ParkDev - SCP Foundation

🗿polvoFan1982 01/08/2010 (Fri) 22:13:41 #09213382

If you haven't heard of ParkDev, do yourself a favor and scour your favorite emulator forum for one of his fans. Your keywords: "Paperboy", "10/25", "Ant Lion", and "Waterproof".

If you have heard of ParkDev, you know exactly why I'm writing this.

🗿polvoFan1982 01/08/2010 (Fri) 22:14:08 #09213384

Back in the day, independent game developers had two choices: submit to a studio, or settle for bootlegging.

The biggest problem, back then, was the tech. Any moron could punch in a few lines of code and call it a day; the problem came in when you needed to distribute. Most of the big consoles required you sign a licensing deal, and the ones that didn't were going out of fashion and fast. If you wanted to get something out there, what you needed was word of mouth or a ton of CDs.

This is what ParkDev was operating on. It's unfortunate: if you didn't live in the city of Gimhae, you'd almost certainly miss the release run. ParkDev's games were distributed via mail-order in the form of CDs; perhaps as a result, ParkDev's games run exclusively on Korean PC environments. Actual copies of ParkDev's games are rare, with only about 500 of his most popular game (Waterproof) sold ever. God help you if you wanted to talk to the man himself.

ParkDev released a total of four games from 1995 to 2005, though only recently has he gained any sort of notoriety. Like all cult classics, his games have been analyzed to pieces, often literally. Nothing I say will be news to the in-crowd.

But if you read this far, you're looking for answers.

Let's start with Paperboy.

🗿polvoFan1982 01/08/2010 (Fri) 22:14:49 #09213387

Paperboy was ParkDev's first and arguably most "normal" game. Set in the 2D world of 1995 suburbia, you play a bright and cheerful little lad who breaks into your neighbors' houses in order to deliver their newspaper.

The goal is simple. Doing so, not so much.

For its time, Paperboy had some pretty out there mechanics: every nook and cranny of the house could have any number of bits and bobs inside or on top of. Some of them were even locked, leading to a fun little lock-picking minigame. And it was useful to play: the items inside could be made into any number of fun contraptions!

Your main enemy was, perhaps a bit paradoxically, the very same people who were supposed to get your paper. For starters, you're not allowed to get caught. If they see your face, get a hold on you, or otherwise catch you on tape, you're done. Secondly, the game encouraged you to create any number of contraptions in order to distract or incapacitate your customers, some of which looked fairly lethal. Third: beyond even the necessities of gameplay, each customer's house is fortified like they knew you were coming.

Upon a successful delivery and the Paperboy's subsequent escape, the most controversial part of the game took place: the ending.

ParkDev's games all have multiple endings, but mapping out what you did to earn them is an absolute nightmare. Paperboy's are particularly contentious: of the 48 confirmed endings, fans have yet to figure out the exact trigger conditions for 8 of them, and even the other 40 are buried under a veritable flowchart of factors. Anything from which level you played, to how long you took, to even which contraptions you set up could factor into the end screen.

It isn't like the endings were that different, anyways. Translated, your typical ending looked like this:

312|FOUR BY FIVE|ROCK PILE

AMERICAN-MADE SUPERPREDATOR

If you're looking for some kind of meaning there, you used to be in good company. It certainly doesn't look like something a paperboy would've seen. ParkDev never said anything on the matter, and his next game gave little clue as to what it all meant.

🗿polvoFan1982 01/08/2010 (Fri) 22:15:02 #09213388

ParkDev's leap into the third dimension, 10/25 was a surprisingly complex game for 1998.

This gist of it is that your sister was given a week-long detention that just so happens to intersect with the anniversary of an ornery gwisin's death, and it's up to you to hatch a plan to save her. Each day, you have 30 minutes of your lunch break and 30 more after cram school to explore, solve puzzles, and prepare for your daring detention break-out.

For a game that was never intended to be anything more than a city-specific curiosity, 10/25 has an astounding level of detail built into it. The labyrinthine schoolhouse is packed to bursting with hidden passages, useful props, and even a small network of NPCs with consistent schedules. The crafting and lockpicking mechanics from Paperboy return in full force, with more reason to use them. But if you ask anyone what the crown achievement of 10/25 was, you'll always get the same answer: Sohyon.

Confined to the nighttime levels until Sunday, Sohyon is the vicious spirit of a murdered schoolgirl, and 10/25's primary antagonist. Everything you do, she works to subvert. That means passages closed, structures demolished, and even a busted lock from time to time. That was assuming she didn't cut out the middleman and hunt you herself.

