Lunia was an MMORPG by South Korean producer allm, originally launched in early 2006 and published in Brazil by Level Up! Games in late 2008. Its main premise was being an MMORPG with heavy elements of an arcade beat ‘em up, being one of the first to combine both genres.
I started playing Lunia sometime in 2009, and it was what taught me fast typing, introduced me to online forums and communities, and gracefully presented me the world of MMOs in general. The game was the biggest time-sink of young me until late 2012, when the Brazilian servers shut down. Sadly, the global servers followed suit just a year after. It’s fair to say it was far from being the largest MMO at the time, but to 9-year-old me, it was golden.
Recently, I stumbled upon some screenshots buried deep in my file archives. After a couple days of reminiscing old times in some unofficial servers that are still around - and realizing the game aged surprisingly well (although it might be just my nostalgia talking) - I decided to use the skills that I acquired since then to snoop around the game files, maybe learning some cool stuff along the way. As it turns out, that was quite successful and exceedingly fun, so here’s a quite lengthy rundown of my journey.
I probably spent over 150 hours in the last month to get up to this point, and it is still very much a work in progress. Many of the game files are still hidden or unexplored, and there’s a bunch that I still plan to do with the extracted assets. With that, I may update this post (or write follow-ups) in the near future if I do so.
