Bahamut

30-Second Overview

In 1996, a graduate student at National Central University who could not finish his thesis set up a gaming BBS to pass the time. His name was Chen Chien-hung, online handle "sega," and he named the site after the dragon from Final Fantasy — "Bahamut." Thirty years later, the dragon is still alive: 6 million members, 1.5 million daily active users, NT$300 million in 2022 revenue, ranked in the top five for traffic across all of Taiwan, and the largest ACG community in the Chinese-speaking world.¹

A Dragon Born on a BBS

October 28, 1996. First-day user count: 247 people.

In that era, access to the internet in Taiwan was still a privilege of university dormitories; ordinary people connected by dial-up, and bandwidth was measured in kilobytes. Chen Chien-hung set up the "Bahamut BBS" on Taiwan's Academic Network with no business plan, no venture capital — just the desire to find people who also loved to play Final Fantasy and talk about it.²

The real explosion came in March 1997. TV variety host Pu Hsueh-liang's program "Video Game World" (電玩大觀園) invited Chen Chien-hung on for a feature interview. The day it aired, site traffic shot to over three thousand users. From 247 to 3,000 — not from advertising money, but from three minutes on television.³

Going Commercial: A Company Made by Gamers

In 1999, Chen Chien-hung worked five months as a programmer at Kimo and then quit.

On March 3, 2000, he and Chen Chien-jen (his cousin), Lin Chun-yu, and Pan Chun-wei — three people from different schools, different departments, who had not previously known each other — registered "Wang Pu Network Information Co., Ltd." in Taipei. The capitalization was modest, but one thing was clear: all four of them were players themselves.⁴

In September of the same year they shifted to a paid service model. The company did not achieve its first monthly break-even until November 2001 — a full fourteen months of burning through capital.⁵

They made it through.

"Our audience is enthusiasts of subculture, so we stay close to their needs and build the community."
— Vice CEO Chen Chien-jen, 2023⁶

The Logic of Hara District: Not Deleting Posts Is a Philosophy

Bahamut's discussion section is called the "Hara District" (哈啦區). Today it remains the world's largest traditional Chinese-language ACG forum — not because its UI is the most attractive, and not because its algorithm is the most sophisticated. It is because of its position: unless a post crosses a clear line, the content is not taken down.

ACG enthusiasts have their own language. You would not post doujinshi (fan-made art) on Instagram for friends and family to see, but in the Hara District you can find people who understand exactly what you are talking about. This sense of belonging is not built through accumulated features — it is built through the trust that "what you say matters and will not mysteriously disappear."⁷

The moderator system is also key. Bahamut gives each discussion board's moderators a degree of self-governance — management style, board rules, and atmosphere are all decided by the moderator. Headquarters does not intervene, but provides the infrastructure. Like a city that does not manage how each neighborhood governs itself, but ensures the water and electricity stay on.

The Eras It Survived

PTT is in decline. Wretch is gone. PTT's old users are aging. MySpace is a forgotten name. Facebook was once the terminator of social platforms, but Taiwan's ACG community did not fully migrate there.

Why?

Because a general-purpose platform cannot solve the context problem of subculture. If you say on Facebook "I finally pulled the limited-run character," your university classmates, your supervisor, your parents — they all see it. Bahamut is a place where you can only talk to people who understand. This need does not disappear regardless of how platforms iterate.⁸

In the SimilarWeb Taiwan website rankings for the end of 2024, Bahamut ranked fifth overall and first in the gaming category.⁹

Anime Crazy: From Forum to Streaming

In 2016, Bahamut launched Anime Crazy (動畫瘋).

This decision was riskier than it appeared. The OTT market at the time already included Netflix and YouTube, and Taiwan's domestic market had several players. Bahamut's approach was not to compete on content licensing, but to do legal licensing of Japanese animation — a market long dominated by piracy, where the "why would I pay" mindset was deeply entrenched.

On February 12, 2020, Chen Chien-hung posted a number on Facebook: Anime Crazy's paying-subscriber ratio had broken 5.12%. He wrote: "The ephemerally beautiful flower has bloomed!"¹⁰

For him, this number represented more than revenue. It was an answer — delivered by users' paying behavior — to more than a decade's worth of asking whether ACG subculture could ever be taken seriously.

GNN: 26 Years, 300,000 Articles

GNN (Game News Network), the name modeled on CNN, published its first article on November 20, 2000 — a report on Phantasy Star Online.

On February 11, 2026, GNN reached the 300,000-article milestone. Of those, more than 48,000 were player contributions — 16% of the total.¹¹

Twenty-six years. Players writing for players.

Annual Meetups: The Offline Body of an Online Community

The annual "Site Meetup" (站聚) is not a marketing event — it is more like an annual ritual for meeting the people behind the usernames.

From the first one held at National Taiwan Normal University in 2000 — of the 247 members, who knows how many actually showed up — to the 27th anniversary meetup in 2023, which saw a record-high 247 booths and more than 10,000 people squeezing in.¹²

Something happened at that meetup: someone stole a special-edition Godzilla figure worth NT$5,500, and several other vendors had CDs and toys taken. Vendors filed a police report; investigators identified a suspect.¹³

This incident demonstrated one thing: the community is now large enough that a thief could believe they could blend in and disappear. That is scale.

Why This Is a Taiwan Story

Taiwan's ACG culture was for a long time viewed as frivolous — playing games, reading manga, watching anime was not serious work.

Bahamut's existence did something structural: it gave these people a place to come together, and that place itself was a declaration of cultural legitimacy. When the "Academic Otaku Symposium and Bahamut Thesis Award" began to be held annually in 2014; when university professors and graduate students started writing papers on ACG culture; when the Taiwan Creative Content Agency established a "Special TAICCA Award" — that thing once dismissed as "frivolous" was starting to be taken seriously.¹⁴

Not because it suddenly became "high culture." It is because it has always been there, and enough people care about it.

Further Reading

• Bahamut GNN Game News — Real-time ACG news, published since 2000
• Anime Crazy — Taiwan's domestic OTT, legally licensed Japanese anime streaming
• Chen Chien-hung (Sega) GNN Interview, 2011 — The founder's first-hand account of Bahamut's first 15 years
• Older than Facebook! Bahamut Turns 27 — Why Are Users Growing? (Business Next, 2023) — Vice CEO Chen Chien-jen on community management philosophy