Things That Remain Even After the Game Is Over

One day, a mysterious red star appeared in the sky of the online game.

With each new patch, the star drew a little closer, and monsters that were harder to defeat than usual began to appear. Rumors spread among users that the in-game world might truly be facing its end . Finally, on the day the red star came close enough to fill the screen, players gathered on a hill. They had come to witness the end of the world they had shared for so long.

Soon, the red star engulfed the world, and the screen turned to darkness. And just like that, the world of 〈FINAL FANTASY XIV〉 came to a close.

Why is this scene still remembered as “the most romantic server shutdown in gaming history”? It’s probably because the end of a game isn’t just about the service coming to an end.

It encompasses the characters we nurtured with love and the time spent alongside other players. It also embodies the time developers spent going through trial and error to build that world. Looking back at a game that disappeared long ago is ultimately a way of revisiting the time and traces left behind by the people who were part of it.

The NationalCentral Library’s “Discontinued Korean Games: Reactivated” is an exhibition that revisits the traces left behind after these games disappeared.

When working in game promotion, one naturally tends to think first about upcoming games, the next update, and the stories yet to be told. Perhaps because I’m so accustomed to always looking ahead, taking another look at a game that’s already ended felt unfamiliar. What would a game that disappeared long ago look like now? 

Carrying that curiosity, I headed to the exhibition hall at the National Library of Korea.

Records of the Beginning, Clues to Remembering Games

Upon entering the exhibition hall, you’ll first encounter records from the early days of Korean game development.

The exhibition’s timeline begins in the 1980s, when independent developers first started creating games. In an era when the game development environment was not as established as it is today, developers had to figure out how to create games on their own, working within the constraints of limited technology and informationto create their games.

Many of the games created in this way have not survived intact to this day, or have become difficult to play due to changes in the operating environment. As a result, we must now confirm their existence through surviving materials—such as magazines, packaging, and advertisements—rather than the games themselves.

It feels a bit sad that games once completed through the developers’ countless struggles and efforts now survive only as a few images and sentences in magazines. Perhaps that’s why I found myself looking at the exhibition materials for a little longer.

Nowadays, an immense amount of content is created around a single game. Before release, advertisements and videos promote the game, and after release, user-generated streams and content pile up online. Yet here, a single page from a magazine served as a crucial clue for remembering a game from decades ago.

Game books like 〈26 DOS Games to Enjoy on Your Computer〉, displayed in the exhibition hall, show what kinds of games existed at the time and how they were introduced to the public. Old gaming magazines featured news about new games, walkthroughs, development stories, documenting the gaming culture of the time. The domestic SRPG PC game *Tempest*, which heavily emphasized character illustrations and visual effects, along with the floppy disks containing the game, have become important historical materials showing how a game was created and distributed.

The exhibition also featured an area where visitors could play restored classic games firsthand. As visitors played using the clunky controllers, I could picture how people back then must have encountered and enjoyed these games.

Back in the days when the current model of countless users simultaneously logging in and playing online wasn’t yet commonplace. To enjoy games with friends, you had to meet in person and gather in one place, and to check out new games or walkthroughs, you would have eagerly awaited the monthly game magazines. The image of marking the relevant pages and glancing back at them repeatedly naturally comes to mind.

The history of gaming isn’t just about the games that were released

When working at a game company, it’s not uncommon to encounter concepts and projects that never saw the light of day.

Sometimes the initial concept changes completely, and projects that have been in development for a long time are canceled before release. As a result, the countless mockups, builds, and test versions created during the development process are often quickly forgotten in the industry simply because they never saw the light of day.

That’s why the records of unreleased titles remaining at the exhibition struck me as particularly intriguing. This is because materials that weren’t considered particularly significant at the time—since they didn’t lead to a finished product—now, with the passage of time, actually reveal the direction game development was heading in that era. Why did they try to make these games? What technologies did they experiment with? Why couldn’t they clear the final hurdle? The remaining materials contain the choices and possibilities the developers grappled with back then.

Among them, *When That Day Comes* was a title that particularly highlighted the significance of these records.

The Korean shooting game *When That Day Comes*appeared in advertisements and articles in game magazines, hinting at its release, but it never actually made it to market. What was interesting was that the thing that most vividly describes this game—which never actually saw the light of day—is not the game itself, but a single page of advertising.

