JoyOn

In October 1992, four high school friends (team leader Kim Taegon, Yi Jehyeong, Yi Hyeongjin and Jeong Jongpil) got together to form HQ Team and started working on their first game, Knight Master. But the fatherland called, and thus they just uploaded a very early demo of their unfinished RPG and left for their two years of military duty.

Upon their return, they resumed their enterprise, but a new inspiration left a deep impact on them: Warcraft. Thus they set out to make the first real-time strategy game set in the history of Korea. Lacking the manpower and business experience for such a project, they pitched it to Trigger Soft, who helped out with the graphics and took care of the production side of things. Afterwards HQ Team decided to take things into their own hands, and their next title Imjinrok marked the beginning of one of the most popular game series in Korea.

Despite their success, the financial situation remained insecure, and thus the team (by now renamed Dreamware) eventually joined up with Gamania Korea in July 2000.

Gamania Korea was founded as a joint-venture of the venerable Taiwanese company that was founded in 1990 as Full Soft and the localization studio and Korea Licensing (the Gamania Korea of today is a new company and not directly related). The brothers Jo Seongsam and Jo Seongyong who ran Korea licensing and Gamania Korea had first founded a PC systems and floppy disk import company named Saem Jeonja in 1988. It had made first game publishing experience in a cooperation with Ssangyong in 1992, but went bankrupt in 1995, resulting in the founding of Korea Licensing, which localized foreign games for the Korean market, but also sold Korean game publishing rights to the US (Korea Licensing was renamed in 2003 to Multi Plus Enterprise).

Gamania Korea was on a course of expansion in 2000, taking in not only Dreamware, but also Caiz Studio, developer of the mecha action game Gears9. In August 2001, it severed its ties to Gamania and was renamed to JoyOn. After Kim Taegon and HQ Team left in 2003, the company worked on several more online games, but didn't get to publish any of them. On March 7th, 2006, JoyOn fusioned with the lottery portal JoyToto (which had previously renamed itself from Lotototo), gave up in-house development and settled as a online game web portal only.