To this day, nobody's sure how Sohyon's AI actually works. Any one playthrough can see her go from a cunning trapper to a rampaging brute. One of the moderators on the old ParkDev forums swore there was a time when she did nothing but follow silently from a distance until they saved the sister, after which they were predictably caught.

Not that it matters: whether or not you saved your sister (and given the sheer difficulty of the Sunday level, you probably won't), the game ends when (and never simply "if") Sohyon finally catches you.

In 2003, 10/25 was succeeded by Ant Lion.

🗿polvoFan1982 01/08/2010 (Fri) 22:15:33 #09213389

If I had to pick the weirdest of the bunch, it'd be Ant Lion. For all their oddities, Paperboy and 10/25 fit neatly into the "stealth" niche, and while Ant Lion certainly incorporates some stealth elements, the meat of the game is a bit harder to quantify.

For starters, the plot of Ant Lion is distressingly vague. A gaggle of teenagers are having a dusk-till-dawn party at an abandoned desert compound of some sort. There's no real story or exposition: players go from the menu straight into the action.

Secondly, Ant Lion's gameplay is remarkably open-ended, with a variety of things to do. Unlike Paperboy (and, to an extent, 10/25), the players are expected to mingle about a group of 14 or so teenagers, or else aimlessly explore the (surprisingly large) game world. There's no real objective: the game only ends when either the players survive until dusk, or both are incapacitated, either by police, the environment, or the Ant Lion.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Ant Lion is multiplayer. Player One is "Dohyeon", the glorified camera that follows Player Two's "Kyubong" around (or doesn't) as he gets into all sorts of illegal mischief.

As far as anyone can tell, Ant Lion was intended to be a "make your own fun" game. You're perfectly free to indulge your friends in an inane rhythm minigame; you're also free to kill them, drag their bodies to the center of the map, and throw them into the central pit. The old Parkdev forums had maintained a whole list of challenges ranging anywhere from restoring power to all facilities in a single night (never completed, I believe, though it's theoretically possible) to leading each of your friends to the Ant Lion.

Once you lose one of the protagonists, however, the games turns from a fun but unnerving desert romp to something truly off-putting. If Dohyeon is the first to go, the camera will fall to the ground, the lens will crack, and Player One will no longer be able to follow Kyubong. Kyubong will still be able to move and interact with the world, but Player Two must rely on their knowledge of the map to navigate — and once they're gone, all that can be heard is the rusted machinery, the Ant Lion's shuffling, and the howling desert wind.

If Kyubong dies, Dohyeon will still be able to move around and view the world — but he will not be able to interact with it. The other teenagers will not talk to Dohyeon, only stare at him with a yet unseen contempt. He cannot work the machinery or even pick up objects. While Dohyeon is still subject to the police, the environment, and the Ant Lion, he is otherwise dead to the world.

Of note: while the game is supposed to take place in South Korea, the desert terrain doesn't correspond to anything in real life, North or South.

🗿polvoFan1982 01/08/2010 (Fri) 22:15:59 #09213391

In 2005, ParkDev put out Waterproof.

Disclaimer: remember how I said all of ParkDev's games had multiple endings? We only know this because the source code was dumped. To my knowledge, it's only ever been beaten once (and we'll get to that later).

Waterproof stars a little toy robot named "Nari" (according to its model's name in the files), stuck inside of a large ship stranded in heavy seas. Despite the title, she's not actually waterproof — too much time in the sloshing waters threatens to rust her over — but she does have the ability to "jump" a short distance through walls and obstacles. Nari can also climb, hold onto, and kick off of walls, though she'll run out of stamina quickly.

The goal of Waterproof is to reactivate the ship and plot a course back to "the Mainland". This is easier said than done: aside from a few robot NPCs, the only other inhabitants of the ship are the Mollusk and its spawn. Every member of the ship's crew is dead, killed by the Mollusk, and it can't tell the difference between flesh and metal.

The Mollusk is neither as smart as Sohyon nor as stealthy as the Ant Lion. It makes up for this with its mobility: the Mollusk can climb infinitely, it can throw itself across a room, and — most importantly — it can swim. As well, the Mollusk will occasionally stop to spawn, and though her children aren't as deadly as the Mollusk, they're just as tenacious. Nari's only hope of avoiding a violent end lies with her ability to jump, which she must use carefully.

