soyo
WEplayWE Creator
- 28 November 2007
The most realistic game released in PES history - WE9LE
Legacy and it’s history
I had this idea for a while, to write down (so that it won’t get lost) what I remember, but never really got an impulse to do it. Well I decided to finaly stress my memory and do it because I think this game deserves it for the road it took to where we’re now. This is simply a written testimony of we9le legacy, based on my memories, as well as some reaserch I did to substiantiate (remember) the right order and dates of those. If I made a mistake somewhere down the line, I appologise as it was unintentional. If someone would like to correct me, please do so. I will welcome anybody who either does that, or maybe adds something more that I didn’t write down here, that is in relation with we9le history. Also one sidenote, I will write this from weplaywe perspective, but I know russian scene also have their large group (pes5-club) that plays we9le till this moment. Kudos to them for that.
Looking at this document, it really brings tear to my eye how far we’ve come, against all odds (how small this game was in terms of being known). It is really a big sentiment for me, when I remember the days in 2006. I would like to thank upfront everyone who contributed to the we9le franchise, and kept this game alive for so long, either mentioned here explicitely, or not.
I hope I won't be boring anybody here, and someone finds this story interesting. Our story starts with the typical KONAMI cycle back in those days. (some dates might be off couple of days, this is due to stores errors, or some releases being shown that are specified to the particular country of release)
Upfront we must ofcourse point out, that the main contribution towards WE9LE is that of the KONAMI, as they made the game (duh). Nothing from below could have been accomplished if KONAMI (and Seabass) did not work out this amazing game, through all their PES5 iterations. So thanks KONAMI!
2005 August (Aug 02-04 2005) – First iteration of PES 5 is being released in Japan for PS2, under the name (Wonder, Wonder) World Soccer: Winning Eleven 9 (1)(2)
2005 October/November – PES5, improved japanian WE9 is being released mostly in Europe (1)(4)
2005 Novemeber – J. League Winning Eleven 9 Asia Championship, 3rd iteration of the PES5 series (5)
2005 December – K. League Winning Eleven 9 Asia Championship (6)
2006 February (7/8 Febr) – Winning Eleven 9 International is being released, 4th iterarion of PES5 series (1)(7)
Let me pause here for a second, because we need to mention some confussion in the online dates being shown on PC version. If you look on the web on play asia, or amazon or ign o rany other site, most (or all) of them will show a release dates for PS2 and XBOX version as beginning of February, while suprisingly they will show PC release date being in april, or even may (for some of them). This is not a true release date of the PC version of we9i. When I first saw those release dates today I was very suprised because I remember very well those days of PES5 series, and I already was playing this game(we9i on PC) way before april/may. So I did a little more digging, and shifted from looking at the release dates on the online sites, to looking for testimony of actual gamers. I’m sure we would find more of these, but the single soccergaming thread should suffice:
http://www.soccergaming.com/forums/showthread.php?t=130249
Basicaly what happened was, KONAMI release the WE9i in february for all platforms (so PS2, XBOX and PC), but both Americas got it delayed (like always) and received it only couple months later. As you see though, one guy bought the game already on 7th february on a PC(he’s from Singapoure though), which shows the actual release date of PC version, which corresponds to PS2 and XBOX one. Also, one person reported the official press release dates from konami website:
In conclusion and what you must remember is, yes the american market got the we9i after we9le release date, but it’s only because KONAMI holded the release of we9i (4th iteration) from february, for couple months.
2006 March (6 march) – Last, 5th itteration of PES5 series is being released exclusively on Korean market under the name of WE9LE – Winning Eleven 9 Liveware Evolution
2006 March/April – Word gets out at italian pro evolution forum about a hidden gem (we9le); Now I cannot find this thread, I did run into it couple years ago and I wish I had it bookmarked, but I didn’t; but the first place where this game was discovered (outside of Korea) was one of the italian forums about pes
2006 May – 2 months after the korean premiere, the word about WE9LE gets out to english speaking gamers with Energia posting about we9le on soccergaming.com:
http://www.soccergaming.com/forums/showthread.php?t=131912
Initaly the game was only possible to be played in korean, as the English Patch by Energia or K-Patch was not done yet at this point. So people had to „Guess” where is what on the screens, based on their pes5/we9 memory.
