라이딩스타 (Riding Star)

» see star.hangame.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The setup is the best thing about it. Global warming has finished off winter on Earth, so the people who snowboard have gone looking for somewhere that still has a season, and they find a planet. The planet is called Riding Star. It has low gravity and steep valleys, and the flagship run is an ice valley named Oblivion. Once you are there the game also lets you ride on sand and on water, which is the sort of detail that gets added when a team has built its own physics and wants to show you.

They had built their own physics. Bluecat Studio spent about six months writing an engine before they wrote the game, having tried commercial racing engines and concluded that flat racing math takes the fun out of a snowboard. Races ran up to eight players, or four against four. Tricks filled a gauge the game called FUN, the gauge powered your boosters, and the trick points converted into experience once you crossed the line. A separate battle mode scattered ice cubes across the map that gave out random items when you hit them.

NHN put it on Hangame as the portal's first publishing release of 2007. Open beta opened on 24 January, after a closed test in October 2006 that drew eleven thousand people and a final test that January. The money came from paid items sold either on a timer or outright, plus a Converse shop selling branded gear for your rider. By the spring of 2007 it had eleven maps and a trick license system with its own quest tree.

~ the record ~

~ the studio that walked out ~

Bluecat came out of Hangame. The team had been NHN's own internal development group and left to set up on their own, with an NHN investment behind them, which led the trade press to describe them as effectively an NHN affiliate studio. Their chief executive, 연윤호, did not care for that framing and said so in an interview twelve days before the first closed test: NHN is not a parent company, it is a publisher. He described the arrangement as running strictly through the contract, with NHN providing no production help and simply inspecting the finished game.

He also described how it felt, which Korean studio heads mostly do not. The word he used for the team's state of mind was 절박한, desperate, and the line he gave the reporter was that they did not know when they might starve. They had committed to this one game in early 2005 and had been building it ever since.

~ the notice is a photograph ~

There is no surviving text version of the shutdown. What survives is a pop-up window on the official site pointing at a JPEG, 532 by 600 pixels, and everything Hangame had to say is typeset inside the image. Its embedded metadata says it was made in Photoshop at 18:44 on 3 September 2008, the evening before it went up.

The heading reads 한게임 라이딩스타 서비스 종료 안내. As the Riding Star service terminates on 16 October 2008, it says, sales of paid items are ending. Sales stopped at ten in the morning on Thursday 4 September. Play and items kept working normally until the 16th, and whatever you still held was refunded in bulk into Hangame's wallet currency on 23 October. Six weeks of notice, and the verb is 종료 throughout, which is the word Mgame declined to use three years earlier for a comparable act.

The logo on this page was cropped out of that image. It is the only copy left: the wordmark on the live site had been baked into a Flash file that nobody archived, and the whole asset tree underneath it holds no standalone logo. The last surviving picture of the brand is the one printed on its own death notice.

~ it kept going without korea ~

Here is the part the Korean encyclopedia gets wrong. It says the overseas versions, Project Powder in the United States and Snowbound Online in Germany, both closed in 2012. Neither did. Snowbound ended on 31 October 2010, announced two days ahead. Project Powder ran until 7 February 2013, when its publisher Outspark shut down and took it along. Its last archived page, three weeks before the end, is a normal running game with no notice on it at all.

The timing is the thing. The North American site first appears in June 2008, which is to say the overseas launch was being set up while the Korean original was being wound down. Korea stopped taking money on 4 September and switched off on 16 October, and the same game went on being sold to Americans for four more years. A Korean studio's game outliving its home market by that margin was not unusual in 2008. Watching the two happen in the same quarter is.

Nothing is left to probe. The developer's own site is gone, Project Powder's domain is parked at a reseller, and star.hangame.com still answers today with a perfectly healthy 87 kilobytes belonging to a martial-arts idle RPG that Hangame put on the subdomain in June 2026. A status check on the old address returns a living page and tells you nothing.

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