Post by virtuavalentine on Feb 18, 2024 9:29:22 GMT
Fishing Champ/Fishing On
What was Fishing Champ?
NewMMO Blogspot Article on Fishing Champ • Gamescampus Youtube English Trailer
Wayback Machine EN Homepage • Wayback Machine KR Homepage • Gameogre Reviews Page
Fishing Champ was a South Korean MMO developed by Beto Interactive that lived for a year in the US under Gamescampus publishing and somewhere around 10 years in South Korean markets.
Copyright listings on the footer of associated websites with this game show that it's exchanged hands constantly since launch and has likely been held in a nightmare of litigation that prevents it from reaching western markets. There exists an extremely small amount of information documented on this game online, with most of the companies associated with it not listing it on any of their websites. A few Reddit posts describe this game on r/MMORPG, but it's been mostly memory holed out of public consciousness due to its short life cycle and poor marketing, along with direct competition from other South Korean MMOs like ozworldonline and Maplestory.
What was the main gameplay like?
The main gameplay loop seemed to revolve around life simulation, fishing, farming, and cooking. From personal experience, the game actually had a pretty unique aquarium system for the time, allowing you to raise the fish you've caught and just sorta stare at them. There was also a large cast (pun intended) of playable characters that acted similarly to a more modern MMO's class system, enabling more gameplay optioons but also monetization and cosmetic methods.
What happened to the game?
The publisher Gamescampus shut down the English release of the game on September 30th 2008 without much explanation after a lapse in update news for the game, and the closure was directly documented on the wayback machine. The likeliest theory is that they failed to meet player-count and monetization expectations, and were forced to shut down due to being unable to pay for server costs. There was a closed beta on June 6th, 2006 that seems to have ended quietly and led into the main release for the game, however finding news articles regarding it is difficult.
The South Korean release of the game was supported for a large span of time, being quietly closed sometime after 2017. Regular updates and maintenance logs can be seen on the Wayback Machine, suggesting it was extremely feature rich compared to the English branch after so many years of updates. Noteworthy is that the main website for both releases uses Adobe Flash for a large portion of its infrastructure, and that had it continued to be supported into 2021, it likely would have cost the parent company a large amount of money to redesign the website for an MMO on its last legs anyway.
What's been found?
For some reason, CNET of all places contains a download link to the client for the August 2007 English release of the game. When installed, the majority of the resources for the game are barely encrypted or are stored as easily accessible files. With enough effort, the game could likely be rebuilt pretty easily or private servers built based on the code available. Given a severe lack of footage for the game or the client for the South Korean release being completely lost behind the language barrier, this is currently all we have regarding the game.
