The Pacific: Beyond the Game
Internship — Xbox 2 Achieves 5 Million Units Sold Just One Month After Launch! Exactly one month after the official release of the Xbox 2, it hit a monumental sales figure of 5 million units. This fell far short of the pace set by the original Xbox or Sony’s PlayStation 2. Yoo Jae-won and the Xbox team had quietly hoped for a new sales record, given that the previous console had moved 3 million units in its first week, but sales dropped sharply after that initial week. The $200 price increase over the predecessor appeared to be the culprit. Still, reaching 5 million units carried real weight. It also meant The Pacific had sold 5 million copies. Gaming magazines ran special features on the game’s 5-million-copy milestone. A few voices argued that because the title came bundled with the console, it shouldn’t count as a legitimate sale. That view missed the point. As an Xbox 2 exclusive, The Pacific was being sold at the full AAA price of $49.99, with ID Software receiving proper payment. The 5 million figure was 100 percent real. The only downside was that the Xbox 2’s $499 retail price remained unchanged, so ID Group absorbed the cost of the bundled game. The company had already decided to shoulder that expense at the group level. In reality, the actual loss was even smaller once manufacturing costs were factored in. The 90nm process had yielded exceptionally well, driving down the cost of CPUs, GPUs, and memory chips far below projections and creating unexpected margin.
The ID Technology board had unanimously approved the aggressive strategy to seize a commanding lead in the next-generation console market, so there was no internal resistance. Losses from the Xbox 2 division were more than offset by profits from Android smartphones, which enjoyed over 40 percent net margins. With tens of millions of units selling annually, the scale of those profits was staggering. Yoo Jae-won had created this new market, and the board could not oppose a leader whose results spoke for themselves.
Once the Xbox 2 had secured a meaningful foothold in the next-generation console space, The Pacific — Beyond the Game aired. The three-hour documentary, split into two parts of ninety minutes each, premiered on NBC. Documentaries had long been BBC territory, but NBC now delivered comparable quality. Production values ultimately came down to investment, and since ID Group acquired NBC, the network had undergone a thorough overhaul backed by bold spending. Targeted investment in premium programming translated directly into higher ratings. The drama department, which had struggled to produce hits since the 1990s successes of Friends and The West Wing, was now churning out major series: the mystery-horror-exorcism show Supernatural, the meticulously researched and tightly scripted The Rome, and the medical-mystery drama House, which combined medicine and deduction to powerful effect. A common thread ran through these hits: each had won the Million Dollar Challenge, Yoo Jae-won’s contest offering a $1 million prize for outstanding genre fiction. Though the literary establishment dismissed it, the public embraced the Million Dollar Challenge far more than any traditional literary prize. Webtoons and genre novels bearing the gold seal saw explosive traffic. Some claimed the traffic surge came after selection, but the split was roughly even between works that were already popular and those that exploded afterward. The contest was still ongoing; it would conclude only after one hundred winners had been chosen. The selection committee remained anonymous, and its criteria were still a mystery, though everyone knew Chairman Yoo Jae-won wielded enormous influence. In truth, his judgment carried decisive weight, yet he did not choose solely by personal taste. The absolute standard was pre-regression box-office and sales data. This allowed ID Group to secure proven source material and adapt it into dramas far faster than before, with even stronger commercial results.
The same aggressive investment extended beyond drama. A dedicated documentary division was created, producing and airing several high-quality films. For 2004, the division’s flagship project was The Pacific. It received the largest budget and personnel commitment in NBC documentary history. Part 1 focused on ID Software, showing how an AAA game could be completed in under a year. Part 2 examined the hidden history of the Pacific War. Yoo Jae-won had poured his attention into the second half. It systematically exposed the war crimes of the Japanese Empire that the Japanese government had worked so hard to conceal. Leading academic authorities on World War II appeared, along with firsthand testimony from veterans who had either committed or witnessed atrocities while serving in the Imperial Japanese Army. The evidence had been gathered over more than a decade by a special team operating in secrecy; each document was as sharp as a honed blade. Part 1 aired nationwide on a Friday prime-time slot in September, and Part 2 followed one week later.
The morning after the second episode of NBC’s prime-time documentary The Pacific — Beyond the Game aired to strong numbers, Yoo Jae-won sat in his study as usual and began a leisurely internet surf.
“As expected, internet reactions are the fastest.”
Threads discussing the documentary were easy to find on 2CH.com, the gathering place for North American youth. Nextcom was no different. News pages were filled with articles about the Pacific War and the Japanese government’s response. Since last month, Pacific War stories had become reliable traffic drivers, and NBC’s documentary served as a spectacular finale to that wave of interest.