Unfortunately, Waterproof is nearly impossible to beat. By the time you'd have completed most of the essential tasks, the ship would be full of Mollusk spawn; if your PC wasn't buckling under the weight of so many entities, you'd still have to contend with avoiding the horde.

Nevertheless, Waterproof was considered ParkDev's best game yet, and there were even talks he'd be picked up by a local game studio.

Oh, if only.

🗿polvoFan1982 01/08/2010 (Fri) 22:16:23 #09213392

For as good as his games are, cracking ParkDev's games is a nightmare. He's not a very good coder, and most hacks of his games tend to be afflicted with game-breaking bugs. Moreover, he doesn't leave comments; it seems like he never expected anyone but him to read his code.

Out of respect for ParkDev, the fans who cracked his game never publicly posted their cracks, opting instead to share them among friends and the occasional university archivist. A big part of ParkDev's appeal was outsider approach to game design and distribution; messaging a hobbyist for a CD or a crack was and still is considered the most respectful way to acquire his games, perhaps even the only "legitimate" way.

There was, in retrospect, good reason to believe this.

A few month's after Waterproof's release, a user named Eumenides1990 dumped the code for Waterproof on the ParkDev forums, and accompanied it with a near-incoherent rant. To the best of my knowledge, Eumenides1990 accused ParkDev of comprehensive degeneracy, criticizing everything from his coding ethos to the alleged political slant of his games (though the actual ideology being referred to is unclear). It was ridiculous, and has become something of a meme in ParkDev circles. But that didn't matter.

ParkDev was already a bit sparse online, posting on very few sites and rarely at that. Shortly after the post, however, ParkDev scrubbed his entire online presence, deleting every account he had and disappearing. Most of his deleted posts are still missing; almost all of what we have are archived Ask/Tell-style 4chan threads and quotes of his posts on obscure forums.

It's not a nice story — but if it had ended here, I wouldn't be posting about it.

🗿polvoFan1982 01/08/2010 (Fri) 23:16:56 #09213428

A few weeks ago, someone finally beat Waterproof.

Believe it or not, ParkDev's games have a niche speedrunning community in Japan and the States. It's hobbyist to the core — these are the kind of people who buy old Korean computers and trade bootleg CDs just for the opportunity to say they saved their virtual sister the fastest. Many once-impossible Ant Lion tasks have now been completed, and it was only a matter of time before someone set their sights on ParkDev's crown jewel.

UltraGoji1954 was the one to do it, and in under two hours. I won't bore you with the details — suffice to say, the edges of certain objects have interesting qualities. Point is, someone was finally able to get one of Waterproof's endings.

It's… peculiar.

Upon the ship's docking, the screen faded to black, before revealing a map of Mount Taebaeksan. It stayed like this for several seconds, before suddenly cutting back to the menu. At first, no one was sure what this meant — but upon watching a playback, someone noticed a faded number on the top right, visible only in high-contrast.

You might recognize it from earlier: "312"

The joy of Waterproof's first successful playthrough was quickly overshadowed by the mystery of its ending. The theories were endless, anything from an indicator of how you played the game to a hint about Parkdev's next project. His previous games, in-turn, received a level of increased scrutiny reserved mostly for ARGs. Before, everyone wanted to know if Waterproof could be beaten; now we wanted to know what that meant.

One of these users was 46Guy, an old-timer fan who hiked in his spare time. He theorized that you could overlay the grid from Ant Lion's map over Waterproof's ending, hike over to quadrant DxE, look out for rock piles, and see if anything's buried underneath. The idea was a bit absurd — nobody pegged a niche indie developer to be the mountaineering type — but enough people were interested that 46Guy embarked on his journey.

46Guy's liveblog attracted more attention to the ParkDev forums than even Waterproof's completion. Everyone was F5ing for the next post, whether that be an update on his search, a response to someone's question, or even just a cool landmark — and the forums were beginning to buckle under the pressure.

Overall, the thread was up for about 12 hours. Day became night, updates became less frequent, and people were creating accounts by the truckload just to know what happened next. Everyone knew it was only a matter of time before the ParkDev forum's meager servers died, but we couldn't help it. We all had to know.

11 hours in, 46Guy posted an image of a pit filled with rocks, and we knew — we knew — that ParkDev's secrets were finally at hand.

The last image was a shot of 46Guy from behind as he points his camera into the pit, taken from a few meters in the air. It stood for all of five minutes before the servers finally crashed.