Historical Archive of Metin2
The museum's centrepiece
倚天II · October 2004
The oldest complete Metin2 client that survives. For twenty years it was said not to exist: it was on a CD bundled with a Chinese magazine for kids.
- 8/10/2004last file written
- 4½ monthsbefore the oldest known one
- 310monsters, later 397
Exhibition
Metin2 in Korean magazines
Twenty-three pages from two Korean monthlies, 2002 to 2004: the Metin2 that never came out, the beta adverts, the 2004 remake. Each page with its Korean text and the translation.
Enter the exhibitionMetin2 was born in Korea in 2002 and reached China, Hong Kong, Japan and Europe. In 2009 and 2014 its server and its source code left the workshop. Here we collect what of that story is proven, and every claim says how certain it is.
See these first
the whole showcaseFeatured stories
all dossiers- New story The 2004 client exists September – November 2004 For twenty years the scene had given up every 2004 Metin2 client as lost. The build of the second closed Chinese beta had survived on a CD bundled with a …
- Two hundred and ten seconds: the leak's birth certificate September 1, 2009 The file that gave birth to the world scene of private servers carries a date down to the second, and the port written in its own header.
- Not a theft: a migration May 2009 – April 2010 The scene tells the story of a heist. The documents tell of a publisher merging two servers after "many months of testing," an industry that rents all its own iron, …
- What the scene knows, what we know 2024-2026 The most serious public reconstruction of the leak is Exynox's, from within the Western scene (March 2024). It has the artifact, and guards it better than anyone. This archive has …
The rooms
Period images
Official Ymir material from 2003-2004. The setting sheets carry the credit © Latte / © YMIR CO.,LTD. 2003: a co-author the scene never recorded.
The eight theses the story rests on
- These are two events, not one. September 2009 = binaries: the figure of the administrator is born. January 2014 = sources: the figure of the dev is born. Whoever confuses them understands nothing of the scene.
- The origin is not Korean, it's Chinese: to be precise, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The «龙驹原版» build of the 《龍駒 Online》 edition by Run Up (Mongkok), posted on a Chinese forum as a turnkey private server. The Chinese themselves, in December 2009, called it «the Taiwanese 龙驹 server». The West got it for free at first; the 20-coin price came later. And it has a prehistory: the HK 2007 build was already running in Chinese pservers from June 2008 (sixth batch).
- A single tarball carries the whole thing. No new source leak is attested after 2014: twelve years of world scene rest on 2.79 GB bit-identical to themselves.
- Resources leak, the server never does. Modern content reaches the scene within days, but only client-side: the server implementation has never come out.
- The law exists, but it has three geographies and three targets. In Germany, six cases in twenty years, all about commerce (Webzen hits the code with a DMCA measured on 22,114; Gameforge hits the trade through GVU). In Turkey, the only country to have banned Metin2 by law, the driver is child protection: five provinces from 2009 to 2016, and Gaziantep literally targets private servers. In China the Xi'an licensee got three pirate-server operators convicted, but over Metin 1: on Metin2 no one has ever taken action in China. In Korea the law prosecutes ex officio, and in 2007 Webzen had 46 MU Online operators identified. It's not that they don't act: they don't act in Europe, and not on Metin2.
- A game in retreat is not being watched. In September 2009 the Hong Kong and Taiwan operation was merging its servers: merger executed on 26 August at 10:00, theft timestamp six days later. Metin2 closes in Korea in March 2013, and nine months later the scene has the source code. The Chinese shutdown of April 2008 hit Metin 1: Chinese Metin2 never closed, and in the leak's quarter it was launching a new build. The leak leaves no trace in the accounts: 2009 was Ymir's golden year, and the Korean press wrote not a line about it, neither in 2009 nor in 2014.
- Italy was there from day one, and doesn't know it. Italian guide on 8 September 2009, ahead of the West; the servers were called LongJu, that is, the official signage of a Mongkok company that had taken the name from its own building; and the «40k» of 2013 was credited to Italians.
- The community built an institution. Metin2Dev has rules like a legal deposit, a marketplace, terms of sale and a pillory: all the scaffolding of commerce except the right to sell. And the story has a mirror side: in the West fans made private servers, in China a company born around the game bought the rights and in 2026 brought it back to life with an act of the State.
No file is distributed. For each exhibit we publish name, bytes, fingerprints (MD5, SHA-1), internal dates and contents, and we state whether a copy is kept in the private archive. We never say where a file was or is, nor how we obtained it: a fingerprint is documentary data, an archive is something else.
Primetin2 preserves Metin2: this site is a faithful port of the official 2010 one, the game runs, and this section keeps its history. The scene's memory is made of forum tales, often wrong in exactly the details that matter. Here every claim carries its degree of certainty, and when a hypothesis falls we write down why.