# Lineage *The Blood Pledge* - Work: MMORPG - Date: 1998 (South Korea) - Made by: Jake Song (Designer & lead developer) - Houses: NCSoft - Platforms: Windows, Mac OS X - Canonical: https://www.lanternhall.org/works/lineage/ > A 2D feudal war of castles and blood pledges, adapted from a Korean comic, that rode the PC-bang boom to millions of subscribers and made NCSoft one of Asia's great game companies. **Why it matters:** Lineage proved that the online role-playing game could be a mass-market phenomenon in Asia, built on internet cafes, guild politics and castle sieges, and it bankrolled the NCSoft empire that later backed Richard Garriott and Guild Wars. ## Quick answers **When was Lineage first released?** Lineage was first released in 1998 (South Korea). **Who created Lineage?** Lineage was made by Jake Song (designer & lead developer). **Who published or developed Lineage?** NCSoft. **What kind of work is Lineage?** Lineage is a MMORPG in the MMORPGs tradition, released for Windows and Mac OS X. **Why is Lineage important?** Lineage proved that the online role-playing game could be a mass-market phenomenon in Asia, built on internet cafes, guild politics and castle sieges, and it bankrolled the NCSoft empire that later backed Richard Garriott and Guild Wars. ## Overview In the West, the story of the graphical online world usually runs from [*Meridian 59*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/meridian-59/) to [*Ultima Online*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/ultima-online/) to [*EverQuest*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/everquest/). In South Korea it runs through *Lineage*. Launched by [NCSoft](https://www.lanternhall.org/houses/ncsoft/) in September 1998, *Lineage* was a 2D, isometric [MMORPG](https://www.lanternhall.org/atlas/mmorpg/) about kings, lords and the guilds it called blood pledges, fighting over castles in the feudal Kingdom of Aden. NCSoft reported that it eventually passed three million subscribers, most of them in Korea, a scale no Western game of the time approached. Sold in North America as *Lineage: The Blood Pledge*, it never found that audience abroad, but at home it became a social institution and the foundation of one of Asia's largest game companies. ## Origins The designer was Song Jae-kyung, known in English as [Jake Song](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/jake-song/). A computer-science graduate of Seoul National University who had studied at KAIST, Song co-founded Nexon with Kim Jung-ju at the end of 1994 and led development of *Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds* (1996), one of the first graphical online role-playing games. After falling out with Nexon's management he left, and in September 1996 he began a new online game at the internet company I-Net. The Asian financial crisis squeezed I-Net, and in December 1997 Kim Taek-jin, a programmer famous for the Hangul word processor, recruited Song to NCSoft, which Kim had founded that March to make office software. *Lineage*'s server was built on a fork of the *Nexus* code, and according to later accounts its statistics, monsters and items borrowed heavily from [*NetHack*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/nethack/). The fiction came from print. Shin Il-sook's comic *Lineage* tells of a rightful prince, Deporoju, reclaiming his throne from the usurper Ken Rauhel, a plot the game turned into a structure: the servers carried the comic's character names, and the world was organized as a feudal hierarchy of kings, lords and knights bound by land. As features accumulated, the game's world gradually drifted from its source. ## How it plays *Lineage* borrows its surface from [*Dungeons & Dragons*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/original-dungeons-and-dragons/): players choose a [class](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/character-class/) (today seven: Prince, Knight, Elf, Magician, Dark Elf, Dragon Knight and Illusionist), raise attributes such as strength and wisdom, and kill monsters for [experience](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/experience-points/) and [loot](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/loot/). An [alignment](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/alignment/) score, lawful or chaotic, rises and falls with a character's conduct, and town guards attack chaotic characters on sight. The heart of the game is political. Only a Prince can found a blood pledge, so every guild has a monarch. Pledges declare war on one another, and outside safe towns any player may attack any other; [player killing](https://www.lanternhall.org/lexicon/player-killer/) is not a fringe behavior but a pillar of the design. The prize is the castle siege. A pledge that storms and holds a castle rules the surrounding land and may set a tax rate on purchases in nearby towns, collecting a share of other players' spending. The result was a game in which power was social and economic as much as personal: large pledges controlled territory, taxed it, and defended it in pledge wars that became the game's main event. ## Reception & impact *Lineage* arrived at the right moment. South Korea was building out broadband at speed, and the PC bang, the internet cafe where young people paid by the hour to play, was multiplying; the country went from roughly a hundred such cafes in 1997 to about 25,000 by 2011. *Lineage* became one of the games that filled them. NCSoft's own history records a Korean Game Award grand prize in December 1998, the year of launch, and the company listed on KOSDAQ in July 2000. Success brought problems that the West would meet later. From the early 2000s organized "workshops" farmed the game's currency, adena, for sale for real money, anticipating the [gold-farming economy](https://www.lanternhall.org/culture/virtual-economies/) of later MMOs. Korean media coined the term *Lineage pyein*, roughly "Lineage wrecks," for players consumed by it, and in-game feuds sometimes spilled into real-world confrontations. In 2009 NCSoft seized some 140,000 accounts it accused of using automated hunting programs; Korea's consumer agency sided with complaining users, and the dispute went to court. In North America the game fared poorly. Song moved to NCSoft's new Austin office after the 2001 acquisition of [Richard Garriott](https://www.lanternhall.org/makers/richard-garriott/)'s Destination Games, but *Lineage: The Blood Pledge* could not compete with 3D rivals such as *EverQuest*. NCSoft closed its last three North American servers on June 29, 2011. At home the numbers told a different story: nearly a million active subscriptions as of April 2008, $1.3 billion in revenue by August 2012 and $1.8 billion by November 2013. ## Legacy *Lineage* paid for NCSoft's expansion. The company went on to publish *City of Heroes* and ArenaNet's *Guild Wars*, and to launch *Lineage II* (2003), an Unreal Engine prequel set 150 years earlier; by 2006 the franchise had attracted some 43 million players. Song left NCSoft in 2003 to found XLGAMES, which later made *ArcheAge*. The original never closed in Korea. Its mobile remake, *Lineage M* (2017), grossed $2.8 billion by July 2020, and NCSoft has since reopened classic servers that recreate its early rules and difficulty. The template *Lineage* set, of guild-owned territory, open PvP and castle wars, carried into *Lineage II* and many Korean MMOs that followed, and similar siege warfare appeared in the West with [*Dark Age of Camelot*](https://www.lanternhall.org/works/dark-age-of-camelot/). Its gold farms, meanwhile, were an early warning of the real-money shadow economies every online world would have to confront. ## Facts - Its world and name come from Lineage, a comic by the Korean artist Shin Il-sook; the game's servers were named after the comic's characters. - Jake Song began it at the company I-Net in 1996 and joined NCSoft, then a small office-software maker, in December 1997. - Lineage's server code was based on a fork of Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds, which Song had co-created at Nexon. - Only the Prince class can found a blood pledge, and pledges that capture a castle may set and collect taxes in nearby towns. - Its stat, monster and item systems were reportedly borrowed in large part from NetHack. - NCSoft reported more than three million subscribers at the game's peak; by April 2008 it still had nearly one million. - By November 2013 the game had earned about $1.8 billion; the mobile remake Lineage M grossed $2.8 billion by July 2020. ## Sources and further reading - [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lineage_(video_game)) - [Lineage official site (Korean)](https://lineage.plaync.com/) - [Wikipedia: Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus:_The_Kingdom_of_the_Winds) --- From The Lantern Hall (https://www.lanternhall.org/), a museum of fantasy literature and roleplaying games.