Softstar's Twin Classics: That Afternoon You Cried at a DOS Window

In 1990, a group of college students hunted for technical manuals at Guanghua Market, shared a single computer, and produced the first Chinese-language martial arts RPG — Xuan-Yuan Sword. Five years later, a 26-year-old poured a broken heart into the ending of The Legend of Sword and Fairy, selling 10,000 copies on its first day. These two games were eventually called "Softstar's Twin Classics" — spanning thirty years, spawning TV dramas and films, with cumulative sales exceeding one million copies. In September 2024, Softstar sold both IPs for NT$500 million. But for an entire generation of players, that afternoon sitting in front of a DOS window and crying for the first time — that can't be sold.

The Boy at Guanghua Market

October 1990, Taipei. A game called Xuan-Yuan Sword appeared on software store shelves.

Its creator, Tsai Ming-hong, was still a student at the time. He gathered a few classmates and friends who were interested in games — "even the neighbor next door was recruited to help with development." This scrappy team eventually acquired a name: the DOMO Group.¹

It was an era when you had to figure out everything yourself. "Making a game meant trying and researching everything on your own — how to control a mouse, how to control the keyboard, how to handle resolution. You had to solve it all yourself." That's how Tsai described the development process. He would crouch at Guanghua Market hunting for technical references; the team shared a single computer. (From Mirror Media interview)²

Tsai's idea was simple: "Chinese culture has 5,000 years of great stories. If those could form the foundation of a game, it ought to draw players in more deeply." In an era when Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest dominated the RPG market, telling your own mythology in Chinese was itself a kind of manifesto.

Xuan-Yuan Sword's graphics were crude and controls clunky, but it was the first role-playing game ever built in a Chinese-language environment.³ One blade, forged from the stacks at Guanghua Market.

The One Who Put a Broken Heart into an Ending

Five years later, the second blade was drawn.

July 7, 1995. The Legend of Sword and Fairy launched in Taiwan: 320×200 resolution, 256-color display, 28 MB installation size. Its producer, Yao Zhuangxian, was 26 years old, leading the team at Softstar's "Rogue Creators" studio.⁴

Yao had begun imagining the world of Sword and Fairy as far back as 1991, while developing Super Monopoly 2. The initial concept was a historical wuxia set against the backdrop of the An-Shi Rebellion, but the script kept expanding, and after multiple revisions the historical setting was stripped away. What remained was something more dangerous: human nature.⁵

The game's ending sparked fierce internal arguments among the development team. Yao insisted that female lead Zhao Ling'er had to die. Planner Hsieh Tsung-hui and artist Lin Jia-wun both objected. In the end, Ling'er died in Li Xiaoyao's arms — all her tenderness and sacrifice reduced to ash after a single battle. This tragic ending became the most iconic moment in the entire Sword and Fairy series.⁶

Stories circulated online that Yao wrote the ending because he had just gone through a breakup. He later clarified multiple times that he was not heartbroken during development, but admitted that Zhao Ling'er was inspired by a female classmate who sat next to him in college.⁷ Whatever the truth, that ending struck millions of hearts.

First-day sales: 10,000 copies, sold out. Cumulative sales across all versions: over one million copies. In PC Software magazine's reader polls in China, Sword and Fairy occupied the top three positions for six consecutive years.⁸

Curator's Note
In 1995 Taiwan, Windows 95 had just launched and most household computers were still running DOS. In an era before Steam or YouTube livestreams, a game's reputation spread by a single mechanism: someone who'd played it telling someone who hadn't, "You have to play this." That's how Sword and Fairy spread.

Two Blades, Two Paths

Both Sword and Fairy and Xuan-Yuan Sword were forged at Softstar, but they took completely different roads.

Xuan-Yuan Sword took the historical route. Tsai Ming-hong's DOMO Group wove Chinese mythology and real history together. The 1999 entry Xuan-Yuan Sword III: Rift of the Sky moved the story to the Silk Road between the Tang Dynasty and Europe, sending players to control a Tang-dynasty youth traversing the Arab Empire all the way to the Frankish Kingdom. The 2000 spinoff Scar of Sky, set at the collapse of the Sui Dynasty and dawn of the Tang, became the highest-rated entry in the series.⁹

Xuan-Yuan Sword's most distinctive design was the "Demon Forging Cauldron." Beginning with Xuan-Yuan Sword II, players could capture defeated demons in a cauldron and refine them into items or new companions. The mechanism was rooted in the worldview of Investiture of the Gods and Classic of Mountains and Seas, embedding cultural foundations directly into game systems. In an era before Japanese RPGs had developed the concept of "capturing monsters" (predating Pokémon), the Cauldron was genuinely original.¹⁰

Sword and Fairy took the romance route. Yao Zhuangxian's Rogue Creators blended martial arts with love stories, and used a "tragedy for all" narrative to break the convention of RPG happy endings. What Yao wanted to write was the feeling of helplessness: the person you care about, you cannot save — no sword is strong enough to deflect fate's drift. This tone placed Sword and Fairy closer to a novel or a film than to a typical game within the Chinese-language gaming landscape.

Two blades, one shared belief: stories from the Chinese-speaking world deserve to be taken seriously.

Soundtracks: Things That Outlive the Visuals

Ask anyone who played the original Sword and Fairy what they remember most, and the answer is usually the music (the visuals having long since faded with the pixels).

