NCSoft
| NCSoft logo | |
| Company type | Public (KRX: 036570) |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer and video game industry |
| Founded | 1997 |
| Headquarters | South Korea |
Key people | Tak Jin Kim |
| Website | NCsoft Homepage |
NCsoft (KRX: 036570) is a South Korean based online computer game company. NCsoft produced Lineage, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game.
NCsoft was originally founded in March 1997 by Tak Jin Kim, author of a Korean word processor program called Hangul, a business software developer. One of the company's first products was NC HTML Editor. In September 1998, NCsoft launched its first and most popular game, Lineage. 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 NCsoft Austin (based in Austin, Texas) as a partnership with Richard Garriott's Destination Games in April 2001. 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 4th 2005 and have announced Lineage II for a later date.
At the Taipei Game Show on February 2006, NCsoft announced Dungeon Runners [1], which is being developed at the Austin offices, and is now in the Closed Beta stage of testing.
In 2006, NCsoft hired the primary developers of jMonkeyEngine, a high performance open source scene graph based graphics API.
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.