橙光 / 66RPG — How an RPG Maker forum became the “Roblox of Visual Novels”
(This was originally a Twitter thread that I’ve expanded upon and edited so people can easily find & read it)
I’ll start with a disclaimer: I do not speak Chinese.
That said, I find it absurd that there’s no English information on this, so let me do my best to tell you the history of 橙光 / 66RPG — a website with 80M active users, 8,000 paid developers and 100,000+ games.
It all began in 2005, when 柳柳/LiuLiu, a student at Tsinghua University in Beijing, created www.66RPG.com as a forum to share RPG Maker info.
LiuLiu had a lot of skill with RPG Maker, sharing various scripts and tutorials. His first game, Legend of the Black Sword (2005), drew a lot of attention, and 66RPG soon became a hub for China’s emerging indie dev scene, where people could share game design tips, learn how to make/rip art and play each other's games.
It grew to over 1,500 RPG Maker games, including several that became cult classics in China — here’s a short selection:
- 黑暗圣剑传说 / Legend of the Black Sword (2005). A fan-made remake of 魔武王 / Dark Knight Saga, a 1994 Taiwanese RPG. It was created by LiuLiu and showed what was possible to do with RPG Maker.
- 仙剑奇侠传之灵儿续传 / The Legend of Sword and Fairy: Ling’er’s Story (2006), a fan-made sequel to the first Chinese Paladin / Sword & Fairy RPG, an all-time classic across Asia.
- 梦幻西游单机版之梦幻群侠传 / Fantasy Westward Journey Standalone Version (2006), a single-player version of Fantasy Westward Journey / 梦幻西游, one of China’s most popular MMORPGs.
- 雨血之死镇 / Rainblood: Town of Death (2007), a high-profile game inspired by Wuxia novels and arguably China’s 1st indie title to reach the West (it was officially released in English in 2010).
- 格斗纹章 / Fighting Emblem (2011), a Tower Defense/RPG by LiuLiu using characters from series like Street Fighter, Final Fantasy, King of Fighters and Hokuto no Ken.
(You can go here to find a Hall of Fame of Chinese RPG Maker games).
After many server issues, attacks from hackers & trolls and even a temporary shutdown in 2009, 柳柳/LiuLiu began to turn the website into a business that no longer depended on RPG Maker.
The first step was creating their own RPG Maker-like editor. Their initial attempt was called 彩虹文字游戏制作精灵 (Rainbow Text Game Creator), a free Visual Novel maker that offered additional features and assets at a cost (that could only be paid with 66RPG VIP credits).
After several updates, this editor became the 橙光文字游戏制作工具 (Orange Light Text-Adventure Game-making Tool), advertised as a fully free tool that allowed anyone to “make a Visual Novel in a single day”.
This new editor proved itself quite successful. By 2014 the RPG Maker content of 66RPG was moved to a different section of the site (and later removed entirely), while the front page changed into 橙光游戏 (Orange Light Games), a site specialized in Visual Novels made with the new editor —it hosted over 5,600 of them by the end of 2014.
Isabella Jiangcheng at SuperPixel wrote a great article in English examining this new identity and some of the stand-out games.
She writes that the majority of users “are women and use the site as a tool to express their romantic fantasies and desires” — what many call “otome games” — but also notes that the website also allowed for content that could be “improper and sensitive on the modern Chinese Internet”:
Espionage: The Red Route was the first piece to break people’s view of 66RPG as being just a fangirl’s pajama party. The game adapted from the real-life stories of a legendary covert agent Yuan Shu, depicting the intelligence warfare during the second Sino-Japanese war, the China theater of WWII.
This new version of 66RPG quickly grew in users and features. They added a payment system to reward creators for successful games, made so they could be played on mobile and also added a licensing system.
This is one of the most interesting aspects of 橙光 — you can license their assets, get editors to help you, sell your VN to players and license it for adaptations — films, books, comics, TV & audio dramas, etc.
For example, 绝世千金 / Unique Lady is a 2014 VN that became a TV drama in 2019.
On March 29 2024, 66RPG/橙光 made a post giving more details about its size and operations: https://66rpg.com/t_114/Uzo1XtcI338.shtml…
It has 100,000+ Visual Novels, 80 million active users and 8,000 authors under contract. It also has 12 editors in charge of recruiting new writers, with all content split into 5 sub-genres.
66RPG/橙光 is now a media powerhouse. Even NetEase is trying to rival it with its own Visual Novel portal, 易次元 / Yi Ci Yuan, which currently holds over 5,000 games.
Of course, it’s not all sunshine, as there’s debate about how fair 橙光’s business practices are. Like Roblox, it’s a platform for creating & publishing games that owns the copyright of anything made with it.
Also, as you might have guessed by now, unfortunately, you likely cannot play any of these. Not only they aren’t translated, but you also need a Mainland China phone number to play.
Still, I think it’s a fascinating side of video games most people never even imagined existed.
It’s worth remembering that there are various of these “isolated worlds” out there — Japan had the Game Atsumaru (ゲームアツマール) website, a hub for indie developers where millions of people enjoyed games like Your Turn To Die — Death Game By Majority and Our Island (ぼくらのアイランド), played over 35 million times.
Sadly, Game Atsumaru closed down in June 2023. It died as it lived —unknown to Western gamers, critics and media. It’s as if Newgrounds died and no one outside the US reported on it or even knew it existed.
Finally, if you enjoyed this article, I invite you to check out my other articles on the history of Chinese RPGs, the history of Korean RPGs, the birth of Japanese RPGs, the history of MUDs & MMOs or follow me on Twitter. Cheers!
