Remake (3)
Jin Taekyung, the CEO, gave Han Miru’s proposal some serious thought.
So this is the kind of offer he came to me with.
Until now, Fantasia Tales had been a game that wasn’t even worth paying attention to.
But after hearing Han Miru’s proposal, it suddenly felt like an albatross around his neck. If he kept it, he didn’t need it. If he gave it away, it felt wasteful.
No matter how close they were, there was no way he’d simply hand over a ruined game for free.
Does he really think he can bring it back to life?
He called in Vice President Park Suhyeong to discuss it.
After hearing the story, Park Suhyeong asked, “How much did they say on their side?”
“They didn’t name an exact figure, but I get the feeling they’d be willing to pay around the development cost.”
If they ask for more than that, they won’t accept.
“Wouldn’t it be more profitable to sell?”
In the end, the game had already been shut down and shoved into a warehouse. If he could turn that into cash, it was a clean deal.
“What are the odds it succeeds if they remake and relaunch it?”
Park Suhyeong shook his head.
“When you consider the money, time, and manpower it would take, it’d be better to just move on to another project.”
“But if it ends up in the hands of SW Games?”
“Then there’d be some chance. After all, Team Leader Kang Seon-woo originally planned the game, and a fair number of Development Team 3’s people are over there. Even so, it’d still be hard to make it a major hit.”
Watching him worry, Park Suhyeong said, “From the way you’re talking, isn’t the sale already decided?”
“...It is, really.”
Profit was one thing, but if they refused, the drawbacks would be much greater.
Brotherhood M was already listed in the Legend Games store, and any new game would have to use the Surreal Engine.
Park Suhyeong came up with another idea.
“What if we use the money from selling Fantasia Tales to acquire a game studio? Since it’s the sale proceeds being reinvested, wouldn’t shareholders be less likely to object?”
“Hmm.”
Acquiring a game studio was already under consideration anyway.
“Is there anywhere good enough to buy?”
“Yes. This time—”
As soon as he heard the answer, Jin Taekyung slapped his knee.
“That’s it!”
* * *
Today was the day for the server room inspection.
I went around the server room with Seon-woo. Inside the sealed space, rows and rows of routers, servers, and power supplies stretched on without end.
Once you gathered all those servers in one place, it became a data center.
And naturally, not just anyone could come into a server room.
There were only about ten people, myself included, who were allowed in. Even then, we had to scan a card key and pass iris recognition first.
The server room was the biggest power hog in the building.
The servers ran twenty-four hours a day, spewing out tremendous heat, and to keep that under control, the cooling and circulation systems operated twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year.
The employees at A-One checked each of those systems to make sure nothing was wrong.
Once the inspection was over, Seon-woo and I headed up to the rooftop.
The rooftop had been turned into a rest area where employees could take a break. From up here, you could see the entire Yuseong Town complex at a glance.
We bought drinks from a vending machine and sat down on a bench.
It was the middle of the workday, so there were hardly any people around.
Taking a sip of my drink, I said, “About the Legend Deck launch title.”
“I told you, it won’t work. We do have a game in planning, but even if we start development now, there’s no way it’ll be ready in time.”
“What if we just fix an existing game instead?”
“What do you mean?”
“Fantasia Tales.”
“What about it?”
“I bought it.”
“...Huh?”
I explained it to him.
After hearing everything, Seon-woo looked genuinely shocked.
“That was the method you had in mind?”
“Yep.”
Apparently he hadn’t imagined I’d actually buy Fantasia Tales out of LD Studio, because he looked completely flustered.
“LD Studio just sold it to you that easily?”
“They sold it once I gave them money.”
“How much did you pay?”
“Fifty billion won.”
Seon-woo’s jaw dropped.
“What? You paid fifty billion won for a dead game?”
“I’m not just getting the game. I’m also taking over all the data from the development process. They said development cost that much, didn’t they?”
LD Studio’s games usually cost around one hundred billion won to make. Fantasia Tales had basically been developed for half price.
“No, but that was all labor costs anyway.”
“And that would include your labor, too, wouldn’t it?”
In exchange for that money, they had poured their time and effort into game development. In a sense, I was just buying that back with cash, so I didn’t really feel it was a waste.
Seon-woo thought about it for a moment, then said, “Hold on. Who’s paying for this?”
“Me, probably. Or I’ll earn it back and pay it off.”
When I thought about the money I’d eventually need to support them later, fifty billion won wasn’t even that much.
“So you want me to bring a dead game back to life?”
“There are examples, aren’t there?”
The best-known one was Last Fantasy Online.
The Last Fantasy series, made by Trionics, was a masterpiece anyone who loved games would know.
When they announced an MMORPG based on that famous IP, everyone was excited, but what came out was a disaster in its purest form.
People assumed the service would just be shut down, but the dev team gritted their teeth, rebuilt it from the ground up, and brought it back. It’s still being serviced successfully to this day.
“Whenever you got drunk, you used to cry and yell that Fantasia Tales wasn’t some doomed game, that it was going to be a smash hit.”
“No, when did I ever say that? Why are you making things up?”
“......”
Maybe I hadn’t done that this time around, but I definitely had in my first life.
“Anyway, it’s yours now, so go ahead and tear it apart however you want. Let’s see if it really was the kind of game you thought could blow up.”
