HACKED 1

Have you ever had a game account—one you cherished and raised with all your devotion and your wallet—stolen in an instant?

I… have.

To tell this story, I think I first need to start with how I came to play the game called <No Lifer>.

My history as a gamer was, quite literally, a history of being stabbed in the back.

The first among my previous games was a global AOS game. Its era-defining popularity was short-lived; one of the core developers spewed some bullshit on social media, sparking a massive boycott.

From racism and sexism to neo-Nazism, he really knew how to draw aggro on a wide scale. Millions of users around the world were simultaneously enraged by that jerk’s words and slammed the account deletion and game uninstall buttons.

The next was a domestic MMORPG. It was doing well until a consumer deception issue regarding gacha items got it dragged into a government audit, where it was thoroughly torn apart and struck with the hammer of a heavy fine. Ultimately, they posted a service termination notice recently.

I didn’t even feel that sorry about it. No matter how you look at it, stealth-patching a 0.1% rate to 0.001% was crossing the line.

The last one was an American AAA console game series that had been a steady hit for years, becoming a massive IP adapted into movies and dramas. It was a series I had loved since I was a kid.

However, while making the new title, a difference of opinion among the executives swallowed up ten years of time and nearly 100 million dollars in budget, after which the entire development schedule was postponed indefinitely. It was safe to say it had effectively been scrapped….

And so, three strikes and you’re out. With the “affection” of a Korean, I endured three times, but all three opportunities turned out like this. So, how could I not feel disillusioned? I was going to quit for good, but.

“No matter what game I pick up, it’ll be better than these assholes. Ah, for real this time, just one more. Even if I lose, I’m going for it.”

…With that thought, I picked up that “whatever game,” <No Lifer>.

I shouldn’t have done that.

<No Lifer>’s developer, <Boundary Laboratory>, was a typical small indie developer, as evidenced by their awkward naming sense. A youth-led startup, a workplace with fewer than five employees—even the co-founders were all just seniors, juniors, or friends. It was essentially a startup at the level of a college club, gathered with nothing but passion and vision while knowing nothing about running a company.

In its early days, <Boundary Laboratory> developed a few mobile games that were unique but not impressive, with good ideas but incredibly poor business models. Naturally, those games were swept away from the stores without a trace, pushed out by games from big corporations with overflowing capital.

I found out about those games later and installed a few just for fun, and, well. I feel bad saying this, but….

No, I don’t even feel bad. Those games simply deserved to fail. Cheap-looking ads like “The Empress or the Concubine, who will you trust?” or “Test your IQ!” popped up every minute, making me go crazy with frustration, but they didn’t even have a function like “Pay to remove ads forever!” Are you kidding me? I’m saying I’ll give you money, so why can’t you take it?

Coming back, <No Lifer> was this developer’s latest work and their ambitious masterpiece. Following a string of failures, it was released at a point where they were pushed to their limits both in terms of personnel and capital—you could call it a desperate, soul-searching final strike. In fact, looking at a later interview with the developers, they said that if this game failed too, they were going to close the business and look for jobs individually.

And that soul-searching strike succeeded. Much more grandly than expected.

At a glance, <No Lifer> was a character-draw (gacha) game like the many others scattered across the mobile gaming world.

In these types of games, there are diamonds, rubies, crystals, runes, gems, summoning stones, and so on…. The names differ by game, but the function is similar; there is a paid currency commonly referred to among users as “stones.” You consume these stones to pull the gacha and draw characters.

You grind up useless characters to turn them into resources, and you make useful characters stronger by enhancing them and equipping gear items. You gather the characters you’ve raised and build a deck. You send them into battle. You farm experience points and resources. You use those to raise other characters. Repeat.

If you hear just this much, there’s nothing special. However, <No Lifer> had one very big feature that other games didn’t. It used its own proprietary AI model.

