Coins, tokens, currency, GP, whatever you want to call them, have occupied the back pockets of protagonists in the pixelated worlds of video games going back since before the days of Mario headbutting those floating, blinging gold coins all the way to the bank. Although video game designers throughout the eras have exhibited limitless imaginations in creating universes rich and lush and beyond our wildest dreams, the somewhat mundane notion of currency — units of value that can be utilized in exchange with elements within that universe — has remained ubiquitous, regardless of if your avatar is a vampire-slaying assassin of the night or a pizza-loving Italian stereotype trying to save his mushroom friend.

But at some point in this timeline — and perhaps far earlier than you would think — the line between video game currency and meatspace currency began to blur. There are many touchpoints in how this came to be, but as game developer Jamie McCormack lays out, the pivotal moment in creating the “greyspace” in between fiat and virtual currencies in the gaming world took place in South Korea in the early 2000s:

“Unlike in the West, where we have high street retail network and a history of buying boxed games, in Korea things were a little different,” McCormack explains. “For various historical reasons, Japanese goods weren’t very popular, so video games consoles weren’t there in large numbers. Instead widespread PC adoption, a culture of gathering in venues with lots of networked computers in-place, and massive investment in broadband by their government enabled new business models to emerge.”

Inherent in the above are the formative elements of the massive competitive gaming culture that’s now taken over the world, but even with strong interest in the emerging gaming market, Korean game developers were struggling to turn a profit. Piracy via torrenting programs was so prevalent that the market became habituated against paying for games at all, so they had to figure out a different model to create a successful business. If that sounds familiar, that’s the same problem that led the music industry towards free-to-play streaming platforms, but that’s a topic for a whole different story…