To a marketer, this is a fairly familiar type of material. You select images of the game, decide what to emphasize,  it’s an advertisement created to introduce the game to the public. At the time, it was likely intended solely to promote an “upcoming game.” However, decades later, its role has completely changed. The screenshots and text in the ad have become a record that allows us to glimpse what kind of game the developers were aiming to create and what they wanted to showcase.

The Era of Games Preserved in Developers’ Memories

The history of games isn’t preserved solely through documents and data. The memories and testimonies of the people who created and enjoyed games back then also serve as important clues for understanding that era. How do first-generation developers who experienced that time firsthand remember those days?

In one corner of the exhibition hall, an interview with Hong DongHe (Adjunct Professor at Kaywon University of Art and Design), a first-generation Korean game developer, was playing.

Listening to Professor Hong’s story, one is reminded that the development environment—which we now take for granted—was by no means a given in the early 1990s.  At that time, game engines and development tools were not as readily available as they are today, and developers had to create the necessary functions themselves.

Professor Hong recalls that he implemented the necessary libraries himself by referring to the original technical manuals from IBM headquarters. The manuals didn’t even include ready-made code. We had to read the circuit diagrams and build the necessary functions ourselves, and for information not found in the documentation, we had to share knowledge among programmers to find solutions.

We had to implement the libraries ourselves. There was absolutely no code there—just circuit diagrams.

Professor Hong cites *Toshi, the Primitive Boy* as an example illustrating the development environment at the time. It was a Korean-made action game produced in the early ’90s, based on a comic book IP. During development, they had to implement multi-joint processing from scratch to depict the movements of a long-necked dinosaur boss, and and researched various scrolling methods to create dynamic visual changes. While these features are now familiar within modern game engines, back then, we had to build methods from scratch just to achieve a single on-screen movement.

Professor Hong describes that era as follows.

It was truly an era when we had to squeeze every last bit of code out of the system.

Actually, when I first entered the exhibition hall, the rough and simple graphics of the old games were the first thing I noticed. But after listening to the interview and looking at the same screens again, I saw something a little different. Even a single movement of a character that seemed simple involved a problem that someone had to solve themselves, and even a feature we now take for granted required them to find the solution from scratch back then.

There are stories that cannot be told by looking at the finished game screens alone. What challenges they faced and what solutions they devised to create a single scene—what they had to give up and what choices they made—are difficult to fully grasp from the final product alone.

Human memory fills in the gaps that the remaining records cannot capture. The history of a game becomes clearer not only through the records that remain, but also when the memories and experiences of the people who created it are recorded alongside them.

Why Game Developers Need "Records"

After returning from the exhibition, I suddenly recalled the official guidebook for *Legend of Mir 2* that I had looked up while conducting a previous interview.

From today’s perspective, there are quite a few amusing points. The recommended specifications for playing the game at the time were a Pentium III 600MHz processor and 128MB. By today’s standards, those specs are so low they’re laughable.

Another page that catches the eye is the one explaining how to start the game. It provides detailed explanations, labeling each item on the screen with letters—from where to enter your ID and password to which fields to fill in your date of birth and password confirmation.

These processes have become so second nature now that we no longer need a “guide.” So, looking at this page actually makes me realize anew just how much time has passed. It also makes me think that creating an account and logging into an online game—things we take for granted now—must have been such a novel experience back then that each step required a separate explanation.

This book probably wasn’t created from the start with the intention of preserving the gaming environment of that time. Back then, it was simply a practical guidebook designed to help users get started and enjoy the game more fully. However, as time has passed, it has become a record that shows not only the game’s content but also what kind of computers were used to play it and how people first encountered online gaming.

The magazines, advertisements, and discs I saw at the exhibition have also traveled through time in the same way. Perhaps the significance of a record isn’t determined from the start, but is rediscovered only after time has passed.

Builds, design documents, concept art, images created for release, and unused drafts. While these files are currently created simply to develop and promote a single game, no one knows which of them will become crucial clues explaining today’s games 30 years from now. Someday, they may serve as clues revealing today’s games and what we set out to create.

I find myself curious—and even a little excited—to see what form the games we’re creating now will take in the future and how they’ll be interpreted as historical records.