Nosotek () is the first Western-invested IT

joint venture A joint venture (JV) is a business entity created by two or more parties, generally characterized by shared ownership, shared returns and risks, and shared governance. Companies typically pursue joint ventures for one of four reasons: to acces ...

company in

North Korea North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the northern half of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and shares borders with China and Russia to the north, at the Yalu River, Y ...

. Nosotek is known for developing computer games for various platforms, such as iPhone,

j2me Java Platform, Micro Edition or Java ME is a computing platform for development and deployment of portable code for embedded and mobile devices (micro-controllers, sensors, gateways, mobile phones, personal digital assistants, TV set-top ...

and

Wii The Wii ( ) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Nintendo. It was released on November 19, 2006, in North America and in December 2006 for most other Regional lockout, regions of the world. It is Nintendo's fifth major ho ...

. They claimed to have 50+ programmers on the team jointly managed by western and local managers in 2009. Nosotek's main target market is

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

. Nosotek offers clients billing through either a Hong Kong or Chinese company, according to its website, which promises “skills, secrecy, dedication.”

History

Nosotek was founded in July 2007 by the North Korean General Federation of Science and Technology (GFST) and the foreign entrepreneurs

Felix Abt Felix Abt (born 15 January 1955, Switzerland) is a Swiss business affairs specialist on North Korea and Vietnam. Abt was one of the first foreign entrepreneurs to seek to do business in contemporary North Korea, where he lived between 2002 and ...

and Volker Eloesser. Ju Jong Chol also played a major role in founding of the company. The company was joint venture between GFST and Felix Abt and Eastmars Ltd (Owned by Volker Eloesser). Nosotek took industry by surprise with its popular western oriented games. This included a popular

role-playing Role-playing or roleplaying is the changing of one's behaviour to assume a role, either unconsciously to fill a social role, or consciously to act out an adopted role. While the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' offers a definition of role-playing a ...

for

Nintendo Wii The Wii ( ) is a home video game console developed and marketed by Nintendo. It was released on November 19, 2006, in North America and in December 2006 for most other regions of the world. It is Nintendo's fifth major home game console, f ...

and an app that reached that reached Apple's Top 10 list in Germany for at least a week in 2008. They also developed an award-winning medical software. Products names are kept are confidential as clients don't want to be associated with North Korea. Nosotek's co-founder Felix Abt claimed that company became profitable in less than a year. Several of Nosotek's games are distributed by German company Exozet Games, including one block-based game called "Bobby's Blocks." Between 2007 and 2010, Nosotek's North Korean programmers made mobile-phone games based on the Hollywood films "The Big Lebowski" and "Men in Black" which were then distributed in the West by Nosotek Joint Venture Company. They developed “Big Lebowski Bowling”, a 2007 mobile-phone bowling game set in a rendition of the bowling alley where The Dude spent much of the movie drinking White Russians, and “Men in Black: Alien Assault” in which players battle invading aliens. Those games ended up getting published through Ojom GmbH, a unit of a company called Jamba that was wholly bought by News Corp. for $188 million in October 2008 and later renamed Fox Mobile. Volker Eloesser founded Elocom Mobile Entertainment GmbH in 2003, which later became a subsidiary of Ojom. The Big Lebowski and Men in Black games are not listed in the top 50 games available on cnet.com. In 2012, Nosotek cooperated with students from the

Kim Chaek University of Technology Kim Chaek University of Technology is a university in North Korea, on the banks of the Taedong River in Pyongyang. It is named after General Kim Chaek. The university's programs in nuclear reactors, nuclear electronics, nuclear fuel and nuclear ...

to develop '' Pyongyang Racer'', a

racing video game Racing games are a video game genre in which the player participates in a racing competition. They may be based on anything from real-world racing leagues to fantastical settings. They are distributed along a spectrum between more realistic rac ...

built for and released by the

Koryo Tours Koryo Tours is an independent Western travel company based in Beijing, specializing in group and independent tourism to North Korea. Their tours run throughout the year covering budget to exclusive trips. There are packages for staying in the cap ...

travel agency to promote

tourism in North Korea Tourism in North Korea is tightly controlled by the North Korean government. All tourism is organized by one of several state-owned tourism bureaus, including Korea International Travel Company (KITC), Korean International Sports Travel Company (K ...

.This game represents the first North Korean game made widely available online.Pyongyang Racer as it turns out had a secret predecessor. The project was based on an earlier racing game, developed by Nosotek and published on Facebook by “one of the big players in the social media market.” Pyongyang racing game after Nick Bonner talked to Volker Eloesser at Nostek. He liked the idea of working on a “fun, nonviolent and nonpolitical” project with North Korean youth. Nosotek offered software development from its launch in 2007 for several years although the business appears to have closed. Its website has been inaccessible since it was hacked in 2013. The site was hit in 2013 and its front page was replaced with a message in French, English and Korean attacking North Korea. A tag on the page claimed the hack was the work of “Syndicat de Boucher-Leblanc.” A linked website entitled “Global Clandestine Operations Network” has information in English, French, Russian and Arabic, but offers little information about the group. The hacked content has gone, but the main site is yet to return.

References

External links

*https://web.archive.org/web/20100711001826/http://www.interview-blog.de/politiker/wenn-das-regime-sich-nicht-wirtschaftlich-offnet-wird-das-land-kaum-vorankommen-im-gesprach-mit-ulrich-kelber-mdb-zu-seiner-nordkoreareise
North Korean Economy Watch - German Entrepreneur in DPRK
*

* https://web.archive.org/web/20120123074939/http://www.prlog.org/10733028-german-delegation-visits-north-korean-games-company.html * https://web.archive.org/web/20121004100500/http://www.interview-blog.de/unternehmerinnen-und-geschaftsideen/nosotek-is-the-first-european-invested-software-development-research-co-mpany-in-the-dprk-with-the-head-office-in-pyongyang-interview-with-mr-ju-jong-chol-vice-president-of-nosotek/ * https://www.nkeconwatch.com/category/organizaitons/nosotek/ * https://www.nkeconwatch.com/2009/09/03/felix-abts-advice-on-starting-jv-company-in-the-dprk/#more-5004 * https://www.gpic.nl/IT-in-NKorea.pdf Information technology companies of North Korea Video game development companies {{NorthKorea-company-stub