Keyboard Warrior's American Launch
The goal of the game was to type on a money tree keyboard and put down the swarming zombies. “Ooh!” Su-gyeong’s family couldn’t help but exclaim after hearing Yoo Jae-won’s explanation of the background. It was their first time experiencing the vibrant full-color CG rendered with every ounce of the VGA card’s power, the cheerful background music that delighted the ears, and the heart-pounding sound effects.
“Me? All right.” For the first time, Su-gyeong’s father showed genuine enthusiasm. Su-gyeong looked thoroughly reluctant, but one sharp glance from her mother was enough to make her yield her seat.
“Yes! Shall we start with basic key practice? Move the mouse and click the start button. It’s the one on the far left.”
Su-gyeong’s father followed Yoo Jae-won’s instructions without difficulty. “Ah, so that’s what this is for.” Though it seemed to be his first time holding a mouse, he slid it smoothly and clicked the start button. The words “Start Game” appeared, followed by an illustrated explanation of the zombie rush scenario Yoo Jae-won had described. The art style was humorous and SD-like rather than realistic—after all, the game was aimed primarily at children, so blood and flying gore would have been inappropriate. Instead, meticulous care had been poured into its polish. Even the character and short-sentence practice sections, which could easily have been skipped, were given full stories. The keyboard warrior, having confirmed the power of spirit speech, heads to an abandoned warehouse to test his abilities; that is the character and short-sentence practice. Rows of empty bottles line the shelves, each bearing a single alphabetic letter. At first, only basic letters like A, S, D, and F appear.
Bang, bang, bang! As Su-gyeong’s father hesitantly tapped the alphabetic keys, loud gunfire rang out and the cheerful sound of shattering bottles followed. The fragments flying from the broken glass looked natural. Rather than drawing every shard individually, the pieces had been turned into sprites that burst outward according to the computer’s processing power—an approach that reduced manual labor but raised the recommended specifications. Attention had also been paid to the sound effects and background music. Those with MIDI equipment could enjoy the highest quality audio, while the tracks were tuned to sound good even without it. The sound effects had been recorded by Yoo Jae-won himself; the bottle-breaking sounds came from actually smashing real bottles. The only sound that couldn’t be captured directly was gunfire. Instead, he had recorded the loud crack of a plank striking a concrete floor and adjusted its pitch and tone in a sound editor until it resembled a gunshot.
Su-gyeong’s father was completely absorbed. Every key press triggered an exciting reaction, which was only natural. This was on an entirely different level from the static games like Galaga found in arcades.
“Sir! I think we can try a full evaluation now.”
“Shall we?”
The real highlight began once the actual game started. The user interface was intuitive from the start. In the lower left was the keyboard warrior’s energy bar; on the right were accuracy, speed, and other stats. The numbers on the right displayed the user’s real-time typing ability, but they also functioned as buffs. Higher accuracy increased damage dealt to zombies, while greater speed raised the chance of useful items dropping.
The trained keyboard warrior charged into the zombie horde threatening the city. The on-screen keyboard warrior moved on his own without direct control from the player. The player’s only task was to rapidly type and eliminate the zombies and enemies that appeared on screen.
“Ugh!” The first wave that poured out was a swarm of vampire bats. Each bat had a single alphabetic letter on its chest. “Typing that word reduces the monster’s energy,” Yoo Jae-won explained. Weak monsters like these bats carried only one letter, but stronger ones had entire words. The most powerful enemies bore multiple long words. The length and number of characters indicated a monster’s strength.
Perhaps flustered, Su-gyeong’s father made far more typos than he had during the character practice. If he failed to eliminate a monster in time, it would rush the keyboard warrior and deal damage. “Dad, try harder! Your energy just dropped a ton!” Su-gyeong, who had quickly grasped the mechanics, began offering advice. Soon after, zombies appeared. Zombies came with harder words and didn’t die in one hit. Just as Su-gyeong’s father managed to clear one word, a new one appeared. Naturally, the words changed. They even counterattacked when struck, spitting fireballs that flew toward the keyboard warrior. Of course, the fireballs also carried words that had to be typed to intercept them. A beginner could handle one or two zombies, but when they came in groups, fingers tangled and the difficulty spiked. Yoo Jae-won had set the maximum at five or more at once. The title “Zombie Rush” was no exaggeration.
“Uh-oh?” Su-gyeong’s father, who had only just touched a computer for the first time, stood no chance of defeating the zombies. With a dying cry, the keyboard warrior fell in glorious defeat.
“My turn!!” Su-gyeong stepped up next. There was no way someone who was a complete computer novice and had even less intuition than her father would suddenly become good at the game. As expected, she lost half her energy to the opening bat swarm and fell without even defeating a single weak zombie that had no special abilities.
“Let me show you how it’s done.”
“Go ahead, show us.”
