Snail Shell helped invent a genre on the Chinese side. Founded in Zhengzhou in September 2019 as Snail Shell Culture Media, it was among the earliest studios in China to chase the original machine-girl, mecha-musume action figures of its own design, and it climbed fast into the front rank of domestic makers working that niche. The RPG Series is one of its signature lines, articulated 1/12 mecha girls built around a fantasy role-playing theme of classes and adventurers, the figures arriving ready-assembled and heavily poseable rather than as kits, a finished counterpart to the build-it-yourself wave the genre grew out of.