The 2008 that looked like the beginning

Until September 2026 the archive dated the first Chinese Metin2 private server to June 7, 2008: 龙驹在线 (Fuzhou), open beta on "last year's Hong Kong version," 10× exp, with its own client distributed from the homepage. F That's already fifteen months before rain. But it isn't the beginning.

风云倚天, August 2005

风云倚天 is documented from August 14, 2005. F It isn't a fan page: it's a commercial private server in operation. It sells gear in RMB, has a call center with a Xi'an area code, its own launcher, a patch that swaps the client's IPs, and 1000× experience. The domain was never re-registered by anyone else, so every preserved page is period-authentic by construction. F

Three years before 2008, and four years before the leak. We hold its bytes: three fyyt.exe files with original dates of 10/1, 11/13 and 12/31/2005, and two ip_chn.es files with the game servers' IPs in plain text. F

How you got there

The trail wasn't in China: it was in Korea. A Korean blog from November 20, 2005 teaches Korean players how to point the official client at the Chinese server by swapping ip_kor.es for ip_chn.es. F The Korean word for this scene is 중국메틴, "the Chinese Metin." For seven rounds of research we had searched with the correct words (사설서버, 프리서버, "private server") and found silence: the scene exists, is alive in 2026, and goes by the wrong word. The cost of one term.

It has to be said precisely what 风云倚天 actually was: in 2005 the name 倚天 covered both Metin 1 and Metin2, and the Chinese Metin 1 pserver scene is already documented from December 2005 (a dated account entry) and from February 2006 (a complete FreeBSD install guide). F That 风云倚天 was running Metin2 is shown by its homepage (metin2 client, Metin2 maps in the localization table); that Koreans called it "Chinese Metin" without distinguishing is part of the story.

The piece that's worth the most

Inside pkdu.zip, a Chinese PK server kit, there's client_string.txt from November 27, 2005: the map localization table, Korean → Chinese, with the English column empty. F They were translating from the original Korean client. No Western intermediary: in 2005 the West didn't exist yet, and China already had its own pipeline.

On March 22, 2007 a Japanese player, reading the client's strings, establishes that the Japanese edition is the Chinese version reworked with Korean grafts. T The two observations add up: the client pipeline reads in one direction only, Korea → China → everywhere else.

Even earlier

The oldest official Chinese binaries we hold, yt2_pack.exe and yt2_pack98.exe, are from October 8 and 11, 2004, two weeks before the Chinese public beta of 11/18/2004: official 《倚天Ⅱ》 material. F Of the closed beta client from 8/25/2004 (199 MB) and the "complete client" from 8/16/2005 (315 MB), only name, size and period date survive; the bytes are lost. F

And China has a prehistory before the game: Metin 1 came out there at the end of 2001 as 《倚天》, "the second Legend of Mir." F The oldest file in the whole museum is a truncated relic of the March 2001 Metin 1.

What changes

The 2009 leak didn't open a scene in China: it reached it. When rain published, Chinese Metin private servers had existed for four years, with a market, paying customers, and an established localization practice. The novelty of 2009 was the package, not the idea: a ready-made virtual disk anyone could switch on.