Jake Song

Jake Song (Korean: Song Jae-kyung) 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 received his master's degree in computer science from KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology). While at KAIST, he created hanterm, a Korean-language terminal emulator that became widely used. His technical background in systems programming shaped his approach to game design, which has always emphasized complex interconnected systems over linear content.

Nexon (1994)

On December 26, 1994, Song co-founded Nexon (initially NXC Corporation) alongside Kim Jung-ju. Their breakthrough was Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds (Korean: Baram-ui Nara), which began development in 1994 and launched on April 5, 1996. It was one of the first graphical MMORPGs, released in America before Ultima Online. Song was described as one of "four young CEOs that led Korea's dot-com boom" in the late 1990s.

NCSoft and Lineage

At NCSoft, Song designed Lineage: The Bloodpledge (1998), drawing on his 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 and establishing South Korea as a global center for the online gaming industry.

Song left NCSoft in 2003 after disagreements with founder and CEO Tak Jin Kim over the company's direction.

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 January 2025, after 22 years at the company, Song left XL Games entirely, citing a desire to "take some time to recharge." His departure was reported by Korean outlet Bizwatch. Development of ArcheAge Chronicles continues under Executive Producer Ham Yong-jin.

Design philosophy

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 player freedom: "I wanted to make a world where players could be merchants, pirates, farmers, or kings. Not because the game told them to, but because they chose to."

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