This time Yoo Jae-won took the keyboard. He had packed in plenty of elements that would entertain not only beginners but also fast typists. After clearing the opening vampire bat wave, items would drop. Super Bomb, Instant Kill, Health Recovery—these and other items appeared at random. Equipped with a Super Bomb, Yoo Jae-won began a proper zombie massacre. With godlike typing speed, he shattered the fire and ice attacks the zombies launched before they could even fly, deleting the zombies themselves in an instant. He even caught the treasure zombies that tried to flee with items during the chaos. After several waves, the music shifted dramatically. An electric guitar riff raised the tension while the melody grew urgent. It was the boss fight.
A massive zombie dominated the center of the screen. Its energy bar stretched across the top of the monitor from left to right, making its overwhelming strength obvious at a glance. The boss zombie opened with an area attack, hurling nine razor-sharp ice spears at once. Each icicle carried multiple words, so intercepting them all was impossible even for Yoo Jae-won. Instead, he used an item he had acquired. Items were activated not by hotkeys but by typing their names directly—fitting for a game called Keyboard Warrior. When he typed “Super Bomb,” a nuclear explosion of flame erupted and every icicle vanished. The boss zombie’s energy bar dropped by a quarter in a single blow.
After that, Yoo Jae-won assaulted the boss with his transcendent typing skill. When the boss’s health fell to one-third and it suddenly summoned minions, he used the Instant Kill item. True to its name, the skill killed monsters in one hit; in practice, typing the first letter of each word a zombie carried would instantly slay it. To maintain balance, the skill’s duration was limited to a mere 1.5 seconds. Even so, Yoo Jae-won eliminated all seven summoned minions with Instant Kill. He then finished off the boss, which stood no chance. Upon its defeat, the words “Game Complete” appeared, followed by a message thanking the player. Below that, a bar graph displayed the player’s typing speed and accuracy over time, along with a list of letters that had produced the most typos. These statistics appeared whether the player defeated the boss or suffered a game over—after all, the American version of Keyboard Warrior, while enhanced with game elements, remained educational software.
The statistics were all perfect S ranks. Yoo Jae-won had made zero typos during play, and while his lowest speed was 200 characters per minute, his average reached 570. That was roughly fifty characters faster than his Korean typing speed. Having done so much programming lately, his English typing had overtaken his Korean. Finally, the staff roll began. Starting with the company name ID Technology, Yoo Jae-won’s name appeared prominently in nearly every credit. Unlike the rest of the game, which had been in English only, the Korean text stood out clearly. At the very end, the company’s address and contact information appeared.
Having finished the boss fight, Yoo Jae-won turned to Su-gyeong’s family. He had wanted to ask how they felt about his secret weapon, but it seemed unnecessary. Su-gyeong and her parents alike wore expressions of genuine astonishment. Yoo Jae-won was confident. Even though the American version of Keyboard Warrior took the form of a game, he was certain its educational effect was perfect. Anyone who could clear it all the way to the boss fight without dying would be able to type five hundred characters per minute flawlessly.
After finishing Su-gyeong’s computer lesson and returning home, Yoo Jae-won immediately got to work. He plugged the phone line into the modem, launched the terminal program, and entered the nostalgic password “ATDT 01410.” The characteristic modem handshake sound played, and the familiar KETEL screen appeared. It was the VT mode of PC communication. When he entered the ID he had created during his visit to the Korea Economic Daily while picking up diskettes from the SKC distributor, the connection succeeded. One might wonder why the Korea Economic Daily, but the company that operated KETEL—the ancestor of PC communication—was indeed the Korea Economic Daily.
From there, Yoo Jae-won accessed the paid internet service and connected to CompuServe’s FTP service in the United States. He began uploading the American version of Keyboard Warrior, whose true value he had confirmed today.
“Good grief, the estimated time is over forty minutes.” The file, compressed with ZIP, was only 720 KB across two 360 KB diskettes. In the modern era it would transfer in the blink of an eye, but the estimated completion time displayed was exactly 42 minutes and 49 seconds. The internet of that time lacked resume functionality, so any disconnection would mean starting over. Yoo Jae-won prayed fervently that it would upload in one go. His prayer went unanswered. It took three attempts before he finally saw the upload complete message. Still uneasy, he downloaded the file he had just uploaded and tested it himself.
“Good.” Confirming that it ran properly, Yoo Jae-won checked the time. Simply uploading it to the file archive wasn’t the end. The next step was far more important. As if hiding a needle inside a haystack, he pulled a perfectly ordinary-looking diskette from a pile of diskettes and inserted it into the drive. It looked unremarkable, but its contents were anything but. This was the diskette containing the document he had written on the day of his regression. After entering the two-layer password and loading the document into Jewel Word, he found a single phone number. With careful hands, he copied it onto a memo pad. That phone number was the starting point of his American strategy, so he could not afford to be careless.