4 ms·
North Korea’s First Computer Game: Pyongyang Racer
- xentronium 14y agoObligatory Artemiy Lebedev's photo report on NK (unfortunately, comments in Russian only): http://www.tema.ru/travel/north-korea-1/ http://www.tema.ru/travel/north-korea-1/ http://www.tema.ru/travel/north-korea-2/ http://www.tema.ru/travel/north-korea-2/ http://www.tema.ru/travel/north-korea-3/ http://www.tema.ru/travel/north-korea-3/ http://www.tema.ru/travel/north-korea-4/ http://www.tema.ru/travel/north-korea-4/
- hayksaakian 14y agoseems like the site (of the game) is down from my end
- rootedbox 14y agoif it was from NK then why does the game use english?
- astine 14y agoIt was commissioned by Koryo, the NK tourist agency as a promotional tool. It's not for Koreans to play, but for foreigners who might want to visit North Korea.
- pbateman 14y agoBecause it's a promotional tool made by the travel agency Koryo. As a foreigner you can travel through North Korea and see a truly strange country. It's probably going to do the job quite well just because it will pique the curiosity of a few and they might end up going.
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoAs an American, you can only visit during the Mass games unless they've changed that. I've been thinking about a weekend trip one of these days (but probably October given that's the only time I can go).
- taligent 14y agoThey've changed it. You can go at certain periods during the year often coinciding with key events. And you can only go as part of a set tour which is usually over a week. So no weekend tours and certainly not by yourself.
- rplacd 14y agoIIRC, the last person to individually book a tour to North Korea decided to shirk his appointment with the state ministry in charge of chaperones and took advantage of the fact that a Trans-Siberian railway crossing was listed as a valid port of entry on the standard tourist visa... it's not often you get to play with (if only mentally now) the technicalities of international transit. It makes you grin like hell.
- pbateman 14y agoThe only thing stopping this from being really funny is how awful the life of the average North Korean is.
- taligent 14y agoActually the average life of North Korea is not that different from those in rural China, Phillipines, Thailand and arguably some parts of the US.
- yen223 14y agoDo they really send people to reeducation camps for disrespecting the president in the US?
- taligent 14y agoSorry I should have clarified. I meant in terms of the basics: food, shelter, water etc. My point was that North Korea is borderline third world on par with other countries in the region.
- tomjen3 14y agoNorth korea is not borderline third world, they are much, much worse - indeed they can't even feed their own army anymore.
- nandemo 14y agoYour comparison is still off. North Koreans will risk their lives to escape to rural China. In China and Philippines there might be poor sanitation and malnutrition but you won't find a lot of people actually starving to death.
- sakai 14y agoUmm... that's quite simply false. Between 1994 and 1998, somewhere between 240K and 3.5M people died from famine in North Korea (of a total population of ~20M).[1] And while it's possible that there are similarly arduous conditions in China, the Philippines, Thailand, and (even) the US, the average citizen is certainly better off in all of those places. To put those famine figures in perspective, that's roughly the equivalent of half of California perishing from starvation during the mid-1990s (at a national scale -- if you prefer to think at a more regional scale it's like losing SF from the Bay Area). [1] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine for a quick overview
- RaphiePS 14y agoLast summer I had the pleasure of visiting North Korea (with Koryo Tours). I think it's worth noting that the company is not North Korean -- it's based in Beijing and run by British expats.
- Fantastix 14y agoHow to get backdoor into North Korea... Convince the game designers to be on your team. hmm...
- dfc 14y agoWhat does it say about a tech news website when the writer cannot be bothered to google "open source screen capture" before posting a story.
- obstacle1 14y agoNothing, since the writer is a freelancer and doesn't represent said website.
- dfc 14y agoSo they went ahead and posted his story?
- pretoriusB 14y agoYes, if the story is hot, no news site would care about capture quality anyway. And it's not like it's some high class news outlet anyway. Complaining about some random web news site?
- dfc 14y agoAre you the guy that complains about "try hards" in games?
- redact207 14y agoHeroic officers of the army, members of the Worker-peasant red guards, compatriots, comrades and friends. Today we have achieved great victory of technical excellence in honor of our Dear Leader, who is a perfect incarnation of the appearance that a leader should have, who has returned to Heaven from where he first descended. We have proved to the world our superior technical and scientific achievements, for which we are now envied. The technology that powers Pyongyang Racer is the same divine and glorious codebase that sent Unha-3 into the heavens that was gifted upon us by the Highest incarnation of the revolutionary comradely love. The sun flag of the great Comrade Kim Il Sung and Comrade Kim Jong Il will forever flutter in the van of our revolutionary ranks that display only victory and honor and will always encourage and drive us toward a new victory. Move forward toward the final victory, Pyongyang Racer.
- mechnik 14y agoDear Leader is dead, long live the Supreme Leader!
- dguaraglia 14y agoNext in line: "Incredible Leader of Total Awesomeness. Bee's Knees"
- dguaraglia 14y agoI know this is not supposed to be the kind of comment HN encourages, but... whatever, you had me at "technical excellence" and it only got better from there :)
- salemh 14y agonot supposed to be the kind of comment HN encourages Yet, its what we may perceive as the best representation of what the populace is having to deal with / parrot. Like most ironies, sadness and hilarity ensue.
