Lee Yeongdo

In Dec. 2015, LOCOJOY International announced a "3D action RPG" was in development by Vision Bros, a Korean mobile developer, and would be released in the 1st quarter of 2016. A closed "final test" beta was announced and players could register using their mobile phone numbers. The beta began on January 1, 2016 and ended on January 5, 2016. The game Dragon Raja M was released on Google Play for Android on 11 February 2016.

After the forum was closed in 2007 Lee said in an interview that he was searching for a place to serialize his work online, saying that "the realtime feedback from the readers is a big joy, and I miss that feeling." But he found it difficult to find a replacement to the old text-only forum, which was "easier for [him] to access because [the forum]'s white text on blue limited one's expression to text, and it enabled [him] to show individuality purely through words." The web's increased sense of community and of the writer's presence thereby, made it more difficult for him. "I believe words and people are separate," Lee said, "some people may like a writing and want to find about the writer, but I don't."

The popularization of HTTP and the Web browser caused the decline of Hitel and other commercial online services, and Lee's readership on the forum was greatly reduced. But Lee continued to use Hitel forum to 2005, completing The Bird That Drinks Blood, the last of his multi-volume novels as of July 2014.

Between 2005 and 2008 Lee wrote several short stories for science fiction magazines, including Regarding the Translation of KAIWAPANDOM which has been translated into English. There were talks of publishing Dragon Raja in the United States in 2006, to which Lee's response was "I don't want to disgrace our country."

In 2004 a mobile RPG Dragon Raja Mobile, or DRM, was released through KTF's mobile game services. The game's storyline of 15-hours playtime on average, was based on the beginning chapters of the novel.

Dragon Raja was adopted as a part of KBS Radio 2's Fantasy Express program, and the total of 83 episodes ran in 2001.

This practice of online serialization and getting published based on its popularity (estimated by the work's view counts) surged in fantasy, science, romance fiction in Korea. Online forums dedicated to these genres opened in hundreds by 2000 attracting prospective writers, and caused the boom of the Internet literature.

Outside the forum he published a short story Over the Horizon as an e-book in 2000, and wrote a series of children's stories for RedPen study books published by Kyowon Co. Ltd.

Lee's publisher Golden Bough has run an online community from 1999 where the publisher and Lee's fans discuss and actively participate in publication of Lee's current and upcoming works. There the publisher ran limited edition campaigns for Polaris Rhapsody in 2000 and for Dragon Raja 's 10-year anniversary in 2008. In 2011, a campaign for the new hardback edition for Future Walker has been announced. In 2015, a new hardback edition for Polaris Rhapsody was released.

In the midst of his debut success, Lee began typing his second novel Future Walker, a sequel to Dragon Raja. Future Walker was serialised on the same forum from October 1998 to June 1999, and published in August by Golden Bough in 7 paperback volumes.

Lee's Dragon Raja world and its main characters have been used as a basis for a MMORPG, Dragon Raja Online, or DRO. The game began development in 1998 with the investment by Samsung Electronics, and was released in 2000 in South Korea, and later in 10 countries including Taiwan and China as 龍族. where the novel was published in the same title and marketed along with the game. After a series of M&A of its developing company over the years, DRO's Korean service was closed in 2011. The English version of the game however, can be accessed at here and the global service has remained live. (August 2011)

Lee serialized Dragon Raja from October 1997 to April 1998, referring to himself as "typer" as he typed and didn't pen his work. The chapters quickly gained popularity and Lee's readers began waiting online for Lee to post the new ones. Lee usually posted his works well after midnight, and Lee's readers began calling themselves zombies, and Lee the Necromancer summoning them online every night. Through its 6-month running, Dragon Raja accumulated 900,000 hits, and its publishing rights were soon taken by Golden Bough, an imprint of Minumsa Publishing Group. Beginning in May 1998, the novel was published in 12 paperback volumes.

He started writing seriously from 1993, but didn't think that he would be writing novels.

Mid-1990s were when fantasy and science fiction literature was just being introduced to Korea. Lee remembered that "if you asked people what is fantasy, they would say 'Isn't that like western martial arts'" in a 2008 interview. He found the genre attractive and decided to try a story with it. It was also when various online service providers similar to CompuServe in United States (but different in its interface being text-only) were emerging. Lee joined one such provider, Hitel, to start posting on its Serial forum what would be the first chapters of Dragon Raja.

Lee was born in 1972 in Busan, South Korea, the first child of two brothers. When Lee was 2 years old, his family moved to Masan in South Gyeongsang Province where he has lived since. As a child he read heavily in various subjects. In 1991 he entered Kyungnam University where he studied Korean language and literature.