A History of Korean Gaming

Mips was the first game developer hailing from Busan, a rare sight in the Seoul-centered economy (Mirinae Software had started out in Daegu, but soon moved to the capital). During the development of their second title, they took the independent team Garam & Baram under their wing, who helped out with the game in turn for Mips' funding and co-producing their current game adaption of Park Seongu's manhwa The Legend of Eight Dragons. There was even a live concert helt in October 1997 to promote the game's music, the first of its kind in Korea1. However, before the game was finished Garam & Baram parted ways with Mips2, who kept capitalizing on the license for the next few years with a hardly connected fighting game "side story," by publishing the first game's original design tools as RPG Director, and finally a planned sequel that was never produced.

In late 1999 the company was temporarily renamed to dizitalSHOCK, but appeared as Mips again less than a year later. Soon after, Mips would buy up another independent studio, TRiC(3), but most of the key members as well as TRiC's only IP, the real-time RTS Jurassic Primitive War joined SKC instead (Only the sub programmer from the first Primitive War is known to have ended up at Mips4).

Mips nonetheless took over TRiC's favored genre for their final game project, which made the most buzz due to a publicity stunt: The company would distribute a million copies for free, planning to cash in on paid online gameplay5. In the end, however, the stunt was received exceptionally badly, determining the end of Mips.