Youth Culture - Video Games
Due to changes in the game market, this article is outdated.
By far one of the most popular video games ever to hit Korea was StarCraft and the popular add-on, Broodwar, both by Blizzard entertainment. Until recently (2000), 80% of Blizzard's Battle.net multiplayer hub was being used by South Korean StarCraft players. The game debuted in Korea in early 1998, and its popularity was so fierce it led to the rise of the PC room (PC 방), where 20 or more computers are connected by LAN and to the outside world by a T1. These PC rooms can be found in every corner of the country, wherever kids can be found. And at a price of about $1.00 (U.S.) per hour, they can afford it. When kids finish school in the evening or afternoon, they make their way to PC rooms to chat and play multiplayer video games. Nowadays, StarCraft is still popular, but Korean-made role-playing computer game "Lineage" is taking over.
Another wildly popular Asian game, this time an arcade game, is "Pump". Pump is competitor of "DDR", a game
where the player stands on a dance platform with pressure-sensitive arrows and mimics dance movements
indicated with similar arrows seen on the screen. As players improve their moves, it looks more like a dance
than someone stomping around, and the pros use their hands and work in pairs, creating quite a display of
coordination.
