New PC gaming cafe photographed in North Korea — rare pictures of 'Pyongyang PC bang' gaming above the 38th parallel

Images purportedly showing a newly opened public PC gaming space in North Korea have been shared on social media. Technology enthusiast Iniysa shared photographs of a “North Korean PC bang” on X. A ‘PC bang’ translates as basically a ‘PC room’ and the term comes from South Korea, where it is widely used to refer to an ‘internet café’ or ‘electronic café’ where gaming is the main activity. There are thousands of PC bangs in South Korea, and they form a major part of the youth culture below the 38^th parallel. However, they aren’t really a thing in the North, as you might expect.

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The contemporary commercial architecture of this new venue is typical of many higher-end developments I have seen in East Asia. If anything, it looks too premium for a place where gamers typically just want to go and sit in the dark, in front of an adequate eSports PC, for a low hourly rate.

A critical thinker might question whether this is a premium showcase venue designed to frame the idea that a modern, advanced gaming culture exists in North Korea. Actually, tech-Twitterer Iniysa reckons that the swish new PC bang is located in “a newly built city in Pyongyang, and only the top elites selected by the state, such as those recognized by Kim Jong-un and nuclear test scientists, are allowed to live there.”

Also, while one might expect North Korean PC gamers to live by Chinese tech hand-me-downs, Iniysa is openly surprised to see premium Asus ROG-branded gear at this Pyongyang PC bang.

Images of what appears to be the net café games UI are also somewhat eyebrow-raising. The machine translation of the grid-layout game launcher banner is ‘Mars Computer Arcade’, which we haven’t heard of before. However, it features many AAA and eSports titles that are popular on the other side of the DMZ.

Without much pixel peeping, we can see the iconic covers of games from franchises like FIFA, Battlefield, Call of Duty, Rainbow Six, Crysis, Far Cry, and others. Iniysa chirps up to suggest that, while these games may be accessible in the Pyongyang PC bang, they will most likely be restricted to local – probably internal – networks. Thus, the North Korean bamboo curtain persists, even in the gaming sphere.

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