History of video games/Platforms/Gakken Compact Vision TV Boy

Gakken Founding
Gakken was founded in April of 1946 to provided educational services during the post World War II reconstruction of Japan. Gakken began making educational electronic kits in the 1970's.

Launch


The Gakken Compact Vision TV Boy was released in Japan in October of 1983 for 8,800 yen.

Legacy
The Gakken Compact Vision TV Boy is mostly remembered for its unique design. This strange control scheme is both credited as a factor in the failure of the console, while simultaneously hailed as a bold design that has its own fans.

After the Compact Vision TV Boy, Gakken would not completely exit the gaming industry. It continued to manufacture 4-bit educational computers capable of extremely simple games in the 1980's. A new model in this 4-bit computer line, The Gakken GMC-4, was released as recently as 2009, which included several simple games game, and could be reprogrammed to play new games. Importers charged $39.95 for the GMC-4 system in 2009.

Technology
The 8-bit Motorola MC6801 Microcontroller is kept on the game cartridges. A Motorola MC 6847 video display generator and 2 kilobytes of RAM resides in the console. This approach gave the Gakken Compact TV Boy some of the advantages of systems that kept the computer in the cartridge, as well as the cost saving advantages of reusing hardware between games.

Game library

 * Frogger
 * Urban War Year 200X
 * Super Cobra
 * Robotan Wars
 * Mr. Bomb

Excite Invader
Excite Invader was a 1983 game inspired by Space Invaders, and considered to be among the best for the system. The name of this game is sometimes listed as "Excite Invaders".

External Resources

 * Video Game Kraken - Gakken Compact Vision TV Boy page.