The second episode opened dramatically. It began in downtown Tokyo. An NBC reporter stopped a young university student on the street and asked a single question: “Do you know who Japan’s ally was during World War II?” The student’s answer was startling. “The United States… right?” The clip was so striking that 2CH.com’s front page featured a large still from the scene. “It’s the United States,” Yoo Jae-won murmured. He had seen the finished documentary early thanks to his position, yet the moment remained amusing on rewatch. The question was repeated several times. Some answered the United States again; others admitted they did not know. Only an elderly man, looking ashamed, correctly named Nazi Germany. From its very first minutes, the documentary made clear that Japan had deliberately avoided teaching its modern history. As the film progressed, the reasons for concealing the dark chapters of the Imperial era were revealed one by one, mirroring the narrative of the game The Pacific.
The Pacific War had been flawed from the start. Japan had launched a surprise attack without a declaration of war, awakening the sleeping giant that was the United States. The Empire itself had become a deranged state driven by the madness of war, and it had never been capable of properly governing the colonies it seized. That madness reached its peak in the war’s final stages, exemplified by the comfort women system and forced labor. The current Japanese government still denied these events, yet both the game and the documentary presented official documents proving they had been directed at the highest levels by Imperial General Headquarters. These were original documents collected by the special team—evidence the Japanese government had once tried to destroy. Yoo Jae-won’s early support had allowed the team to secure them in time, and now they served their purpose.
“Mass media still packs a punch,” he observed. The documentary’s impact was immediate. The clearest sign was the sudden halt in protest calls and emails from Japanese right-wing groups that had been flooding ID Group. When The Pacific first launched, those same groups had attempted DDoS attacks on Steam and the Xbox 2’s Live servers to disrupt multiplayer. Because the Xbox 2 required an internet connection even for single-player, the platform was vulnerable. Illegal copying had always been the industry’s biggest threat, and as technology advanced, so did piracy tools; most copy-protection schemes lasted less than a month. The original Xbox had not been immune, so the Xbox 2 had been designed to run exclusively online. Hackers understood this weakness, and Japanese right-wing groups had hired them to exploit it. Yet Xbox 2’s online services remained stable. ID Group possessed the most effective anti-DDoS technology available. It controlled the PC operating system, held a major stake in Cisco—the largest player in internet networking hardware—and its software and hardware touched nearly every layer of the internet. From the cloud server control room where Yeong-sik worked every day, operators could monitor internet conditions in almost every country except China. Any sign of a DDoS attack triggered an immediate response, so the right-wing groups had simply wasted money on hackers.
Even after the attacks failed, the groups did not back down. Their trademark persistence—something they called “guts”—manifested in an unexpected direction this time. They began flooding ID Group’s email and customer-service lines with complaints. Japanese was said to lack strong profanity, but these callers proved otherwise. The volume of abuse was so intense that call-center staff reported severe stress. Yoo Jae-won did not tolerate it. Numbers belonging to abusive callers were collected and routed to automated systems; lawsuits for obstruction and assault followed. Then, the day after NBC’s documentary aired, the organized trolling stopped cold. Contrary to the right-wing claim that everything was fabricated, the documentary had presented black-and-white footage and documents bearing the clear seal of Imperial General Headquarters, along with testimony from veterans whose service records had been verified. No one was listening to denials anymore. Instead, growing numbers of people expressed disappointment at Japan’s refusal to confront its past, in stark contrast to Germany’s thorough postwar reckoning.
Shopping sites reflected the shift. Searches for “Rising Sun” had once returned countless products featuring the Rising Sun Flag in collaboration with various brands, including thousands of items on ID Group’s own P Market. That number had now dropped sharply. “Typical capitalist behavior,” Yoo Jae-won thought. When the items sold, they were stocked; once they risked backlash instead of profit, they were pulled.
“Now, how will Japan respond?” The Japanese government, which had lodged vigorous protests against ID Group and Yoo Jae-won, had long insisted that compensation for the past had been settled by the claims agreement within the 1965 Korea-Japan Basic Treaty and that repeated apologies had already been made. It was the same old argument, but it held no weight with Yoo Jae-won. Expressions of “deep remorse” or “regret” were not apologies. Moreover, the prime minister’s annual visits to Yasukuni Shrine, which enshrined war criminals, the endless stream of inflammatory remarks from right-wing politicians, and the push for new history textbooks that whitewashed the past all made genuine apology and reflection impossible. From Japan’s perspective, the situation could not be ignored. Even if Japan wished to pretend The Pacific did not exist, the American political sphere was stirring. The U.S. Congress was moving toward a formal resolution condemning and demanding apology for the Imperial Japanese military’s comfort-women system. As Yoo Jae-won had predicted, Japan could no longer hold out and delivered a sharp, irritable response—directed not at ID Group or Yoo Jae-won, but at the South Korean government and companies that had little direct connection to the affair.