Just as a writer or director treasures their work like a child, a developer is the same.
Seon-woo stared blankly for a while, as if he couldn’t believe the first game he had ever planned was coming back to him.
Then he turned to me and said, “You think I’d fall for a cheap provocation like that?”
I nodded.
“Yep.”
Seon-woo grinned.
“You know me too well. I already fell for it.”
* * *
Kang Seon-woo immediately gathered the employees who had come from Development Team 3 at LD Studio. Then he told them that Fantasia Tales had been purchased from LD Studio.
Cha Suyeon’s eyes widened in shock.
“Th-that’s really true?”
Kang Seon-woo said it like a declaration.
“Yes. This game is mine now.”
Anyone who had worked in Development Team 3 knew just how much passion Kang Seon-woo had poured into making this game, and how many nights he’d stayed up for it.
But unfortunately, Development Team 3 didn’t have much power, and all through development they’d been harried by interference from the business team.
They’d finished all the content, only to be told to cut it down, or to turn basic items into random boxes, or to remove the cinematic videos because making them cost too much.
After all that suffering, the game was finally completed and released, and everyone had cheered and hugged and shouted in triumph.
But then...
Less than a year after launch, the game was shut down after one scandal and disaster after another. When that news came in, some of the staff burst into tears.
And now that game had come back into their hands!
Kang Seon-woo looked around at the employees and said, “Fantasia Tales will be relaunched as the Legend Deck launch title. Until then, we need to remake it.”
Cha Suyeon asked cautiously, “How are we going to remake it?”
As if he’d been waiting for the question, Kang Seon-woo answered, “The way I originally planned it. This time, you don’t need to worry about anything else. There’s only one thing we have to focus on: how to make a fun game.”
— Wow! They bought back the game they themselves developed?
— Just how much money do they have? Did Quikshaka Ocean World make that much?
— Well, they got investment from Continue Capital, so they’re probably rolling in cash.
— But is there any need to rescue a game that already failed?
— Seriously. They’d be better off making a new one.
— Are they trying to do an Edo Tensei on it?
— Can you even save a dead game?
— Looking at how well their releases have done, they seem to have real talent.
— Come on, a casual game made with Block Valley development tools and an MMORPG are totally different beasts.
— Either way, if LD Studio recovered the development costs on a failed game, isn’t that a huge win?
After selling Fantasia Tales, LD Studio announced the acquisition of a new studio.
— No way! Gary Richardson?
— Damn, they really brought in a legend of the industry. LD’s got serious teeth this time.
— So is Star Stream going to become a Korean game?
— This is insane. Absolutely insane.
— Ooh! This time I might actually believe in them!
— Who the hell is that, you nerd?
— What? You don’t know Gary Richardson?
— You idiot, do you even know game history?
— Go study. Seriously, study!
Seon-woo was shocked by the news that LD Studio had brought in Gary Richardson as well.
“Holy crap. They acquired Gary Richardson’s studio?”
“Who’s that?”
At my question, Seon-woo shot back, “You don’t know the Ultra series?”
“What was it again?”
Then Seon-woo launched into an impassioned explanation.
“A masterpiece among masterpieces. A god-game among god-games. No, maybe a god-god-god game?”
“That good?”
“Of course! It’s the game that established the framework for modern role-playing games. If Ultra had never existed, today’s RPGs would look completely different.”
Role-playing games, or RPGs, were exactly that—role play.
The player became immersed as if they were the character inside the game. So when they beat a strong enemy, they felt joy, and when a companion died, they felt grief.
“Gary Richardson worked insanely hard to create a game that felt like reality—food, weapons, items, NPCs, all of it.”
“Isn’t that just obvious?”
“It seems obvious now, but this was the early 1980s. He did things people thought were impossible with the computer power available back then.”
Ultra 1, which came out of that effort, was shocking in every sense of the word. The same went for Ultra 2 and 3, which followed.
Even the UI, map markers, and interaction systems he created then are still used today, apparently.
“It’s no exaggeration to say that every RPG after that was influenced by him. In an interview after Ultra 1 came out, he said he thought games would one day be set in a single world where players from all over the planet could log in together and cooperate to defeat monsters.”
“That’s just an MMORPG.”
The MMO in MMORPG stands for massively multiplayer online.
“Exactly. Isn’t that incredible? Thinking about a game like that before the technology even existed. Anyway, when people talk about game history, he’s one of the five biggest names, right up there with Miyamoto Shitaro and Gabe McClen and the rest. He’s a true legend.”
Hearing that, something suddenly clicked in my head.
“Ah! I remember now.”
Seon-woo nodded as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
“See? No way you’d forget Gary Richardson, the legend of the game industry.”
“......”
That kind of thing was only known to people deeply interested in game development or game history. Someone like me, a regular person, wasn’t supposed to know it offhand.
The reason I remembered him was because of what happened afterward.
LD Studio was a company people liked to criticize, but it still made money. Even after the probability-manipulation scandal, Brotherhood M’s revenue had been cut to a quarter of what it was, and people kept saying it would collapse any day now, but it was still earning several hundred billion won a year.
There had been one decisive trigger that pushed a company like that over the edge...
And that trigger was the hiring of Gary Richardson.