In terms of the actual game, Nexus TK is most notable for its rather unusual partially player-run political / control element in which elected users run the justice system and make quite a few lower-level decisions that would typically be handled by GMs. The feeling of power must be pretty appealing some influential players have reportedly been active in their positions for a decade and more. I have qualms as to whether any such scheme would work in a new release of any size, but the title was definitely a pioneer in this regard. It was also a trailblazer in distributed server architecture, setting a record in 1999 by surpassing 12,000 users in a single world. This is the original appellation of the seminal MMORPG we far more often refer to as either Lineage or Lineage 1. Released in the fall of 1998, it was the title that established another Korean company we all know, NCsoft. The team leader was Jake Song, who had been a principal on Nexus TK. Accordingly, although his name may not have top of mind familiarity for many gamers in this part of the world, he rates inclusion on any list of developers who might be considered the “fathers” of our favorite genre. Here in North America, it's easy to regard Lineage as defunct. After all, the servers for this region were shut down over four years ago.
This is a rather NIMBY-esque point of view. In Korea, the venerable MMOG is alive and well. Indeed, NCsoft's 2014 financial reports tell us it generated a very healthy amount of revenue, approximately $240 million. It's interesting to compare this against Guild Wars 2, which is, of course, far more visible to gamers in this hemisphere. Accordingly, many would probably assume it's the bigger earner.
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