Butterfly Love is one of the twelve original compositions from the game, played during the scene where the butterfly spirit Cai Yi sacrifices herself to save her husband Liu Jin-yuan. The track uses simple MIDI timbres, but the melody is so mournful that it multiplied the scene's emotional weight severalfold.¹¹

Thirty years later, in February 2026, original composer Lin Kun-hsin re-arranged Butterfly Love at a fan-organized New Year gathering. The audience was filled with adults in their thirties and forties, red-eyed.¹²

Xuan-Yuan Sword's soundtrack is equally classic. Rift of the Sky won Best Music at the 1999 Computer Player Magazine Game Awards — a moment when Taiwanese game music received formal recognition.¹³

A game's visuals become dated, its systems become obsolete — but its soundtrack doesn't. Thirty years later, the first four notes of Butterfly Love will pull your memory straight back to that afternoon in front of a DOS window.

From Screen to Living Room

In 2005, Sword and Fairy accomplished something unprecedented in Taiwanese gaming history: it became a TV drama.

Produced by Tang Ren Entertainment and directed by Lee Gwo-li, the Sword and Fairy television series cast a then-unknown Hu Ge as Li Xiaoyao and Crystal Liu as Zhao Ling'er. It aired on Chinese regional channels to an average viewership rating of 11.3%, and Hu Ge became a national idol overnight.¹⁴

The drama's impact far exceeded the gaming community. It directly catalyzed the explosion of the entire "xianxia drama" genre in China's TV market. For the following two decades, from The Journey of Flower to Love Between Fairy and Devil, every Chinese xianxia drama traces its lineage to the image of Hu Ge standing on the Fairy Spirit Island in 2005.¹⁵

Xuan-Yuan Sword also had its television adaptation. The 2012 drama Xuan-Yuan Sword: Scar of Sky starred Hu Ge and Liu Shi-shi, but received less critical acclaim than Sword and Fairy. Among all game-to-screen adaptations, Sword and Fairy stands as one of the rare success stories.

Did you know?
Hu Ge had almost no name recognition before filming the Sword and Fairy drama. He went on to become one of China's most acclaimed actors, starring in landmark productions such as Nirvana in Fire and The Disguiser. Yet among fans, his nickname remains "Li Xiaoyao."

September 2024: The NT$500 Million Farewell

September 11, 2024. Softstar Technology released a public announcement: the global IP of Xuan-Yuan Sword had been transferred to Huandong (Hong Kong) Technology Limited for US$10.45 million (approximately NT$300 million); the global IP (excluding mainland China) of The Legend of Sword and Fairy had been transferred to iDreamSky Group for RMB 18.3 million plus 38 million shares (approximately NT$200 million).¹⁶

Two blades. Five hundred million total.

Why sell? New general manager Chen Yao-tian was direct: "Sharpening a blade for 5 to 8 years without knowing if it will be usable" was no longer viable. Sword and Fairy 7, developed with Unreal Engine, sold over 500,000 copies — barely breaking even. Xuan-Yuan Sword 7, also built with a top-tier engine, was a critical and commercial failure on both counts. Softstar was investing over NT$100 million annually in R&D for both titles and bleeding continuously.¹⁷¹⁸

Tsai Ming-hong — father of Xuan-Yuan Sword and former general manager of Softstar — resigned and left the company where he had worked for over thirty years, shortly before the IP sale.¹⁹

When the news broke, discussion threads on Bahamut and PTT exploded. Some condemned Softstar for selling its heritage; others said it should have let go long ago. Most people simply posted a screenshot from the original Sword and Fairy with a single line: "Tears of an era." Chairman Tu Chun-guang published a thousand-word statement on Facebook explaining the decision — it was shared over 1,400 times.²⁰

What Was Left Behind

Softstar's Twin Classics' deepest legacy isn't in their sales figures or IP valuations. It's in something far less measurable: they taught an entire generation of players that Chinese can tell good stories.

Before Sword and Fairy, players in the Chinese-speaking world had two choices: play Japanese games (in translation or raw Japanese) or play Western games. "Telling a story in Chinese that can make you cry" sounds simple, but no one had done it before 1995. Sword and Fairy did it. Xuan-Yuan Sword, meanwhile, transformed history from exam material into an adventure.

Later, Red Candle Games made Detention, turning the White Terror period into a horror game; Rayark made Deemo, telling a wordless story through piano keys. The bloodlines of these works trace back to the genetic inheritance left by Softstar's Twin Classics: Taiwan can make games with souls.¹⁸

In February 2026, Lin Kun-hsin finished playing Butterfly Love at the New Year gathering. A man in a hoodie in the audience quietly wiped the corner of his eye. He was probably thirty-seven or thirty-eight. In 1995, he would have been around ten — just the right age to come home from school and turn on the computer.

That computer is long gone. That DOS window has been closed for thirty years. But that afternoon remains.

Further Reading

• Taiwan Gaming Industry and Digital Entertainment — The full panorama of Taiwanese gaming, from distribution to original development
• Taiwan's Open Source Spirit — Another story of making something far beyond one's scale through passion
• Into the Dungeon: Bahamut's Story — How Taiwan's gaming community grew from BBS to 6 million members, in the same era
• Taiwan Gamers' Wildest Moments — The collective frenzy Taiwan's gamers wrote after the Twin Classics era

References