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In 1998, a startup called NCSoft launched one of the most popular video games of all time, although you've probably never heard of it. The game has earned more than $2.6 billion in revenue, including $330 million in 2016, 18 years after it hit the market. But you probably don't know anyone who has played it.

Two decades after it was founded, South Korea-based NCSoft is one of the biggest game companies on the planet, with a long list of hits and successful franchises, yet it remains largely unknown across the Pacific. Games like its flagship title, Lineage, were blockbusters in Asia but failed to catch on with Western players. Repeated attempts to expand the business into the United States never gained traction.

But Kim Taek-Jin, the company's CEO, is determined to change that. In the past two years, NCSoft has built a new game studio in California, pivoted toward a risky mobile strategy and begun developing new properties for Western audiences. Kim is so committed to translating NCSoft's success that he has even bet his family on the project: His wife, Yoon Songyee, an accomplished executive and neuroscientist known as Genius Girl in Korea, moved to California with their kids in 2014 to run the company's U.S. subsidiary.

"We've been keeping our eye on the Western market for a long time, and it's important to us," says Yoon, the CEO of NCSoft West. "We have a big presence in Asia and Korea, but that's not enough. We want a global audience." Kim founded NCSoft in March 1997, when he was a 30-year-old engineer who had worked for Hyundai Electronics in R&D and in the division that operated Korea's first internet provider. NCSoft was initially positioned as a systems-integration company, but Kim and several key employees were enthusiastic gamers and quickly realized their networking know-how could be used to power videogames with thousands of simultaneous users. In September 1998, NCSoft launched Lineage, one of Korea's first massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs, in which players fight and explore their way through a medieval fantasy setting. The game was a hit: Three years later, it had more than 3 million subscribers paying about $25 a month.

Kim quickly tried to repeat that success in America. In May 2000, the company launched NCSoft Interactive, a subsidiary in Austin, Texas, and just over a year later released an English-language version of Lineage in North America. But Western gamers were much less enthusiastic than their Korean counterparts. The game was built for Asian consumers who often played with groups of friends, in internet cafes, on relatively underpowered computers. Americans played solo, at home, on newer PCs, so the game seemed difficult, repetitive and dated. Lineage struggled in the U.S., but NCSoft didn't give up. In 2001, the company acquired Destination Games, also in Austin, but the studio took six years to release its first title, the MMORPG Tabula Rasa, which sold so poorly that NCSoft shut it down after just 15 months. In 2002, NCSoft acquired Seattle developer ArenaNet, and that deal went better: ArenaNet's 2005 Guild Wars remains one of NCSoft's few hits in North America. Yet back in Korea, NCSoft prospered. Today the company has more than 3,000 employees, operates seven successful MMORPGs and had worldwide sales in 2016 of more than $860 million. "They are a major company in Korea, where they generate most of their revenue," says David Cole, CEO of market research firm DFC Intelligence. "In the U.S. they are a one-trick pony."

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