Taiwan's online gathering places for gaming players have changed homes three times over thirty years. The "Dungeon" of the late 1990s was a black treasure trove filled with cheats; the "Gamebase" of 2000 was the first Chinese-language gaming portal; "Bahamut," which grew out of the National Central University BBS in 1996, saw its membership exceed 6 million by 2025, becoming one of the top five websites in Taiwan by traffic. These three names mark the migration route of Taiwan's gaming community from the dial-up era to the mobile era, and they record one thing: the life and death of a community depends on who is willing to stay, not on who arrives first.
The Black Treasure Trove Behind the 56K Modem
Late 1990s. Your home's 56K modem screeched for thirty seconds, and a black-background, white-text webpage slowly emerged. At the top of the page was a row of Chinese numerals in a counter, and below were dense links to game names.
This was the "Dungeon" (cellar.com.tw).1
No one remembers exactly who made the Dungeon or when it went live. It had no "About Us" page, no company registration, no founder interviews. It was just there, like a library without a street number, containing every walkthrough you needed.
The content of the Dungeon came almost entirely from user uploads. Complete flowcharts for The Legend of Sword and Fairy, password books for Age of Empires (how do you turn this on, Cobra Car), character stat builds for Diablo, and alchemy pot synthesis tables for Sword of the Xenia. A player recalled: "The rich walkthroughs and cheats inside covered almost every game I had played or was currently playing."2 According to PTT users, the Dungeon archived walkthroughs for 90% of the games on the Taiwan PC market.3
A slogan circulated among players: "No Dungeon, No Sleep; Once out of the Dungeon, Shock the Ten Sects."
For many, the Dungeon was the first website they ever visited—earlier than Yahoo, earlier than蕃薯藤 (Fonety), a black cave filled with game cheats.4
📝 Curator's Note
The Dungeon existed in a unique way: it had no community features, no forums, no membership system. It was purely a "warehouse"; players threw walkthroughs in, and other players took them. Before Web 2.0, this was the primitive form of online collaboration: anonymous goodwill, knowledge sharing without expectation of return.
Around 2005, the Dungeon suddenly became inaccessible. There were no announcements, no farewells; it disappeared quietly, just as it had appeared. Players beat their chests in frustration, but online games had already taken the stage, and the demand for single-player walkthroughs was shrinking. The Dungeon briefly revived in late 2008, causing a stir among old players, but the times had already changed.5
The Dungeon died for a simple reason: the world it served had vanished. As players migrated from single-player games to online games, the production method of walkthroughs shifted from "one person writing a complete article" to "real-time discussion in forums," rendering static walkthrough warehouses obsolete.
Gamebase: The Five-Year Throne
On November 16, 2000, "Gamebase" (Gamebase) went live. Behind it was Computer Player Culture, the parent company of Computer Player magazine.6
Completely different from the grassroots style of the Dungeon, Gamebase operated commercially from day one. Launching alongside the hype for Softstar's Heroes: Dark Earth Online, it skyrocketed in traffic thanks to its game discussion boards. In 2002, it was rated the "Number One Chinese Gaming Website," with membership exploding from 30,000 at launch to over 14 million.7
Gamebase got one thing right: it moved the professional content of "gaming magazines" online while adding forum functionality. In an era where broadband was just becoming popular and online games were just taking off, players needed a place to check new game info, find guilds, and complain about operators. Gamebase provided this venue.
But its throne lasted only about five years.
Around 2004, Gamebase underwent a redesign. The new interface had poor usability, frequent bugs, and the all-black design was criticized by players. More fatally, Gamebase was hacked, user data was leaked, and its foundation of trust was shaken.8 In 2007, Gamebase was acquired by its parent company, Citymedia, after which it gradually transformed from a "player community" into a "game news forwarding station," with forum activity continuing to decline.
Where did the players go? They went to a place that grew out of the National Central University BBS.
Chien-Hung Chen's Birthday Gift
On October 28, 1996, National Central University graduate student Chien-Hung Chen got something done: a BBS site dedicated to discussing video games, with all preparatory work completed. He decided to wait until November 10 (his birthday) to officially announce it.9
The site was named "Bahamut," taken from the dragon-like legendary creature in the Final Fantasy series. Chien-Hung's nickname was sega.
