MINTROCKET

Mintrocket is the South Korean game studio developing NAKWON: LAST PARADISE. It is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nexon Korea, and the brand is often stylized in marketing copy as the all-caps wordmark MINTROCKET. This article covers where the studio came from, how it became its own company, who runs it, and how that history shapes the current project.

Studio at a Glance

From Internal Label to Subsidiary

Mintrocket did not begin as a separate company. Before September 2024 it existed as an internal label within Nexon Korea, with the parent organization carrying payroll, legal, and operational responsibility. That label produced Dave the Diver, the studio's first widely-known release and the project that put the Mintrocket name on the map outside of Korea.

On 11 September 2024, Nexon Korea formally spun Mintrocket out of its main organization and incorporated it as a wholly-owned subsidiary corporation. Jaeho Hwang, previously game director on Dave the Diver, was named first CEO. The spin-off did not start NAKWON: LAST PARADISE; the project was already in development. It moved responsibility for the team into a standalone company with its own CEO and books, while keeping ownership inside Nexon Korea.

"Big & Little" Strategy

Nexon frames Mintrocket as part of a "Big & Little" approach to game production. The "Big" side is reserved for flagship live-service titles: large teams, long support windows, broad audiences, conservative risk profile. The "Little" side is for smaller, higher-creative-risk projects allowed to depart from the live-service template. Mintrocket sits firmly on the "Little" side, and the subsidiary spin-off is a structural focus on that positioning.

NAKWON reads as a textbook example of the "Little" framing. It is a third-person PvPvE zombie-survival extraction title set in a near-future post-outbreak Seoul, with permadeath loot rules, a stealth-first design intent, and a tone that emphasizes human survivors as a greater threat than the infected. The subsidiary structure keeps that creative risk separated from Nexon's larger ongoing services.

Game Director: Jang Kyoung Han

Jang Kyoung Han is the game director on NAKWON: LAST PARADISE. Alongside CEO Jaeho Hwang, he is the only Mintrocket staff member who has appeared as a public spokesperson for the project. His name is occasionally rendered in other romanizations; this wiki uses the spelling Mintrocket itself has used.

He has framed the design intent for NAKWON in his own words as "a real survival game where you have to hide, run away, eat, and survive in a world where Zombies hunt Humans, rather than the other way around." That sentence is the clearest statement of the studio's ethos for this game. Mintrocket is not building a power-fantasy shooter; it is building a game where stealth, sound management, and the choice not to engage are first-class mechanics.

Design Ethos on NAKWON

Three threads follow from the studio's positioning and the director's stated intent.

• Survival before combat.

  Sound-based AI, stealth tools, and a day, night, and heavy rain weather cycle change how easily the player and the infected can detect each other. Combat is framed as the failure case, not the goal.

• Real consequences for bad runs.

  Items carried into an expedition are lost if the player dies and fails to extract, turning every loadout choice into a cost-benefit decision.

• Iteration in public.

  Mintrocket has run two pre-alpha playtests and the March 2026

  Closed Alpha

  , and has published a development roadmap responding to test feedback.

The connecting tissue from Dave the Diver to NAKWON is a willingness to commit to a specific creative direction and ship the resulting game without filing off its rough edges.

Related Articles

For the publisher-side view of the same relationship, see Nexon. For a top-level introduction to the game, see the Overview. For the in-fiction setting, see Seoul. For the most recent test build, see Closed Alpha.