Go to any video game store in Korea and you’re bound to hear the name ‘Mario’ within a matter of minutes. Mothers come in looking for gifts for their kids, and they usually don’t ask for Final Fantasy, Tekken, or even Everybody’s Golf, despite the fact that Sony virtually owns the console market in this country. Rather, they ask for Mario, or “something like Mario”. Sadly, their requests are usually met with negative responses. Either stores simply don’t have any Nintendo products, or the little merchandise they do have is unreasonably expensive. What gives?

Actually, for the first few years I was here, I was under the assumption that nobody knew anything at all about Nintendo, and that all Korean gamers just vegetated on free or copied online games. As I grew more fluent, however, I started to seek out the gaming underworld (I say that because it seems all cool game markets in Seoul are literally underground), and as I came to understand things more and more, I started to realize that Nintendo is just as synonymous with gaming here as it is everywhere else in the world.

A friend of mine runs a tiny, cool game shop in the underground market below Uijeongbu Station, one of the northernmost stops on the Seoul Metro. I stop in as frequently as I can, and he always invites me to take a seat on the mini-sofa, play some Xbox 360 on his widescreen CRT, and chat about the weirdness that is the Korean market. Recently, with the news that Nintendo has officially set up a Korean branch, we’ve had a lot to talk about, but unfortunately, not much of it has been good.

See, Nintendo really is embedded in the minds of Koreans, but this is only from the fame of the NES days. The company has had extremely little success here since then, but curiously, this has nothing to do with disdain on the part of the Korean people. Rather, the culprit is twofold - on one hand, it’s Nintendo’s former president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, and his lack of interest in the Korean market, and on the other, it’s Daiwon, the company NCL’s been using for years as its representative/distributor in Korea.

Daiwon is a Korean company that has found fame and fortune representing and distributing a great many Japanese brands and properties in Korea, the most famous of which would be Studio Ghibli and Nintendo. The company handles the Korean marketing and distribution of countless other properties as well, but Ghibli and Nintendo are its big guns. While Daiwon does a halfway decent job with Ghibli, probably because it’s under such intense scrutiny from legions of obsessed Miyazaki fans, it does a notoriously terrible job of handling Nintendo and a ton of other manga and anime properties. The word on the street is basically that Daiwon gets a bunch of money from its clients and does a whole lot of nothing with it. Where that money goes is anyone’s guess.

With the late June news that Nintendo would be setting up exclusive operations here, I was sure it meant that Iwata had finally wisened up to the fact that Daiwon is altogether bad for Nintendo’s presence and advancement in the Korean market. I started making lots of phone calls in order to get a press contact with the newly formed Nintendo of Korea, only to find myself directed right back to Daiwon. After some phone tag, I ended up speaking directly with the individual in charge of NCL relations. Let’s just call him Mr. Jung. I’ll keep his first name under wraps. I explained who I was and what I wanted, only to be told that he knew as much as I did and no more. I asked him if Daiwon would still be handling Nintendo’s marketing and distribution in Korea. Unfortunately, he said yes. I asked him what kind of new marketing opportunities the fresh money from NCL was going to enable. He said, “Uh…I dunno.” I asked him if Nintendo had sent over a representative from Japan to head things up. He said no. Seeing a pattern develop, I asked him if anything at all was going to change, and he basically said, “Uh…erm…not really.”

Let me explain exactly why this is a problem, and just how big a problem it is. In the many years that Daiwon has handled the marketing and distribution of Nintendo’s products in Korea, it’s done, well, just about nothing. Go into any major department store like Hyundai or Lotte, any supermarket like Lotte Mart or Samsung Tesco, or any chain electronics superstore like Hi Mart or E-Land, and you’re going to find lots of Playstation and X-box merchandise and demo kiosks (without too many people buying, mind you), but in all likelihood, nothing Nintendo whatsoever. Zilch. And this in a country where everybody still wants to play Mario more than any other game. To get Nintendo products, you basically have to haul yourself all the way to the exhausting maze that is Yongsan Electronics Market where you stand the risk of getting flat-out cheated by one of many shady merchants. Obviously, Daiwon can’t make the excuse that Koreans don’t like Nintendo. It’s not true. Rather, the fact of the matter seems to be that Mr. Jung and friends are surfing the internet all day on Nintendo’s money. Please note that this is not a foreigner’s uneducated assessment of things, but an educated conclusion reached after speaking at length with knowledgeable individuals directly involved in the industry and through firsthand experience with Daiwon. More on that now.

Weeks went by, and Mr. Jung and I kept in contact. During this time, I started to hear more negative reports about Daiwon, mostly dealing with DS lite, which had come out to unanimous adoration among the young and hip, but, despite plentiful stock, was and is virtually nowhere to be found. More serious complaints were dealing with Daiwon’s customer service, or lack thereof, in the case of faulty units. I decided one day a couple weeks ago to pay a visit to Daiwon and hear Mr. Jung’s side of the story.

The receptionist gave me directions over the phone, and I arrived in the area…only to find myself smack in the middle of a no-holds-barred red light district. I was in a maze of tight alleys lined on either side with nothing but glass windows and scantily-dressed twenty-something girls waving at me to come in for fun and games. Luckily, they didn’t actually come out and and physically try to take me in, which happened the last time I got lost in such an area. I found a neutral zone, called again, and the girl guided me to the Daiwon building…which ended up being right there among the brothels. Shady, shady, shady. And the building itself was pretty dingy. Whatever. I wasn’t there for the sights, I was there for answers.

I found my way up to Mr. Jung’s ‘office’, if you can call it that. The place turned out to be a total hole. His room is home to a staff of four…and I came to find out that they, most unfortunately, are all that exists of Nintendo of Korea at this point. One guy with this truly awful bleached hair looks like a wannabe Korean pimp in his late twenties, and that’s not a good thing. The rest look anything but professional, and the workspace is a dump. Not a cool, gamer’s dump. Just a dump. A “we don’t give a care” kind of dump.

So I start talking with Mr. Jung and friends, asking some questions about what exactly they’re doing for Nintendo, how they’re representing the company, etc. I’m basically met with blank stares. I bring up the customer service complaints and other bad reports that are making the rounds about Daiwon, and ask them what they have to say about these things. At this point, Mr. Wannabe Pimp With Bad Hair got really, really angry, and for no apparent reason. “We’re not Nintendo!”, he shouted. “Did you see Nintendo written on this building?! We don’t ****** care about that ****!” He spoke like an uneducated thug, I kid you not. Mr. Jung was now visibly uneasy, and just stood there not knowing what to do. He didn’t want that to happen. I looked at him, laughed a bit, and told him I was shocked. I asked him, rhetorically, what he thought the big shots at Nintendo would do if they knew what their people in Korea were really like. He apologized, but didn’t take anything back. At this point, I shook my head and walked out in amazement.

Everything I’d heard about Daiwon, and more, turned out to be true. I can’t help but think that the only reason NCL deals with these people is because it knows no better. If Iwata is truly serious about making waves in the Korean market, he’d do good to hire some prudent folks fluent in Korean and send them over here to clean house Reggie-style, starting with the clowns at Daiwon. Better yet, just send the Regginator to execute judgment himself. The potential for Nintendo to succeed in Korea is very real, especially with Wii on the horizon, but as long as Daiwon is in control of the company’s future over here, I see things going nowhere fast.

Note: I hope that Nintendo takes real notice of this problem. I’m not alone here - Kotaku has accurately reported on the issue a number of times, as have other sources. If anyone out there has had similar experiences with Daiwon, let Nintendo hear about it.