Kart Rider 跑跑卡丁车 rides to Chinese gaming glory

Pacific Epoch noted in a small item on Tuesday 9/12 that the very popular South Korean Kart Rider 跑跑卡丁车 game hit 700,000 concurrent Chinese users recently.  We’ve written about Kart Rider before, mostly to say that it’s a big, big deal in online China and yet remains almost invisible in the English language media aside from the always reliable Pacific Epoch and, every now and then, gaming blogs like playnoevil.

3D Q-style racing game Kart Rider hit 700,000 peak concurrent users
(PCU) on September 10, Kart Rider operator Shiji Tiancheng announced on
Monday. Shiji Tiancheng licensed Kart Rider from [South Korean game developer] Nexon and began open
beta testing for the game on March 17. Shiji Tiancheng has 70 million
registered users for Kart Rider.

 Shiji Tiancheng is pretty excited about this.  The official Kart Rider news item reads: Today (9/11/06) will become a date written in stone for Kart Rider 《跑跑卡丁车》gamers, today will become a great moment in the history of China’s online games, today is another milestone in the development of China’s online gaming! ….When the game opened in March 2006 we had 120,000 concurrent users after 3 days, 200,000 after 10 days, 500,000 after 3 months, and now, 700,000!

(via Playnoevil)