Industry Buzz (1)
When the teaser trailer for Fantasy of Galicia first dropped, the industry's reaction was, by and large, dismissive.
Of course, most virtual-reality developers were based overseas and shrouded in secrecy. So even the sharpest Korean studios had a hard time getting solid information. Still, the past has a way of sketching the future.
What genres dominated the popular VR titles currently on the market?
AOS. Hyper FPS. Action fighting. Tower defense. Zombie survival.
The range looked broad enough on paper, but the games themselves shared the same core DNA: repeatable sessions. A handful of fixed maps. A handful of fixed playstyles. Win or lose decided in a single match.
And that judgment wasn't wrong, not really.
How had AOS, in the early 2020s, shoved RPGs aside and claimed the throne so completely? Farming, growth, carrying, winning — every pleasure an RPG once delivered could be harvested in a fraction of the time, cycled again and again.
So of course VR games would follow that mainstream grammar. And of course those kinds of games demanded far fewer development resources than an MMORPG or an open-world title ever would.
That was the only conclusion the industry could reach.
The collapse of Galicia Online had followed the same logic. Content so thin it hid behind the word "freedom." A vast map better described as barren than expansive. That had been the best they could do — and the limit of what they could do.
But then—
"D-Director…! This is insane. It's actually insane!"
"This — this isn't exaggeration. The ads weren't lying!"
"Is this… the end of PC MMOs…?"
"This kind of thing… only happens in novels…"
"The AI is ridiculous! What the hell has our AI team even been doing?!"
The very title the entire industry had unanimously predicted would flop — Fantasy of Galicia — stepped out from behind the curtain and onto the market floor. And the Korean game industry detonated.
Market share wasn't a problem yet. The game was only hosting a thousand players. But once open beta arrived — once the full launch hit — there would be no stopping it. An unstoppable storm.
Those MMORPGs that had somehow clung to life even after VR games went mainstream? Dead on arrival. How were they supposed to compete with this?
Even if Kim Ji-hyun, the legendary director of Korean RPGs, came back and took the helm himself, this was a monster nothing could beat.
So every studio's conference room filled to capacity. Not that sitting in a meeting room produced any useful answers. Competition requires comparable weight classes. How was a regular PC game, a console title, or a mobile game supposed to go toe-to-toe with virtual reality?
Honestly, half of them wanted to sprint over right then, drop to their knees, and beg for the technology to be shared.
But where, exactly, were they supposed to go?
Team Galicia was, under Korean law, a properly registered business. Follow the business registration number and you could find the office address somewhere in Gyeonggi Province easily enough. The quick ones had already rushed over, taken in the building's exterior, and confirmed the office door was locked tight.
Every developer on the team was buried deep in the continent of Galicia. No one was answering the door for curious visitors. That much was inevitable.
And Director Kim Se-rin, the woman who had appeared on the live broadcast?
Nobody knew her.
Truly, astonishingly, not a single working professional in the game industry recognized her face. As if she had simply materialized out of thin air and dropped into the world. Personal networks were useless. There was no one to call.
But nothing stays secret forever. People may vanish; the traces they leave behind do not.
"That background music from the in-game teaser — the composition style is awfully familiar. Isn't that Han-ryang's work?"
"This color grading, the contrast, the way it feels natural and still slips in something radical… that reeks of that crazy woman…"
Two people had shouldered the weight Se-rin couldn't carry alone, and they had left their fingerprints all over the work. People who knew those fingerprints noticed.
And then—
"Wait… the lore…? Project A…?"
Former Blue Edge staff caught the scent of Director Kim Ji-hyun's unfinished masterpiece — or rather, the thing that wasn't unfinished at all — Project A.
"So that's what happened."
Se-rin had more or less seen this coming. Who had tilled the barren wasteland of Galicia — a world with no lore foundation whatsoever — and planted the first seeds? She had.
Of course the design of Project A, the concentrated product of her creativity and obsession, had seeped into every corner of it. Add Yoo Seol and Seo Han-ryang on top of that, and anyone who had worked with them would have to be blind not to recognize the fingerprints.
Among their old teammates, some — unlike the former Kim Ji-hyun and Yoo Seol, who had spent a stretch unemployed — had jumped to other studios quickly. Kim Ji-hyun himself had been the one pulling strings, parachuting people into career positions through industry connections. So the flood of messages wasn't surprising, exactly…
"Why did so many of them write?"
