North Korea’s First Computer Game: Pyongyang Racer

http://www.techinasia.com/north-korea-computer-game-pyongyang-racer/

by danielhitome • 14 years ago

86 57 14 years ago

techinasia.com

hayksaakian• 14 years ago

seems like the site (of the game) is down from my end

rootedbox• 14 years ago

if it was from NK then why does the game use english?

astine• 14 years ago

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.

pbateman2• 14 years ago

Because 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• 14 years ago

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).

pbateman2• 14 years ago

The only thing stopping this from being really funny is how awful the life of the average North Korean is.

taligent3• 14 years ago

Actually 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• 14 years ago

Do they really send people to reeducation camps for disrespecting the president in the US?

sakai• 14 years ago

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).

[1] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine for a quick overview

CamperBob22• 14 years ago

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.

guard-of-terra• 14 years ago

In all parts of the US they have fridges (ones that freeze food) and electricity to run these.

In NK, they never had many fridges (except for the most lucky) and the electricity is reliably unreliable.

And it kind of goes downhill from this point.

RaphiePS• 14 years ago

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.

jvrossb• 14 years ago

So it's all the more puzzling it's this bad then?

EliRivers2• 14 years ago

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.

Fantastix• 14 years ago

How to get backdoor into North Korea...

Convince the game designers to be on your team.

hmm...

dfc3• 14 years ago

What 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• 14 years ago

Nothing, since the writer is a freelancer and doesn't represent said website.

dfc3• 14 years ago

So they went ahead and posted his story?

redact207• 14 years ago

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.

dguaraglia2• 14 years ago

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 :)

salemh• 14 years ago

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.

mechnik• 14 years ago

Dear Leader is dead, long live the Supreme Leader!

dguaraglia2• 14 years ago

Next in line: "Incredible Leader of Total Awesomeness. Bee's Knees"

lawlypop• 14 years ago

For those of you who want to skip the site and check out the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3...

jlgreco• 14 years ago

From the name, I was really hoping this would be a re-branded Tux Racer.

swalsh• 14 years ago

I wonder if the people who developed the game inside NK had the opportunity to play games made from the outside?

sebastianavina• 14 years ago

I wonder if they even had access to unblocked internet.

quant18• 14 years ago

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

North Korea’s First Computer Game: Pyongyang Racer

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