Jake Song

Jake Song (Korean: Song Jae-kyung, born 1965) is a South Korean game designer who co-founded Nexon, created Lineage at NCSoft, and founded XL Games to build the ArcheAge franchise. He is one of the most significant figures in Korean online game development, with a career spanning over three decades.

Education and early career

Song graduated from Seoul National University and pursued doctoral studies in computer science at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), though he did not complete his doctorate. While at KAIST, he created hanterm, a Korean-language terminal emulator for the hangul alphabet that became widely used in the early 1990s.

Nexon (1994)

On December 26, 1994, Song co-founded Nexon (initially NXC Corporation) alongside his college classmate Kim Jung-ju. They developed Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds (Korean: Baram-ui Nara), one of the first graphical MMORPGs. Development started in 1994 and the game launched on April 5, 1996, reaching America before Ultima Online. Song left Nexon due to a disagreement with Kim Jung-ju before the game officially launched in its final form.

NCSoft and Lineage

Song began developing Lineage at a company called Inet. When Inet struggled during the 1997 IMF financial crisis, Song and the Lineage project moved to NCSoft. Lineage: The Bloodpledge launched in November 1998, drawing on Song's love of dungeon-crawling games like NetHack and adapting the story from comics by Il-sook Shin. Lineage became the first MMORPG to exceed 2 million subscribers, making NCSoft one of the world's largest game publishers.

Song rose to Vice President of NCSoft before departing in 2003 after disagreements with founder and CEO Tak Jin Kim. He was described as one of "four young CEOs that led Korea's dot-com boom" in the late 1990s.

XL Games and ArcheAge

Song founded XL Games in 2003 with former Lineage team members. After the failed XLRacer project (a persistent online racing game Song later called a "miserable failure"), the team began developing ArcheAge in 2006. Song wanted to build a sandbox MMO where players shaped the world through their choices rather than following scripted paths.

ArcheAge launched in Korea in January 2013 and reached Western markets in September 2014. Within three months, the game had over 2 million registered players globally. Song returned to active ArcheAge development in 2018 and oversaw the early development of ArcheAge Chronicles.

Departure from XL Games

Song stepped down as CEO of XL Games in 2023 but continued as a director focused on Chronicles. In March 2025, after 22 years at the company, Song left XL Games entirely, citing a desire to "recharge." His departure was reported by Massively Overpowered on March 1, 2025. Development of ArcheAge Chronicles continues under Executive Producer Ham Yong-jin.

Design philosophy

On the game's guiding principle: "The motto of ArcheAge is 'a world made of your own free will.'"

On community and player interaction: "Let the players feel the true fun of MMORPG by forming a community like real life by interacting with other players, whether it be conflict or cooperation."

On the sandbox-themepark balance: "We feel that the ideal situation is like this: on the early stage of the game there should be theme park content, and in the later stage there should be sandbox."

On equipment freedom: "We do not want to enforce any restriction in equipment but instead would like to enable and encourage users to choose to wear appropriate equipment by giving benefits and penalties."

On content quality, reflecting on ArcheAge's evolution: "'Countless and quantitative' features are not what players want, but content with 'density' and 'completeness.'"

Song appeared as a cameo character in Stellar Blade (2024), referenced as a legendary developer.