Lum explains: YOGURTING

YOGURTING: ENDLESS VACATION PHENOMENON!!!!!

Note: I am making NOTHING in this post up.




Yogurting was an MMO developed in Korea in the early 2000s. Like about 400 other free-to-play kMMOs from the same period, it had gameplay which was about as exciting as watching paint dry. Mainly you killed slug-like things in school yards since the four or five quests in the game involved you being schoolkids trying to determine why all your schoolmates had disappeared and been replaced with low-AI MMO mobs (this being the "endless vacation phenomenon" of the title.

Here's a few Yogurting screenshots which although slightly surreal and very kawaii (the cat suits were upsells) will look pretty familiar to anyone who's ever played a kMMO ever.







So far, nothing strange. Where it got strange was when Neowiz, the creators of Yogurting, decided to introduce it to the Japanese market through a marketing campaign that pretty much had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the actual game but instead... just started making really, really surreal anime-themed videos loosely involving the game's characters.

The first one is sort of? kind of? maybe inducing memories of? the actual game of Yogurting. At least until the boss battle when the protagonist turns into a heroine from a mecha epic.



You will be forgiven if, watching that, you go HOLYCRAP that looks cool, where do I download? Well, the thing is, Neowiz wasn't done. They then contracted with Shin Ji, a K-Pop star, to do a Yogurting music video. This pretty much left the actual game, world, and theme of Yogurting behind save a few allegories and mainly just had Anna, the protagonist, have what to most American eyeballs was some of the most surreally eye destroyingly gonzo anime dance footage ever put to Youtube.



To this day people upload the Yogurting dance with different dance music, often having no idea what the heck a Yogurting is.




When the second video become popular in America, most people had no idea what K-Pop was - literally their first exposure was this peppy and very, very surreal music video ostensibly about an MMO. So naturally a lot of people tried to play it despite it never being localized in English or even available for North America or Europe. A few brave translators did post walkthroughs for how to create accounts, download the client, and play long enough to figure out that Yogurting the game had absolutely no dancing whatsoever.

Yogurting eventually shut down (a distributor kept a server running in Thailand until last year) but it lives on IN THE HEARTS OF ALL CHILDREN.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogurting

I'm pretty sure it has nothing to do with yogurt, bizarre sex acts, or anything other than the name Yogurting sounds cool in Korean (where it's Yogureuting and equally devoid of meaning - there isn't even the connection to dairy products -- Yogurt in Korean is yoguleuteu according to Google)

This was my avatar on MMO forums for a few years:



And this is one of the random header images on my blog:

I assure you that the qualifier is unnecessary.

That explains that. I never could figure out what that was.

So far as I can tell, nope. It's just bizarre and random.