- lawlypop 14y agoFor those of you who want to skip the site and check out the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3nueQI-dNe4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3...
- jlgreco 14y agoFrom the name, I was really hoping this would be a re-branded Tux Racer.
- swalsh 14y agoI wonder if the people who developed the game inside NK had the opportunity to play games made from the outside?
- sebastianavina 14y agoI wonder if they even had access to unblocked internet.
- quant18 14y agoMy wild guess is: they might not have had any internet connection at all. But it really depends whether the Koryo Tours guys thought the extra cost would be worth it. I don't have any updated pricelist from Nosotek (the North Korean/Dutch joint venture outsourcing firm which wrote Pyongyang Racer), but back in 2010 they charged an extra €40 to €60 per day surcharge to clients if they wanted their team of two outsourced Pyongyang programmers to have direct internet access; otherwise the team would work "in a cleanroom environment and can not connect to the internet" and all email contact would be with the Nosotek managers only. http://www.nkeconwatch.com/nk-uploads/nosotek-pricelist.pdf http://www.nkeconwatch.com/nk-uploads/nosotek-pricelist.pdf To put this in perspective, that charge is almost the same as the charge for one of the programmers themselves. My guess is, Nosotek most likely have to pay for a third guy from the government to watch the browsing habits of the first two, and that third guy has to belong to both the set of political reliables and the set of internet-savvy people --- two sets which are already small in North Korea and whose intersection is even smaller. Not to mention the cost of the extra computer and internet connection itself More links about Nosotek: http://www.nkeconwatch.com/category/organizaitons/nosotek/ http://www.nkeconwatch.com/category/organizaitons/nosotek/ http://www.northkoreatech.org/tag/nosotek/ http://www.northkoreatech.org/tag/nosotek/ http://nosotek.com/ http://nosotek.com/
- asmithmd1 14y agoVery interesting contract. Did you use them for a project? 4. Communication Communication between the engineers and the customer will only take place by email or Nosotek's bug tracking server. Phone calls are not possible. Chatting is only possible with members of Online Programming teams. Emails exchange will only take place once pay day, answers to questions will be giving on the following day, sometimes two days later. The customer accepts that it might happen that email communication is interrupted for one or two days for technical or administrative reasons. In case the customer sends political propaganda or agitation, Nosotek has the right to cancel the project without returning the prepaid fees.
- xanfred 14y agoNope. North Koreans made "The Big Lebowski Bowling" back in 2007: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-06/kim-jong-il-bowls-for-murdoch-dollars-with-video-games-made-in-north-korea.html http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-06/kim-jong-il-bowls-f...
- jpatokal 14y agoOops -- looks like the bourgeous running dogs of HN have just DOS'd the North Korean video game industry. Here's hoping Kim Jong Un doesn't consider this a declaration of war and transform the Web into a sea of fire...
- JediZX 14y agoNow the NK citizens will be arrested if they don't play this game day and night...
- illuminate 14y agoOn ~what~?
- EliRivers 14y agoOn my last tour I was assured by our (frankly gorgeous) guide that EVERY family has a PC. Or at least that's the plan. We drew our own conclusions :)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jayfuerstenberg 14y agoThe instructions read "don't hit other cars or vans!" but I think I counted around only 6 of them in the entire city. Is it because it's on DEMO MODE?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- 1wheel 14y ago> Or just watch this video of me playing a little bit of the game (apologies for the hideous “demo mode” watermark; my usual screencapture software is broken but this should do until I can fix it)
- dualogy 14y agoNo, it just adds a lot of realism. I'm not being snarky, NK roads are mostly devoid of cars most of the time from what I've seen (on the Internet, didn't have the privilegue to visit yet).
- davorb 14y agoI've read on a blog belonging to a Russian foreign exchange student that's currently living in the country, that they're actually having traffic problems in Pyongyang this year.
- malkia 14y agoWonder whether the game has somesecret subliminal message in the executable? Something like the Trolls game for PC http://www.mobygames.com/game/trolls/trivia http://www.mobygames.com/game/trolls/trivia
- kennywinker 14y agoFor some reason I was expecting it to be written in Python.
- ouchtrech 14y agoYou kidding or what, c'mon ? Python is too good for them. They still be in 70's, python was made in 90's.....
- jagermo 14y agoi think the site is down. Did anyone have a chance to mirror it?
- telepoiss 14y agoI hope they'll release an iOS version soon.
- kitcar 14y agoThis article is incorrect - this is not North Korea's first video game, they have been producing video games for quite a while, there are a number of companies which even outsource production there. From an article in 2010 (http://www.pcworld.com/article/198555/the_worlds_most_unusual_outsourcing_destination.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/198555/the_worlds_most_unusua...) : The outsourcer with the highest profile is probably Nosotek. The company, established in 2007, is also one of the few Western IT ventures in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. Nosotek's main work revolves around development of Flash games and games for mobile phones. It's had some success and claims that one iPhone title made the Apple Store Germany's top 10 for at least a week, though it wouldn't say which one. Several Nosotek-developed games are distributed by Germany's Exozet Games, including one block-based game called "Bobby's Blocks."
- frozenport 14y agoNorth Korea's goverment will report the website outage as a CIA plot carried by an elite group of hackers called "Hacker_News".
- ender89 14y agoComplete with realistic Pyongyang traffic!