2003 into the same market of free two-dimensional Korean games with cute characters, and did to this one what it did to a good many others. By August 2004 the trade coverage had settled into describing NeoDarkSaver as a fairy-tale-graphics title currently in free service, which is how Korean games get written about once nobody is worried about them. Seven months after that it was Lapis.

~ what the successor still carries ~

Lapis is not an archive. I probed it while writing this and it answered with 48,195 bytes of autumn 2026 event page, selling tokens for Pepero Day in November, with a notice board whose newest row was posted the same day I looked. The game that replaced NeoDarkSaver has been running for twenty-one years now, which is roughly seven times as long as the thing it replaced managed.

It also still carries the name. The logo Mgame serves on that live page reads LAPIS in a crystal typeface, and set underneath it in smaller letters is NeoDarkSaver V2. The project's working title never did come off the mark.

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