2006 May - Energia releases the first ever WE9LE Patch targetting solely the translation of Korean texts to English.
http://www.soccergaming.com/forums/showpost.php?p=2052082&postcount=12
Energia said:
2006 May - The word is spreading. maciek_ssi (manner) a known polish pes scene member begin his quest to educate the polish PES scene about the new king of PES - WE9LE with his post informing about Energia English Patch.
http://issonline.pl/?cmd=pokaz&id=1147123538
(One funny fact for you) maciek_ssi, is the person thanks to whom the work done by lyjsym spreaded very effectively to everybody in the world at those days. Why is that, will have to remain a secret
, but it's not hard to guess.maciek_ssi is also a creator of some of the pes tutorials, including we9le ones.
2006 May (end of may) – lyjsym, a known patcher at that time, converts his great xbox k-patch for we9 to we9le, that was used by WE9LE players all around the world for years to come:
Our story breaks here for a long time (till 2009). That’s indeed is a long time and you probably wonder what happened. Well, the thing was, as much as briliant WE9LE was, and how big shocker it was for pes5 scene, and for those who knew about it, we9le was not being able to be played online unless you:
1) Were living in Korea having a korean ID
2) Had original WE9LE game, that was only being sold in Korea (and how hard it was to get it from outside of Korea I documented in one of my threads, which basicaly took me around 5 years to get one single copy – and even if I got one back in 2006 I would still not be able to play it due to restrictions of online gaming in Korea)
While if you wanted to play PES5 you could easily do so on KONAMI official servers (as long as you had genuine copy of PES5), since it was being sold internationaly.
How important online gaming was at the time, could easily tell you pes6 gamers. PES6 basicaly trumped the pes5, not because it was more realistic (it was quite opposite, KONAMI made it very arcade in comparison to pes5), but because the first servers that allowed to play pes6 in „educational way” came before pes5 ones, and when pes5 servers arrived it was too late for pes5 to catch up, even though it was a more realistic game of the two (much more – my opinion).
Well, for pes5 online gaming it was well and good for a while, until a big news came out from KONAMI in february 2007 (I guess to many still played pes5, and not pes6
)Well, I don’t have to tell you, some gamers got really pissed, because they still played pes5 and preffered it, and not pes6. KONAMI needed to get some quick buck I guess, so here goes the closing of pes5 servers.
2009 February – legendary team TurkMania/reddwarf with assistance of _anderson (testing) start working on GoalServer5 that will allow to play online in pes5 outside of KONAMI pes5 servers.
2009 September (29th of September) – GoalServer5 is ready for public, and allows to play pes5 online either through goalservers own server, or by creating a custom server with the help of Hamachi network and GS5 hosting ability.
2010 April (7th April) – TurkMania/reddwarf finish work on WE9LE version of GoalServer, making WE9LE for the first time in its history, able to be played online outside of Korea!!!
http://www.evo-web.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=53880
http://www.evo-league.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4710
2010 June – humble author of this thread, upon finding out that we9le is finaly able to be played online thanks to GoalServer team, and because goalserver site is no longer operating, has an idea for an international group to preserve we9le legacy that will gather, 5 years after it’s premiere, English speaking we9le gamers who still play this game, and would like to play it online using GoalServer and Hamachi; The goal – get 10 people
First message?
2010/2011 – legendary team juce(creator of kitserver) and reddwarf make their own separate fiveserver application, which improves on GoalServer ability. The biggest difference is no need for Hamachi middleware anymore! That translates into the abbility to just running the game, going to Network mode, and connecting to the server automaticaly.
