NCsoft
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| NCsoft Corporation ㈜엔씨소프트 |
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| Type | Public (KRXS: 036570) |
| Founded | March 1997 |
| Headquarters |  Seoul, South Korea (HQ) Austin, Texas, USA Osaka, Japan Shanghai, China Brighton, England |
| Key people | T.J. Kim, CEO |
| Industry | Video games Entertainment |
| Products | Lineage Guild Wars Aion: Tower of Eternity City of Heroes |
| Employees | 2,448 |
| Website | http://www.ncsoft.com |
NCsoft (KRXS: 036570) is a South Korean based online computer game company, which produced and published massively multiplayer online role-playing games including Lineage and Guild Wars. Lineage III the sequel to the successful Lineage II is slated for 2011.
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[edit] History
NCsoft was originally founded in March 1997 by T.J. Kim, a business software developer and author of the Korean word processor Hangul. One of the company's first products was NC HTML Editor. In September 1998, NCsoft launched its first and most popular game, Lineage. Lineage was the first MMORPG to exceed the record of 100,000 concurrent users for the first time in Korea in December 2000. The success of this game helped the company expand to locations in Taiwan, China, Japan, and the United States.
The company established a US subsidiary called NC Interactive (based in Austin, Texas) as a partnership with Richard Garriott's Destination Games in April 2001. NCsoft programmer Jake Song also moved to Austin in order to stimulate development. The branch developed MMORPGs and acts as the home to NC Interactive, NCsoft's division for support in North America (which had been established in May 2000).
NCsoft developed Lineage II and released it in South Korea on October 1, 2003, and in the United States on April 28, 2004. NCsoft is also the publisher for Guild Wars (developed by their subsidiary ArenaNet) and the MMORPGs City of Heroes and City of Villains (developed by Cryptic Studios).
Launched in July 2004, NCsoft Europe is a wholly owned subsidiary with its main office in Brighton, England. They brought City of Heroes to several European countries on February 4, 2005 and established Lineage II servers (Teon and Franz).
At the Taipei Game Show in February 2006, NCsoft announced Dungeon Runners [1], which is being developed at the Austin offices. The game went live to the general public in May 2007.
In 2006, NCsoft hired the primary developers of jMonkey Engine, a high performance open source scene graph based graphics API.
It was announced at E3 2007 that NCsoft is now an exclusive third party Sony developer, and will be developing exclusive games for the Playstation Network.[2]
Also, at E3 2006, NCsoft announced the development of a new MMORPG, Aion. Aion is being developed by NCsoft's Seoul studio, and will use Crytek's CryEngine technology. Aion's score is being developed by Kunihiko Ryo. NCsoft also established a new development studio, Openmaru in Gyeonggi, South Korea in 2006 dedicated in developing and offering new Web 2.0 Web applications.
On November 6, 2007 NCsoft announced that it had purchased the complete intellectual property rights to City of Heroes and City of Villains from Cryptic. This means that NCsoft will now take over development of the game via a new studio; NCSoft NorCal comprised of the staff from Cryptic who had worked on the City of Heroes/City of Villains games.
[edit] Stolen Code
On April 27, 2007, Seoul Metropolitan Police said that seven former employees of NCsoft are suspected of selling the Lineage III source code to a major Japanese game company. According to NCsoft, the potential damaged cost may exceed $1billion USD. [3][4][5][6][7]
[edit] Titles
- Aion: Tower of Eternity
- Atrix
- Auto Assault
- City of Heroes
- City of Villains
- Dragonica
- Dungeon Runners
- Exteel
- Guild Wars
- Guild Wars 2
- Lineage
- Lineage II
- Lineage III
- Point Blank
- Punch Monster
- Smash Star
- SP Jam
- Tabula Rasa
- Web-board Games
