The thesis that circulates

In November 2013, on elitepvpers, a user named .Shōgun wrote that "the first files came from the Hong Kong licensee, Run Up, who rented VPS to Chinese private servers instead of running their own servers, and that's why they lost the license." T It's the most repeated explanation of the leak's origin, and the second half of the sentence, "lost the license," is true. The rest doesn't hold up.

The witness

The witness isn't contemporary: he joined elitepvpers in November 2010, seven months after 龍駒 closed. F He gets a verifiable fact wrong within the sentence itself: Run Up did run its own servers, from 3/8/2007 to 4/7/2010. F And in thirteen years nobody has ever quoted him: the exact phrase gets zero hits across the entire indexed web. F There's no tradition behind it; there's one man who wrote it once.

The mechanics

Run Up never had its own ASN or IP space (reverse APNIC queries on its maintainer come up empty). F In September 2008 its site was looking for GMs, game programmers and comic-shop clerks, never a sysadmin or a machine-room role. F In a gigabyte's worth of bytes from the 2009 server there isn't a single trace of virtualization: no VMware, no Xen, no OpenVZ, no virtio. F The only network object in the world that pairs "hosting" with the name, Runup-Hosting on a Malaysian /24, is from 8/14/2012: two years and four months after the license was lost. F Run Up couldn't rent out VPS because it had nothing to rent.

In its place, a stronger fact

Four independent paths converge: the addresses of period sites, the APNIC registry, the 2006 client catalog, the shell environment inside the memory images. They say the same thing: nobody in this story owns the iron they play on.

• The Taiwanese 龍駒 site sat on SEEDNET, Seednet-TaipeiDP Colocation, Taipei. F
• The Hong Kong site sat on POWERBASE-HK, a commercial data center. F
• On 6/10/2009 a German publishes the connection IP of the Chinese private server LongjuYT2: 203.70.68.11:13000. The 203.70.68.0/25 block is SEEDNET, TaipeiDP Colocation: the same facility as Run Up, in the same months. F
• The server game0901.tar.gz comes from runs on two Shenzhen machines (121.12.173.58 and .49), a /24 of 深圳市亿信科技有限公司, hostname www.idc.com, administered from Sichuan. F
• The Italian private server from May 2009 sits on an OVH dedicated box (94.23.20.144). F

Publisher and pirates bought the same kind of machines from the same kind of providers, and sometimes from the same one. Run Up wasn't a landlord: it was a tenant among tenants.

The migration

On August 5, 2009 the official announcement 【香港雲起提供】 states that on August 26 at 10:00 the Hong Kong server 「狂雷」 will merge into the Taiwan server 「玉馬」, "after many months of testing and evaluation." F On August 27, on Bahamut, Taiwan players describe the market flooded with cheap +9 items brought over by Hong Kong players. T

Months of merger tests mean one specific thing: complete copies of the Hong Kong install, taken out of production, mounted and re-mounted to test the migration. In that exact window the two files we hold were born: metin2_db+mysql.rar, already running on an Italian private server with the database metin2_runup in May 2009, and game0901.tar.gz, closed six days after the merger. F

On the day of the merger, the Hong Kong site still offered a client stuck at 7/30/2008 and a patch stuck at 5/27/2008: the HK branch had been on minimal maintenance for over a year. F A game in retreat isn't watched.

The license

The March 3, 2010 closure announcement says that "the Korean licensor decided not to renew the operating right." F But between February 10 and May 3, 2010, at least four Run Up titles from four different licensors close in Taiwan (Opus, Ymir, 玩酷科技, OnsOn Soft), each with the thirty-day notice required by the Taiwanese ministry's standard contract. F Orderly cessations, not breakdowns. By July the Taiwanese portal is down to four games. F

And in the Korean filings (Webzen's acquisition of Ymir on 1/26/2011, the 2011 annual report) the license to Run Up enters and never leaves: no early termination, no lawsuit, no dispute under that name. It's not an oversight: the same documents write "중도해지" (early termination) for another partner. F An expulsion for breach would have left a line. The silence has the shape of a term not renewed.

Run Up didn't lose a license because of pirates. It lost the catalog, and on 12/31/2015 it handed all its games over to its own offshoot Funmily, still alive in 2026. F