2010 July – PES5-club team releases their great PES5-Club Online Patch v0.0 for WE9LE that also (aside rosters/stats/kitserver graphics) has the abbility to be played online using their own FiveServer
http://pes5-club.pesgame.net/forum/showthread.php?t=5
2011 January (13th January 0:11 am
) – due to Hamachi groups limitation (limit of 16 people per group) humble author of this thread creates the facebook page and moves the Hamachi group over there.https://www.facebook.com/groups/146803765372899/
2011 March – Official name of the group is being created – we’re now called WEplayWE
2011 April (28th April) – due to oversize of facebook group, Prz3m3k, the first HeadAdmin creates a weplaywe.pl forum.
In this place, because I think it's appropriate, I want to thank, thank, thank both juce and reddwarf for their availability and help at that time, with my/our problems with setting online hosting services, with both GoalServer(first) and FiveServer(later). Thanks guys, you rock.
Now some people from what I saw on the web for couple of years, were speaking of "polish group WEplayWE", due to the domain being registered in poland (.PL). That is incorect. This is an international forum (which really was moved from facebook international page), and it's main language is english. The reason the domain has ".PL" at the end, is because the initiative came from Prz3m3k (a Pole), and myself when we moved the facebook group to the external forum. So that's the only reason. We could easily made the domain called weplaywe.com, but we wanted to leave a little bit of polish background there (don't call us vain please
), because we knew the site will be all in english and international, to begin with.2011 September (6th September) – reddwarf releases a great camera zoom tool for we9le on weplaywe website:
http://weplaywe.pl/viewtopic.php?t=212
2012 November – Viktoristus, the HeadChief of WEplayWE Patching team, releases with the help of couple other people(including geezer), his first WEplayWE patch for the 2012-13 season based on Football Manager stats using his unique xml converter:
http://forums.evo-web.co.uk/showthread.php?t=69762
2013 August – WEplayWE Server is moved to the machine of angelzbl0od, the new and second HeadAdmin, who will be hosting the server (and also his WEplayWE FTP) from now on.
2013 October - Still up and kicking
That’s pretty much it
, but who knows what new stories tomorrow will come for we9le franchise No matter the size of active users in our group, the site will stay as long as we’re around. Just like Brock once said:
I’d like to again thank from this place everybody who put even the smallest contribution to we9le franchinse since the release of this game back in 2006, and also to people who financed the domain cost and thanks to whom the site is still present after 2 years since it’s creation (Hektor, Brock, renato1976 and bugger93 who paid domain cost for the whole 2013/2014 year). People like that just prove, that this game did not achieve it’s legendary status without a reason, and I cannot be proud enough for that.
Big thanks to we9le patch creators. Kristian826, Viktoristus, the russian scene for creating their pes5-club patch, and couple others who also did their part. Ofcourse we can’t forget the person who released first patch that translated the korean text and who educated the english speaking gamers about this fantastic hidden gem - Energia, and also lyjsym's K-Patch, upon which all we9le patches base, and which was the patch we9le gamers used for many, many years after we9le' release.
Lastly, we must always remember about the legendary trio:
TurkMania - A person who never gave up on the idea of playing we9le online, and who achieved it(along with reddwarf) when they released their GoalServer hosting application back in 2010
juce - contribution through his kitserver (quickly adapted his kitserver to the Korean edition revised and corrected of PES5/WE9), that helped the moding of we9le possible, and also the co-creator of FiveServer, the currently used WE9LE hosting online server at WEplayWE.pl
reddwarf - co-creator of both GoalServer and FiveServer, without which the we9le would be long dead (no, it isn't dead
)cheers
Luk
(1) http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro_Evolution_Soccer_(serie)
(2) http://www.play-asia.com/winning-eleven-9-paOS-13-49-en-70-3dqe.html
(3) http://www.play-asia.com/winning-eleven-9-liveware-evolution-paOS-13-49-en-70-19lu.html
(4) http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/world-soccer-winning-eleven-9/release-info
(5) http://www.play-asia.com/j-league-winning-eleven-9-asia-championship-paOS-13-49-en-70-yuy.html
(6) http://www.play-asia.com/k-league-winning-eleven-9-asia-championship-paOS-13-49-en-70-13qp.html
(7) http://www.play-asia.com/winning-eleven-9-paOS-13-49-en-70-156a.html
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) Also, there was no fouls being called anymore
