Survival Project

» see sp.hanbiton.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In 2003 the games in the internet cafes I sat in were Counter-Strike and whatever somebody had brought on a CD that week. Korean free to play was a whole industry by then and almost none of it was localized for turkey, so a game like this reached us as a screenshot on a forum at best. Survival Project never had a turkish server and never needed one, because korea alone kept it running for a decade.

The full title was Survival Project: Search for the Legendary Orb. It was 2D and seen from above, built around real time fighting between players rather than around grinding, with twelve characters you picked per match instead of one you leveled forever. Movement was mouse and keyboard in the lobby and keyboard only once a match started, and the client always ran fullscreen with no window mode, which tells you exactly which decade it was written in.

IO Entertainment built it and HanbitSoft published it, the first game the company took to market. The money came from item sales rather than a subscription, so the game itself was free and the shop sold cards. Black cards attached to a weapon or an armor slot with a percentage chance of firing, and matching elements to your character raised that chance, which is a small deep system inside a game that looked like a cartoon.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

2003 was the good year. The international build shipped for the Survival Project tournament at World Cyber Games, sponsored by the korean government as part of the wider effort to export korean online gaming, and korean players had already shortened the name to surp. The community was wide enough in age to run its own tournaments, and in korea it kept high concurrent player counts for years afterward.

Abroad it did not take. The international servers closed on 31 october 2004, barely a year old, once regional partners had built their own localized versions and there was no reason for a central english service to exist. E-Games Malaysia picked up the english side and kept updating it, which is more effort than most licensees put in, and closed on 31 march 2007.

~ the long tail ~

Japan is the sad one. GungHo Online Entertainment launched it there on 29 june 2004 and ran it for two years into a market that never showed up. Japanese players wrote afterward that the late night lobbies could sit at zero people, and they blamed GungHo's near total lack of promotion rather than the game. When the HanbitSoft license came up for renewal on 31 august 2006, GungHo let it go.

Korea carried it alone from there, six more years with no foreign version left anywhere, until the servers were switched off on 24 february 2013. What is unusual is not that a 2003 free to play title died, it is the shape of the dying: the same game got a separate funeral in four countries across nine years, and the country that made it was the one that stayed to the end.

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