South Korea has long been a major center of PC gaming culture, and what helped launch Korean players into the mainstream was a relentless pursuit of competitive games — all fueled by numerous gaming cafes called “PC bang” in Korean.
These cafes offered top-of-the-line equipment at modest hourly rates to allow young Korean players to dedicate their non-study time into video games; and the savvy PC gaming cafes in Seoul started offering more than just chips, sodas, and candies. They began serving some of the same food that young Korean players were going to small restaurants called bunsikjip for, like kimchi fried rice, spicy rice cakes, and of course, instant ramen — definitely not the kind of food I found when I went to PC bangs nearby LA’s Koreatown in the late ’90s.
In this episode of K-Town, I visit one of Seoul’s most popular PC gaming cafes and order a bunch of snacks straight from my computer; everything from cheese ramen to corn dogs gets delivered to my tiny desk as I fight my way through a game of Overwatch.
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