Heroic 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.
I 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 :)
not 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.
This 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_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."
Last 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.
No no no, Koryo Tours is a tour company run by Brits. They're just a tour company. They don't do programming. The programmers are with NovoTek in North Korea. Koryo Tours paid NovoTek to make the game.
Umm... 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).
We desperately need a Poe's Law or a Godwin's law to describe this common scenario. In any sufficiently-long comment thread, the probability of someone falsely equating the USA and $DICTATORSHIP, or invoking moral relativism to achieve the same end, approaches 1.
Your 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.
My 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
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
Very 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.
They have an internal intranet with bulletin boards and even dating sites that a few select have access to. I think it's mostly there to make rich kids feel like they're not missing out. A very, very small number of people even have access to the "real" Internet.
Kim Jong Il once (around a decade ago) famously asked Madeleine Albright for her email address.
Oops -- 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...
No, 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).
I'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.
> 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)
It 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.
As 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).
IIRC, 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.
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.