Trickster Online

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

~ the goodbye ~

In 2003 I was in Turkish internet cafes playing counter-strike. Trickster Online launched in Korea that April into a market that had already gone somewhere Turkey had not, where the cafe was a PC bang and what ran on the machines was a persistent world rather than a thirty minute round. The Korean free to play wave did reach here eventually, but it came through other titles. Knight Online is the one that landed in Turkey. This was not.

Ntreev Soft built it and put it live in Korea on 10 April 2003. It was 2D and isometric, drawn in a soft cartoon style, and you played an animal. There was a bunny and there was a buffalo, and the roster went on from there, each character sorted into one of four types by whether it leaned on raw power or on charm. Combat was point and click and never pretended otherwise.

Licensing spread it across the region over the following four years. Japan got a service in 2005 through Gamepot and China the same year. Taiwan came in 2006 and Thailand in 2007. North America arrived last, on 23 February 2007, run by Ntreev's own American arm.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the drill ~

The thing everyone remembers is the drilling. Certain ground could be drilled, and drilling it paid out items and experience, so there was an entire way to play the game that involved no combat whatever. You found a spot and you drilled, and whatever came up was the reward.

That sounds like a small feature and it was not. Most MMOs of that generation had exactly one loop, which was kill things until the bar fills. Trickster had a second loop that was slow and social, and it kept people logged in who had no interest in fighting anything. Charm existing as a character stat was partly there to make that half of the game work.

~ the long tail ~

The North American service went dark on 27 February 2013. The Korean original, running continuously since 2003, closed on 18 January 2014, and by the end of that month there was no official Trickster server left anywhere in the world.

What came after reads worse than the closure did. Ntreev tried again with Trickster M on mobile in May 2021 and the launch was enormous, over three hundred thousand players at once on the first day. Two months later it was down to about eight thousand. By December 2023 it was showing three hundred and seventy five. NCSoft wound Ntreev Soft up on 15 February 2024 after eleven straight years of losses, and the mobile game switched off on 13 March, three weeks behind the studio that made it.

So the company outlived its own 2003 game by a decade. It did not outlive the attempt to bring that game back.

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