Kim Ji-hyun and Kim Se-rin were separate beings. She couldn't hide forever behind the quiet fiction that "the living one is Ji-hyun," but strictly speaking, Se-rin had no personal ties to any of these people. Kim Ji-hyun's residual glow was still useful, at least for now.
So she answered every old teammate's check-in, confirmed she was alive, and moved on.
Next: the rest of the industry.
Some of them had left good memories from past collaborations. Others…
"Ji-hyun. You really think that'll make money?"
"You know how bad player spending habits are these days. You've got to squeeze the cash cows for everything they're worth. You know how business works — why are you being like this?"
"What, the pigs start barking and the train stops running? Think bigger, Team Lead Kim. Bigger. Don't you want that promotion?"
"Those fossil bastards."
Some of them had left nothing but bad blood. They had fought hard — during her tenure and on the way out — and Se-rin had always been the one who got crushed. And now even those people were suddenly acting chummy, sliding into her messages after years of silence.
She felt, freshly, the truth of the old saying: the position makes the person. Put another way, a little swagger was starting to rise in her chest. She hadn't built this on pure personal ability alone… but she had paid for it with her soul. That much was real.
That said, this wasn't something she could shrug off as a fun little hype event and move past.
How much work had she, Elisha, and Yoo Seol poured into making Galicia what it was now? Even with a mere thousand players running around the world, incidents were already breaking out in places she couldn't control. What happened when that number hit ten thousand — a hundred thousand?
"This is a recruitment opportunity…!"
Se-rin needed warm bodies. The goddess didn't have time to develop. Se-rin wanted instant fixes at the flick of a wrist — and she had already built a development tool disguised as ordinary computer software for exactly that purpose.
Yoo Seol had cheered out loud when she realized she no longer had to cling to Elisha and fly across the world; she could make rich, complex edits from a screen alone.
Se-rin looked out at the empty office nightscape. Desks and computers were already set up. Scale would come with time.
But first…
The next day, Se-rin regretted her hasty judgment.
Shit, shit, shit…
She hadn't noticed it while she was on the continent of Galicia. Most of the time she simply looked down on the mortal world from the space prepared in the celestial realm, and she never revealed her true form unless it was absolutely necessary. Everyone who saw her looked at her with reverence.
Earth was different.
Other people's eyes — she had never expected them to weigh this much.
She hadn't noticed it on the continent of Galicia. The goddess robes with their generous exposure, the suit she had worn for the live broadcast — a flick of her fingers and she could swap outfits in a burst of light.
Earth was different.
Women's clothes — she had never expected them to be this hard to put on.
"What's with the face?"
"Ah, nothing…"
Yoo Seol, walking beside her, tossed the question out. Se-rin let the sentence trail off. She couldn't say it. That the stares felt wrong. That the clothes felt wrong…
The first time she met Yoo Seol she had been in casual clothes, so it hadn't registered. But the moment she tried to put on a women's suit, the awkwardness hit her like a wall. At least Yoo Seol was walking next to her. Alone, Se-rin might have turned around and fled straight back to the office.
She couldn't. She had already made the appointment.
Today she was meeting a handful of former teammates from Blue Edge — the capable, trustworthy ones she had carefully filtered out. The plan was to clear up the rumors circulating online and, for anyone open to a move, float a scouting offer.
Se-rin already wanted to go home.
She didn't even have a home.
…
A short while later, in front of a franchise coffee shop somewhere in Pangyo.
"Ugh, and you don't even have a license."
Se-rin let Yoo Seol's grumbling wash past one ear and took a deep breath. The face she needed to show from here on was a confident one — the same energy she brought when she gathered the team and argued passionately about direction, the same presence she wore when she went live in front of thousands of players.
A low mechanical hum — the screen door opened, louder than it had any right to be today. Se-rin layered composure over her expression and stepped forward.
Click.
She forced down the sensation that the still-unfamiliar high-heeled shoes were cracking like thunder with every step, and lifted her slightly bowed head.
"…"
Was she imagining it? The feeling that every pair of eyes had locked onto her.
Click. Click, click, click—
After a few more steps, Se-rin was certain.
She was not imagining it.