Into the Cellar, or You Cannot Sleep: Thirty Years of Taiwan's Gaming Community

Taiwan's online gaming communities have moved house three times in thirty years. The late-1990s "Cellar" was a dark vault stuffed with cheat codes; the year-2000 "Gamebase" was the first Chinese-language gaming portal; and "Bahamut," grown from a National Central University BBS in 1996, would reach 6 million members by 2025 to become one of Taiwan's top-five websites by traffic. These three names mark the migration route of Taiwan's gaming community from dial-up to mobile — and document one truth: the life and death of a community depends on who is willing to stay, not on who arrived first.

The Black Vault Behind the 56K Modem

Late 1990s. Your household 56K modem screamed for thirty seconds, and a black-background, white-text page slowly materialized. At the top a row of Chinese-numeral hit counters; below, a dense grid of game-title links.

This was the Cellar (cellar.com.tw).¹

Nobody remembers exactly who built the Cellar or what year it launched. It had no "About Us" page, no company registration, no founder interview. It was simply there — like a library with no address, holding every walkthrough you needed.

The Cellar's content came almost entirely from user uploads. Complete illustrated walkthroughs for Sword and Fairy, cheat codes for Age of Empires (how do you turn this on, cobra car), character builds for Diablo, synthesis tables for Xuan-Yuan Sword's alchemy pot. One player recalled: "The walkthroughs and cheat codes inside covered almost every game I had ever played or was playing."² According to PTT estimates, the Cellar held walkthroughs for nine-tenths of all PC games sold in Taiwan.³

Players passed around a slogan: "Into the cellar or you cannot sleep; out of the cellar and the world is shaken."

For many people the Cellar was the first website they ever visited — before Yahoo, before Yam, a black cave crammed with game secrets.⁴

Curator's Note
The Cellar existed in a particular way: no community features, no forum, no membership system. It was purely a warehouse — players dropped walkthroughs in; other players came to take them. Before Web 2.0, this was the primitive form of online collaboration: anonymous goodwill, knowledge shared without expectation of return.

Around 2005, the Cellar suddenly went offline. No announcement, no farewell — as quiet a disappearance as its arrival. Online games had taken over; demand for single-player walkthroughs was shrinking. In December 2008, the Cellar briefly revived to a flurry of excitement from old players, but the era had changed.⁵

The Cellar died from a simple cause: the world it served had disappeared. When players migrated from single-player to online games, walkthrough production shifted from "one person writes a complete guide" to "real-time forum discussion," and the static walkthrough warehouse lost its reason to exist.

Gamebase: Five Years on the Throne

On November 16, 2000, Gamebase launched. Behind it was PC Gamer Magazine's parent company, Computer Gamer Culture Enterprises.⁶

Completely unlike the Cellar's grassroots style, Gamebase was commercial from day one. It rode the wave of Heroes of the Three Kingdoms Online, distributed by Softstar, and skyrocketed on discussion-board traffic. In 2002 it was rated "the number-one Chinese-language gaming website in the world," its membership exploding from 30,000 at launch to over 14 million.⁷

Gamebase did one thing right: it moved the professional content of a gaming magazine onto the internet and added forum features. In that era of newly widespread broadband and just-launched online games, players needed a place to check new game news, find guilds, and complain about operators. Gamebase provided that space.

But its throne lasted only about five years.

Around 2004, Gamebase underwent a redesign. The new interface was poor to use, riddled with bugs, and its all-black aesthetic was mocked by players. More critically, Gamebase was hit by hackers — user data leaked, and the trust foundation cracked.⁸ In 2007, Gamebase was acquired by its parent company Cite Media; thereafter it gradually transformed from a "player community" into a "gaming news relay station," with forum activity declining steadily.

Where did the players go when they left? To a place that had grown from a National Central University BBS.

Chen Jian-hong's Birthday Gift

On October 28, 1996, National Central University graduate student Chen Jian-hong had finished his preparations: a BBS station dedicated to video game discussion, all setup complete. He decided to wait until November 10 — his birthday — to announce it publicly.⁹

The station was named "Bahamut," after the dragon-form legendary creature in the Final Fantasy series. Chen Jian-hong's username was sega.

On opening day, 247 people logged in.¹⁰

Chen's reason for building the station was straightforward: he was a hardcore gamer who found game discussion scattered across every university's BBS — tracking down a walkthrough for a single game meant browsing multiple stations. He wanted one place that concentrated all game discussion. So he personally wrote to moderators at other stations inviting them to move over.¹¹

In March 1997, Chen was invited onto a TV program, Video Game Garden, hosted by Boo Shyue-liang. The day the episode aired, Bahamut's concurrent user count spiked to over 3,000. For a BBS running out of a university dormitory, this was an earthquake-level traffic surge.¹²

But Chen still had to finish school. During graduate school he even locked his own account to force himself to focus on his thesis. After graduating he took a job at Kimo (Yahoo Taiwan's predecessor), working as an office employee by day and continuing to run Bahamut by night. He later described that period as "training by day, real fights by night."¹³

From BBS to Company: The Ten-Million Earthquake

In March 2000, Chen Jian-hong brought in a cousin and two moderators; four people formally incorporated. Capital: NT$10 million, sourced from an air freight business owner, a former DELTA Electronics vice president, and family elders.¹⁴

He deliberately held the company announcement until September 21. He knew the community's reaction would be extreme: "It will definitely cause a major earthquake."¹⁵ A free BBS becoming a company meant telling all the volunteer moderators "someone is making money here now." Sure enough, when the announcement went out, waves of protest crashed in.

