Trigger Soft was a gaming company that became known in Korea for its offline RTS games.
The company started to get interested in the online game market in early 2000 via Rhakmu (abandoned in its beta), before starting the development of its first MMORPG: Seven Hearts (세븐하츠).
The game is presented as a "fantasy role-playing game that pursues a fairy tale feel" and its official development starts with the 3D engine creation (Znzin), based on Jiho Choi's work who has been hired as the first 3D programmer.
Two hackers known as deebee & Glov heavily hacks iRose during its beta. They managed to get an almost total access to the game's servers, giving place to incredible scenes in the main city (Junon) where high-level monsters spawned & where they were able to kill players (in a non-PvP zone).
They will also get their hands on the official binary files of the server (which they will call Arcturus). These files were unreadable in their current state (unlike source code), but allow people to run a replica of the official server.
This event is crucial and will mark the beginning of the history of private servers.
Brett19 is working on multiple server emulator prototypes (bRose / cRose / eRose) on his own. They are side-projects of him in order to practice programming.
eRose seems to have been its most advanced project with a dedicated website introducing it as a private server and claiming to have registered more than 2000 accounts.
The project ended 2 months later and Brett19 published the server files to the public on RageZone forums.
PsyQo published what could be called a private server draft: Rose Sandbox. It only provided limited features that had been added step by step (mainly social between players) and certain maps (Zant at first, then the whole Junon planet).
The more time a player spent online, the more points he earned. These points could then be used on the site to unlock items.
This project was never intended to become a "production ready" server, it was rather a project intended to learn programming.
The private server Ruff starts, funded by the eponymous player. He funded the creation of the server with the help of Glov and deebee for the technical part.
They used Arcturus (the binary files stolen from iRose's servers) as the basis for what would become Ruff Rose.
Ruff Rose is a major milestone in Rose's history in several ways.
Thus, it can be considered the starting point of the gray part of Rose Online's history.
Ruff leaves his own server for personal reasons, and disappears from the Internet.
He leaves the management of Ruff Rose to deebee, the only remaining member of the original team. The latter will recruit many developers (Brett19, Donan, ExJam, Razor and Xadet, to name a few) to assist him in the technical management of the project.
The arrival of multiple people in the team implying their access to the Arcturus files, this will explain the birth of many new private servers using the file base of Ruff Rose.
A team of passionate developers decided to create an open source emulator project for the various versions of Rose Online :
It is important to note that these projects being developed from scratch, they are much less illegal than private servers using "official" resources obtained in a questionable way.
The US branch of Gravity is informed that the original Korean server (kRose) will cease its activity and that the development of the game by the parent company (Korean) will end at the same time.
Until now, Gravity Inc. (USA) had a very limited flexibility regarding the modification of the game. Indeed, they had neither the source code of the game, nor the internal development tools. They had to go through Gravity Co. (Korea) for any development / correction of the game.
Leonis - who can be considered as the American father of Rose Online - is invited to go to Korea to benefit from a week of knowledge transfer with the development team before they move on to another project.
This intensive stay will allow him to learn the technical operation of the game and the use of the internal tools. This transfer will also allow him to get the source code of the game, the complete tools but also a hard disk containing various unfinished contents like a draft of the 4th planet: Orlo.
This event will mark the beginning of the technical autonomy of the North American team.
Gravity Inc. (USA) starts hiring people (programmers, artists & content designers) to master the official sourcecode & start making their own fixes & features such as:
The official game code sources starts leaking on the internet.
They are supposed to come from private server folks that get hired to work on the official Malaysian server (myRose). They would have ended up sharing official sources (k/iRose, pRose & naRose) from their work to some people, starting the official sources leak.
It will allow a new generation of servers to emerge, providing new exclusive features (being able to heavily change the game).
Brett19 & Exjam start working on a free and open-source implementation of the ROSE Online 3D MMORPG for web browsers written from scratch using the latest web standards (WebGL, HTML5, Javascript, Threads, …).
They managed to do some great progress but ended up getting burnt out and stopped their work on this project after an intensive month of work.