On the first day of launch, 247 people logged in.10
Chien-Hung's reason for setting up this site was simple: he was a hardcore gamer who found that game discussion boards were scattered across various university BBS sites, and finding a walkthrough for a game required flipping through several sites. He wanted a place to centralize all game discussions. So he personally wrote letters inviting game moderators from other sites to jump ship.11
In March 1997, Chien-Hung was invited to appear on the TV show Video Game Panorama, hosted by Pu Hsueh-liang. On the day the episode aired, Bahamut's login count surged to over 3,000. For a university dormitory BBS, this was an earthquake-level traffic spike.12
But Chien-Hung still had to study. During his graduate studies, he even blocked his own account to force himself to focus on his thesis. After graduation, he went to work at Yahoo, working as an office worker by day and continuing to manage Bahamut at night. He later described those days as "practicing skills by day, combat by night."13
From BBS to Company: The Earthquake of Ten Million
In March 2000, Chien-Hung brought in his cousin and two moderators; the four of them formally established a company. The capital was 10 million NTD, sourced from an air freight boss, a former vice president of Delta Electronics, and family elders.14
He deliberately delayed the announcement of the company's establishment until September 21. He knew the community's reaction would be huge: "It will definitely cause an earthquake."15 A free BBS turning into a company was equivalent to telling all the volunteer moderators "someone is making money here now." Indeed, once the announcement was made, waves of protest came crashing down.
Worse was the timing. When the company was established, the US Nasdaq had just crashed, and the internet bubble had burst. The initial 5 million in capital burned through quickly, and expenses 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 the native Web version forum "Hala District," removing the permission thresholds for creating boards and posting; anyone could participate directly. The style was set as "relaxed but not indulgent."17 The following year, Gamebase's redesign disaster and the hacker incident caused a mass exodus of players. In 2004, Bahamut's traffic surpassed Gamebase for the first time, with membership reaching 750,000. From that moment on, Bahamut never gave up the number one spot again.18
✦ The Dungeon died due to changing times, Gamebase died due to its own mistakes, and Bahamut survived all crises. The difference in these three endings boils down to one thing: who treated the community like a child to be raised, rather than a business to be managed.
The Dragon Thirty Years Later
In March 2025, Bahamut's membership exceeded 6 million.19
According to SimilarWeb data from December 2024, Bahamut is the 5th most trafficked website in Taiwan and ranks #1 in the gaming category. Daily Active Users (DAU) are approximately 1.5 million, with 25 million daily page views. Revenue in 2022 was approximately 300 million NTD.20
Bahamut's GNN has accumulated a vast amount of game news, with player submissions making up a significant proportion.21 This structure explains Bahamut's core logic: the main content is produced by the community, while the company is only responsible for maintaining the infrastructure.
The Hala boards (discussion forums) remain the heart of Bahamut. Almost every game with players in Taiwan has its own Hala board. Moderators are elected autonomously by players, and Bahamut's management team tries not to interfere with board affairs. Chien-Hung's insistence on "credibility" is simple: he always refuses game publishers' requests to delete posts and prohibits paid listings.22
Bahamut later grew anime streaming (anime streaming), Bahamut Mall, and an ACG database. It transformed from a gaming BBS into Taiwan's largest ACG (Anime, Comic, Game) comprehensive platform. But underneath, it is still an extension of that server in a National Central University dormitory in 1996: a place where players find each other.
💡 Did You Know
Chien-Hung started his business eight years before Facebook's Zuckerberg. Bahamut was founded in 1996, while Facebook didn't launch until 2004. A Taiwanese graduate student's gaming BBS understood "letting users produce their own content" earlier than the world's largest social platform.
Three Tombstones and a Dragon
The Dungeon, Gamebase, Bahamut. These three names occupy different positions in the memories of Taiwan's gaming players.
The Dungeon is childhood. That black-background webpage, that row of Chinese numeral counters, those walkthrough posts formatted in Word and pasted up. 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. The first time arguing with strangers on a forum, the first time joining a guild, the first time getting warned by a moderator. It was once the largest, but being the largest doesn't mean living the longest.
Bahamut is adulthood. It is imperfect; its interface design is still criticized as old-fashioned, there are occasional moderator controversies, and occasional questions about sponsored content. But it achieved something that no other Chinese gaming website has done in thirty years: it is still here.
