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MINTROCKET
August 27, 2026 at 05:59 AM
Dated the game director credit to its last first-party naming and noted that later posts do not restate it
Mintrocket is the South Korean game studio that originated 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.
Item | Detail |
|---|---|
Founded as label | Originally established inside Nexon Korea as an internal label for smaller, higher-creative-risk projects. |
Spun off as subsidiary | 11 September 2024, when Nexon Korea formally incorporated Mintrocket as a separate, wholly-owned subsidiary corporation. |
First CEO | Jaeho Hwang, formerly the game director on Dave the Diver. |
Parent company | Nexon Korea. |
Known for | Dave the Diver (2023). |
Current project | NAKWON: LAST PARADISE, with Jang Kyoung Han as game director. |
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.
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.
Jang Kyoung Han is credited as the game director on NAKWON: LAST PARADISE, a role a developer post stated directly in October 2023. That remains the most recent time a first-party post named him in it: later updates, including those published in March and August 2026, sign off only as the Director of NAKWON. Nothing contradicts the credit, but it has not been freshly restated. 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.
Three threads follow from the studio's positioning and the director's stated intent.
Survival before combat.
Sound-based AI, stealth tools, and the four weather states confirmed in the closed alpha (Night, Rain, Dawn, and Early Evening) 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
, 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.
Mintrocket is not working on the game in isolation. Nexon's second-quarter 2026 earnings materials state that NAKWON leverages Embark Studios' knowledge in design, narrative, and technology to further elevate the game's overall quality. Embark is a separate studio inside the same corporate group, and the wording describes shared expertise rather than a co-development credit. The same materials raise a separate question about the credit itself: the pipeline chart in that deck gives the developer of NAKWON as Nexon Korea, while naming MINTROCKET as the developer of other titles in the very same chart. Whether that reflects a change in which team carries the project, or only how the publisher reports it to investors, has not been stated publicly. No detail has been published on how the Embark collaboration is organised day to day either.
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.
