MINTROCKET

Mintrocket is the South Korean game studio developing NAKWON: LAST PARADISE. The studio is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nexon Korea, and the brand is most often stylized in marketing copy as the all-caps wordmark MINTROCKET. In prose around this wiki you will see both renderings used, but they refer to the same studio. This article focuses on Mintrocket itself: where it came from, how it became its own company, who runs it, and how that history shapes the game it is now building.

Studio At A Glance

The table below collects the load-bearing facts about Mintrocket that have been confirmed in primary press releases and the studio's own communications. Anything outside this table that touches Mintrocket history should be cross-checked against this short reference list.

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, a structure where the same parent organization carried payroll, legal, and operational responsibility for the team. 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. The success of that game is the immediate context for everything that followed.

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, who had been the game director on Dave the Diver, was named the first CEO of the new entity. The spin-off did not start work on NAKWON: LAST PARADISE; the project was already in development before the corporate change. What the spin-off did do was move responsibility for the team out of an internal Nexon structure and into a standalone company with its own CEO and its own books, while keeping ownership inside Nexon Korea.

Practically, this is why two slightly different answers to "who made NAKWON?" both turn out to be correct. The Steam store page for the game prints Nexon as both developer and publisher, which is the legal-entity rendering of the contract that ships the build. Press releases credit Mintrocket as the developer with Nexon as the publisher, which is the studio-level rendering. Both descriptions point at the same corporate fact: Mintrocket is a Nexon Korea subsidiary, so anything Mintrocket builds is, at the parent-company level, also a Nexon product.

"Big & Little" Strategy

Nexon publicly frames Mintrocket as part of a "Big & Little" approach to game production. The "Big" side of the framing is reserved for Nexon's flagship live-service titles: large teams, long support windows, broad audiences, and a conservative risk profile suited to multi-year operations. The "Little" side is reserved for smaller, higher-creative-risk projects that are allowed to depart from the live-service template and try ideas that would be hard to justify inside a flagship team. Mintrocket is positioned firmly on the "Little" side, and the spin-off into a subsidiary is a structural commitment to that positioning.

Reading NAKWON through this lens explains a lot of the design choices that show up in the alpha builds. The game is a third-person PvPvE zombie-survival extraction game set in a near-future post-outbreak Seoul, with permadeath loot rules, a stealth-first design intent, and a tone that emphasizes that human survivors may be more dangerous than the infected. None of those choices sit comfortably inside a flagship live-service plan. Letting a smaller subsidiary carry the project keeps that creative risk separated from Nexon's larger ongoing services, which is exactly what the "Little" framing is for.

Game Director: Jang Kyoung Han

Jang Kyoung Han is the game director on NAKWON: LAST PARADISE. He is the only Mintrocket staff member, alongside CEO Jaeho Hwang, whose name appears as a public spokesperson for the project. His name is occasionally rendered in other romanizations across press coverage; this wiki uses the spelling Mintrocket has used in its own press materials.

Jang Kyoung Han 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 single statement of the studio's ethos for this game. Mintrocket is not building a power-fantasy shooter where the player mows down hordes; 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 run through the way Mintrocket is building NAKWON, and all three follow from the studio's positioning and the director's stated intent.

• Survival before combat.

  The systems that show up earliest in any expedition are sound-based AI, stealth tools, and a day, night, and heavy rain weather cycle that changes how easily the player and the infected can detect each other. Combat exists, but it is framed as the failure case rather than the goal.

• Real consequences for bad runs.

  Items carried into an expedition are lost if the player dies and fails to extract. Coupled with the multi-player session size, this turns every loadout choice into a cost-benefit decision rather than a free experiment.

• Iteration in public.

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

  Closed Alpha

  , and has published a development roadmap responding to feedback from those tests. The studio's communications cadence treats outside playtesters as a real input to design, not an afterthought.

The combination of these threads is the through-line from Dave the Diver to NAKWON. The two games look almost nothing alike on the surface. The connecting tissue is a willingness to commit to a specific creative direction, accept the constraints that follow from it, and ship the resulting game without trying to file off its rough edges to fit a more conventional template.

Quick Facts

• Studio name: Mintrocket (also stylized MINTROCKET in marketing copy).

• Country: South Korea.

• Parent: Nexon Korea, wholly owning since 11 September 2024.

• First CEO post-spin-off: Jaeho Hwang, former game director on Dave the Diver.

• Game director on NAKWON: Jang Kyoung Han.

• Prior known release: Dave the Diver (2023).

• Current project: NAKWON: LAST PARADISE.

• Nexon strategy bucket: "Little" side of "Big & Little."

Related Articles

For the publisher-side view of the same relationship, see Nexon. For a top-level introduction to the game itself, see the Overview article. For the in-fiction setting Mintrocket has built the game around, see Seoul. For the most recent test build the studio has shipped, see Closed Alpha.