In a 2013 interview, Chien-Hung was asked how he viewed the impact of Facebook on communities. His answer was candid: "Our reaction is really slow." (From an INSIDE interview)23 But slow does not mean losing. Bahamut's strategy is not to chase trends, but to guard its core users. When game groups on Facebook come and go, and Discord channels are built and scattered, the Hala board remains the same Hala board.
On some late night in 2026, a player is stuck on a certain level of a game. He opens Bahamut, finds a walkthrough from three years ago on the Hala board, and sees seven people below adding different solutions. He chooses the third one and clears the level.
Thirty years ago, he would have opened a black-background, white-text website, found an unsigned walkthrough, and then closed the screeching modem.
The method changed. The spirit of "someone put the answer here for you" did not.
Further Reading
- History of Taiwan's Online Community Migration — From BBS to Threads, the history of Taiwan people moving their community platforms
- Taiwan's Open Source Spirit — Another group of Taiwanese "powered by love"
- PTT Pttkick — Taiwan's longest-surviving BBS, a contemporary product of Bahamut
- Softstar's Twin Swords — The source of emotional enlightenment for Taiwan's single-player games in the same era
- The Crazy Moments of Taiwan Players — The collective frenzy of the Dungeon/Gamebase/Bahamut generation players
References
- Dungeon Official Website — cellar.com.tw, an early Taiwan game walkthrough distribution station↩
- Bahamut Creation: No Dungeon, No Sleep; Once out of the Dungeon, Shock the Ten Sects — Player recalls the functions and content of the Dungeon website↩
- PTT C_Chat Board: How Popular Was the Walkthrough Website 'Dungeon' Back Then — Netizens estimate it archived 90% of Taiwan PC game walkthroughs↩
- Bahamut Creation: No Dungeon, No Sleep — "The Dungeon was the first website I encountered"↩
- Bahamut Creation: The Dungeon Reopened! — The Dungeon's revival in December 2008 and player reactions↩
- Wikipedia: Gamebase — Launched November 16, 2000; founded by Computer Player Culture↩
- Wikipedia: Gamebase — Number one Chinese gaming website in 2002; membership grew from tens of thousands to tens of millions↩
- PTT C_Chat Board: How Did Gamebase Decline? — Failed redesign, hacker attacks, user exodus↩
- Wikipedia: Bahamut Game Information Station — Set up October 28, 1996; officially announced November 10↩
- Wikipedia: Bahamut Game Information Station — 247 users logged in on the first day of launch↩
- INSIDE: 16 Years of Hardcore Gaming Community, Interview with Bahamut's Segas — Chien-Hung personally wrote letters inviting moderators to jump ship↩
- Wikipedia: Bahamut Game Information Station — 1997 Video Game Panorama interview, 3,000 users logged in that day↩
- INSIDE: Interview with Bahamut's Segas — Worked at Yahoo by day, managed Bahamut by night↩
- INSIDE: Interview with Bahamut's Segas — Company established March 2000, 10 million capital, investor identities↩
- INSIDE: Interview with Bahamut's Segas — Chien-Hung's original words "It will definitely cause an earthquake"↩
- INSIDE: Interview with Bahamut's Segas — Nasdaq crash, 5 million burned, broke even in the second year↩
- INSIDE: Interview with Bahamut's Segas — Launched Hala District in 2003, "relaxed but not indulgent"↩
- INSIDE: Interview with Bahamut's Segas — 2004 "death cross," 750,000 members, surpassed Gamebase↩
- Bnext: Older Than Facebook! Bahamut is 27 Years Old, Why Are Users Increasing? — Membership exceeded 6 million in March 2025↩
- Bnext: Bahamut CEO Talks Starting from Gamebase Traffic War — SimilarWeb ranks 5th in Taiwan, 1.5 million DAU, 25 million daily page views↩
- Wikipedia: Bahamut Game Information Station — GNN reached 300,000 articles by February 2026, 48,000 player submissions↩
- INSIDE: Interview with Bahamut's Segas — Refuses all publisher requests to delete posts, prohibits paid listings↩
- INSIDE: Interview with Bahamut's Segas — Chien-Hung's original words "Our reaction is really slow"↩