NCsoft

NCsoft's logo.

NCsoft is a South Korean based online video game company which produced and published massively multiplayer online role-playing (MMORPG) games such as Lineage and Guild Wars.

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 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 as a partnership with Richard Garriott's Destination Games in April 2001. NCsoft programmer Jake Song also moved to the US in order to stimulate development. The branch acts as the home to NC Interactive, NCsoft's division for support in North America.

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 and established Lineage II servers.

It was announced at E3 2007 that NCsoft had become an exclusive third party Sony developer and will be developing games for the Playstation Network.

On September 10, 2008, NCsoft announced the formation of NC West, a subsidiary which manages NCsoft's other western subsidiaries, and plans to establish a headquarters for that subsidiary in Seattle, Washington, by the end of 2008.

Titles

NCsoft has developed a number of games, such as Lineage, Lineage II, and Aion, and has also published a number of games, such as City of Heroes, City of Villains, Guild Wars 2, and Tabula Rasa.