Celebrating 20 years of MapleStory.

Nexon

In 2003, South Korean game development studio Nexon created MapleStory, a free-to-play 2D side-scrolling massively multiplayer online (MMO) game. It garnered a dedicated fanbase through the years with its cute graphical style and social experiences. Players were able to level up by defeating bosses, making their characters more powerful, and interact with other players throughout the world.

These days, many video game developers are trying to find their “forever game,” typically a live-service that can generate constant player engagement and revenue. This allows these studios to continue to stay afloat while working on new projects. Some of them include games like Destiny, Call of Duty, and Fortnite.

However, this has resulted in only a few power players while many other live-services fail to find an audience. Games like Concord, Babylon’s Fall, and Lawbreakers are notable examples. After all, all of these games are competing with our valuable time, especially as other forms of entertainment like movies, TV shows, and even social media platforms like TikTok can keep us away from gaming.

This is why MapleStory’s longevity is impressive. In 2010, Nexon released the “Big Bang” update that drastically overhauled MapleStory by changing its graphics and user interfaces, as well as made the gameplay much faster-paced. 15 years later, Nexon is planning to release MapleStory Classic World, a pre-Big Bang era of the game, on a new official server. It aims to bring back nostalgic feelings of MapleStory’s humble origins.

“There’s no game like MapleStory. If you look at the genre, it’s pixel art and a side scroller,” Nexon Chief Product Officer Hanbyeol Oh tells Forbes. “It’s very unique and appealing, and I think that it’s that’s one of the reasons for its longevity.”

He continues, “Online games and mobile games, last maybe three or five years, and then they’ll shut down. But then for us, we had over 20 years of content, with so many things to do and so many updates.”

Nexon America’s director of product marketing Grace Lee says that players are lucky to have Oh leading the MapleStory Classic World project. He was MapleStory’s director in 2010 and he’s an active player to this day. This makes him a literal walking encyclopedia.

“What’s really great is that he’s always looking at the community and what they’re saying, ” she explains. “So he has a very active understanding of what players want, and what’s considered ‘classic’ or ‘pre-Big Bang.’”

During Maple Con Los Angeles last month, I spoke with Oh to talk about what players should expect from MapleStory Classic World and how the game continues to retain existing players as well as attract new ones.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

George Yang: How do you attract new players to MapleStory?

Hanbyeol Oh: When MapleStory started in 2003 and then seven years passed, there was initially retention going down. So to keep them, we needed some sort of big change. So one of that was the Big Bang update. We try to just mitigate the complexity of the game and simplify it. My approach is asking what the paint point was and just pick it out or just remove it.

Yang: Other online games have tried to revamp their art style or switch from 2D to 3D. MapleStory looks similar after all of these years, with the anime pixel art. Is there any particular reason why these past few years you’ve kept the art style?

Oh: You might think the art didn’t change, but if you’ve played MapleStory for 20 years straight, then you can see that the art did change every three or five years. It became more like pastel tone. It’s still 2D, but there were a lot of changes that were made to the art, as well as lot of UI and UX changes.

I think 2D is everlasting. There’s Hollow Knight, Silksong, and Shovel Knight. There are gamers who love these kinds of side-scrolling games. So that’s one of the reason why we keep continuing in this genre from the art side.

Yang: In MapleStory Classic World, you’re giving that original MapleStory experience for players. Is there any particular reason why? Is it for nostalgic purposes?

Oh: So my initial idea was, “how we can reduce the learning curve or the pain points for new players?” I want to make the simplified version again. I could do something like Big Bang 2. The first Big Bang was the same opportunity. I think it worked well back then, but I don’t do that the same thing again here.

Current players love the current version, right? So I don’t want to ignore or push my way, regardless of emotions or preferences. So I want to respect that. On the other hand, I want to make the simplified and accessible version of MapleStory.

Yang: How will you balance modernizing MapleStory Classic World while also ensuring that it doesn’t stray away from the original experience?

Oh: I‘m just looking at what are the guidelines of what people think is “classic.” That’s one of the reasons why I’m taking time and taking effort to keep play testing over and over, and just not launch the game right now.

Also, if you look at old MapleStory and its classes and different skills, there was a huge gap between them. One of the popular classes was the ice lightning mage, because they were the most powerful ones. Then you had the fire poison mage which was considered one of the weakest ones. There were also so many useless skills of for all the jobs. So these are some of the balances that we’re looking to address for the classic version of MapleStory.

MapleStory Classic World is set to have a closed playtest in 2026, with a full release coming later.