They claimed it was a dedicated AI trained only on <Boundary Laboratory>’s internal works to solve the issues of AI copyright infringement and unauthorized use that have become hot topics lately…. I’m not a major in that field, so I don’t know the technical details well, but anyway, that’s what they said.

A character’s name, illustration, lines, rarity, stats, skills…. Everything is randomly combined by the AI. Since there are hundreds of millions of possibilities, the probability of getting a duplicate character is almost zero. No matter what I pull, a character unique to me—one that no other user has—comes out, and I can build my own unique deck. There might be characters with the same attributes, but there were no identical characters.

This was a move quite different from existing games. Usually, there are popular characters that everyone wants to pull, and the main business model of a gacha game is to make all users pull and pull again until that character comes out, pouring in massive amounts of money.

On top of that, you add some sparkling effects, put a gold border on it, call it limit-breaking or awakening to sell it for more, swap out the outfits every season to sell them as season-limited cards, sell more anniversary-limited cards for Lunar New Year and Valentine’s and Chuseok and Halloween and Christmas, sell additional stories for each character as DLC, and even sell goods like dolls, figures, and keyrings to milk the franchise for all it’s worth—isn’t that the golden rule and virtue of this industry?

But… characters whose every element is randomly combined and created for only one user? Users wouldn’t crazily pull the gacha while draining their bank accounts to get a character they like, a character fandom couldn’t be formed, and you couldn’t even print out goods. Does something like this make money?

…It did. It made money.

People were more enthusiastic about the “mine” and “only for me” elements than expected.

There were as many different stories and characters as there were accounts. Every player could have their own unique narrative. Who the first character drawn was, what characters came after, what their relationships were like, what kind of bond they built with the player…. All of that became one-of-a-kind, incredibly fun content.

It became a trend among <No Lifer> users to serialize their play logs as long-form live accounts.

A story of a freshly made Level 1 account fumbling through the beginner tutorial and growing through trial and error. In any other game, this content wouldn’t have gained much popularity. A fresh-caught newbie is always welcome, but few people want to repeatedly watch a tutorial process that I’ve done, they’ve done, and everyone else has done.

But this game was different. To the point where one might wonder how the same game could be so different, the stories of “someone else’s house” were fun because they were completely different from “my house.”

While word was spreading like that in the game communities, <No Lifer> gained more recognition by being invited to a large game event in the indie category and setting up a booth.

On top of that, a certain incident that occurred within the game decisively shook the entire internet and became a sort of meme. That certain incident is referred to on internet wikis as things like the <Great No Lifer Battle>….

I’ll omit the details and just give the conclusion. This incident perfectly suited the tastes of community users who liked primary catharsis—to put it simply, “cider,” “true education,” or “patriotic” sentiments.

The patriotic meme “Je-Han-No,” which means “Please, if you’re Korean, let’s do No Lifer,” circulated in communities, and <No Lifer> users were called by the bizarre title of “Nosaeng-ies.” It was a nickname given because the game’s name was “No Lifer” and it matched the way users would grind away their daily lives and immerse themselves in the game like people with no real life.

It was probably around then. When I started the game.

It’s all because of those <Boundary Laboratory> bastards. If only they hadn’t held an event at that exact time saying, “We will give a guaranteed 5-star Avatar of Korean origin to all new users!” as if they were rowing while the tide was coming in.

I only played <No Lifer> seriously for about half a year. But during that half-year, I poured in all the affection I could. It was even more special because I had been stabbed in the back three times by previous games.

In my own way, I even put my name at the very top of the server rankings. I wasn’t a permanent fixture at rank 1 every single day, but I never fell out of the top 10. At this point, can you imagine the scale of my spending?

Actually, a bit of luck played a part there too. Thanks to the good timing of getting in right before this game rose from an obscure indie game that no one but a few enthusiasts knew the name of to a hot, popular hit, I was able to enjoy the benefits of both the indie era and the post-success era.

What happened to <No Lifer> after that? Fortunately or unfortunately, there were no blunders from the creators or the management team.