Anipang and the Summer KakaoTalk Turned Korea Into a Nation of Gamers

In the autumn of 2012, phones across South Korea buzzed with the same notification, again and again. It wasn't news or a message from a boss. It was a heart, sent by a friend, a colleague or an aunt, so that you could play one more round of a game about matching cartoon animals.

The game was Anipang, from a small studio called SundayToz. It launched on KakaoTalk's new game platform on Android on 30 July 2012, followed by iOS on 11 September, and reached 20 million downloads on 11 October 2012, just 74 days after launch. It was reported to be the first game to pass 20 million downloads from Korean players alone, in a country of roughly 50 million people.

Before Kakao: a puzzle looking for an audience

SundayToz was founded in 2009, and Anipang first appeared that September as a Flash game on the Cyworld app store and Naver's social apps, Korea's big social networks of the time. It was a pleasant match-three puzzle with animal blocks, and it found some fans, but it was one game among many on the web.

What changed everything was a messaging app. KakaoTalk, launched in 2010, had become close to universal on Korean smartphones by 2012. That summer Kakao opened a game platform inside the app, and Anipang was one of the titles ready to go. Suddenly a puzzle game could reach almost every smartphone owner in the country through their contact list.

One minute, five hearts and a weekly ranking

Anipang's design is tiny. Each round lasts one minute: swap animal blocks to make lines of three, chain combos for bigger scores, and race the clock. That's it.

The genius was in the social systems around it. To play, you spent a heart. You could hold up to five, and one refilled every eight minutes. Run out, and you could wait, pay, or get hearts from friends, who could send them to you through KakaoTalk. Every week, your score was ranked against the friends in your contact list, so the person you were trying to beat wasn't a stranger, but your younger brother or the manager two desks away.

The Kakao game boom

Anipang's success opened the floodgates. Within months, the Kakao platform was home to a wave of hits that defined a generation of Korean mobile games: the vertical shooter Dragon Flight, Devsisters' running game Cookie Run, Netmarble's board game Everybody's Marble, and Wemade's Wind Runner among them. For a few years, "for Kakao" in a title was a sign of a game designed to spread through friend lists.

SundayToz itself listed on the KOSDAQ market in 2013 and built an Anipang family: Anipang 2, Anipang 3, Anipang 4, the tile-matching Anipang Sachunsung and more. The company later became part of Wemade and now operates as Wemade Play.

Why it matters

Anipang turned Korea's smartphone owners, including millions of people who had never thought of themselves as gamers, into daily players. It proved that social graphs, the list of people you actually know, could be the most powerful marketing channel in mobile gaming. That lesson echoed far beyond Korea, alongside the Facebook-powered rise of Candy Crush Saga in the same year (read our Candy Crush history).

It also marked the moment Korean mobile gaming took off as an industry, paving the way for the big mobile RPGs and global hits that Korean studios make today.

Where to play

The original Anipang is still listed on Google Play and the Korean App Store, and the series continues with later entries. Like the original, they are free to play with optional purchases.