A History of Korean Gaming

각개 겹파 (Gakgae Gyeokpa) - IBM PC (February 1994)

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Marixon's first release was a fighting game featuring antropomorphic animals. The title is a translation of the military term "defeat in detail".

Gakgae Gyeokpa (IBM PC)

닥터 큐 (Doctor Q) - IBM PC (February 1994)

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With doctorq, Ablex continued to walk untrodden paths, this time by trying to combine FPS elements obviously inspired by Doom with a 3D flight sim/shooter like Terminal Velocity or Fury³.

슈퍼캅 (Super Cap) - IBM PC (August 11, 1994)

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Developed by the same staff as Gakgae Gyeokpa, Zis is a much more straight forward platformer with a strictly linear stage progressing, for 6 worlds a 3 levels. The basic elements are standard platforming fare, but this game is incredibly inventive. Each stage seems to introduce at least one completely new idea, giving even the better Super Mario games a run for their money in that department. There's a mountain climber hat, slides, shooter sequences, a pencil item that draws sketchy platforms on the screen, and much, much more.

The technical side, however, is once again much less to get excited about, but luckily not as catastrophic as in Gakgae Gyeokpa. The scrolling is perfectly smooth this time, moreso than in most DOS games, but Zis occasionally gets stuck in the scenery, sprites aren't always deleted properly and there's a whole package of other glitches and even crashes. The game is still playable for the most part, but the overall impression is dragged down by those flaws, nonetheless.

All sprites are drawn well and have an unique, raw charme to them. Backgrounds tend to be a bit on the dull side, though. The music's fine, but lacks inspiration and goes mostly unnoticed. Ablex once again proved that they were one of the best creative teams in Korea, despite the repeated lack of fine tuning.

대통령만들기 (Daetongnyeong Mandeulgi) - IBM PC (1994)

Marixon also did some pioneer work as one of the first Korean companies with a graphical online multiplayer game. Daetongnyeong Mandeulgi means "A president in the making", thus players were competing in a virtual election campaign over the Korean presidency.

It could be confirmed that the game actually went online3, but given Marixon's retreat from the game business, it probably wasn't available for long.

우먼파워 (Woman Power) - IBM PC (1994)

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Same as Super Cop, Marixon's Woman Power looks just like a forgotten Apogee platformer, almost like a feminist version of Duke Nukem 2.

Woman Power release status is not 100% secured: Developer Baek Seungki explicitly states on his blog that Woman Power was an actually released game2, but it was never in any release lists in any retrospect articles, nor does it have an entry with the Game Rating Board. In theory, it might have been available in some kind of shareware form, but the complete lack of accounts from players of the final game suggests otherwise.

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