Worse still was the timing. The company launched just as the Nasdaq crashed and the dot-com bubble burst. The initial NT$5 million burned through fast; the operation only broke even by the end of the second year.¹⁶

Bahamut's turning point came from a competitor's mistake.

In November 2003, Bahamut launched its native Web forum section, "Hala" (哈啦區), eliminating permission requirements for creating boards and posting — anyone could participate directly. The tone was set as "relaxed but not unruly."¹⁷ The following year, Gamebase's redesign disaster and hacking incident drove a mass exodus of players. In 2004, Bahamut's traffic surpassed Gamebase for the first time, with membership reaching 750,000. From that moment, Bahamut never relinquished the top position.¹⁸

The Cellar died from the times changing. Gamebase died from its own mistakes. Bahamut survived every crisis. The difference in the three outcomes comes down to one thing: who treated the community as a child to raise rather than a business to manage.

The Dragon, Thirty Years Later

In March 2025, Bahamut's membership surpassed 6 million.¹⁹

Per SimilarWeb data from December 2024, Bahamut is Taiwan's 5th highest-traffic website and the #1 gaming site. Daily active users approximately 1.5 million; daily page views 25 million. 2022 revenue approximately NT$300 million.²⁰

Bahamut's GNN has accumulated a large volume of gaming news, with a notable proportion contributed by player submissions.²¹ This structure explains Bahamut's core logic: content is primarily produced by the community; the company only maintains the infrastructure.

The Hala boards (discussion sections) remain Bahamut's heart. Almost every game with any player base in Taiwan has its own Hala board. Moderators are elected through player self-governance; Bahamut's management team intervenes in board operations as little as possible. Chen Jian-hong's commitment to credibility is simple: requests from game companies to delete posts are always refused; vote manipulation is prohibited.²²

Bahamut later grew Anime Crazy (anime streaming), Bahamut Mall, and an ACG database. It evolved from a gaming BBS into Taiwan's largest ACG (Animation, Comics, Gaming) integrated platform. But at its core, it is still the extension of that server in a 1996 National Central University dormitory: a place where players find each other.

Did You Know
Chen Jian-hong started his venture eight years before Mark Zuckerberg. Bahamut was founded in 1996; Facebook did not launch until 2004. A Taiwanese graduate student's gaming BBS understood "letting users produce content" earlier than the world's largest social platform.

Three Tombstones and One Dragon

The Cellar. Gamebase. Bahamut. Three names occupy different positions in the memories of Taiwan's gaming players.

The Cellar is childhood. That black-background page, that row of Chinese-numeral counters, those walkthrough texts laid out in Word and pasted in. It belongs to a simpler era: no accounts, no comments, no community — just "I know the answer, I put it here, take it."

Gamebase is adolescence. First argument with a stranger on a forum, first guild application, first moderator warning. It was once the biggest — but biggest does not mean longest-lasting.

Bahamut is adulthood. It is imperfect. Its interface design is still criticized as dated. Occasionally there are moderator disputes, occasionally doubts about paid content. But it has accomplished one thing that no other Chinese-language gaming website has managed in thirty years: it is still here.

In a 2013 interview, when asked how he viewed Facebook's impact on online communities, Chen Jian-hong was frank: "We really did react very slowly." (From an INSIDE interview)²³ But slow does not mean losing. Bahamut's strategy was to not chase trends — hold the core users. As gaming groups on Facebook came and went, Discord channels were built and scattered, the Hala boards stayed the Hala boards.

Sometime in the deep night of 2026, a player is stuck on a level. They open Bahamut, search the Hala board, find a post from three years ago with seven people who added different solutions. They choose the third one. They pass.

Thirty years ago, they would have opened a black-on-white website, found an unsigned walkthrough, then closed that screaming modem.

The method changed. The spirit of "someone put the answer here for you" — that has not.

Further Reading

• Taiwan's Online Community Migration History — Taiwan's social platform move from BBS to Threads
• Taiwan's Open Source Spirit — Another group of Taiwanese "working for love"
• PTT BBS — Taiwan's longest-running BBS, a contemporary of Bahamut
• Softstar's Twin Swords — The emotional origin of Taiwan's single-player games in the same era
• Taiwanese Gamers' Wild Moments — The collective passions of the Cellar / Gamebase / Bahamut generation

References