History of video games/Platforms/Nuon

Development
VM Labs was cofounded in January 1995 by Richard Miller, the designer of the early laptop computer the Sinclair Z88.

Development of the Nuon started in 1995 as VM Labs Project-X. The system was also known as Merlin (No relation to the handheld game device of the same name). 5 of the 6 hardware design team members for the Nuon were former 3DO employees.

In around November 1997 VM Labs started to approach software developers, with $7,500 development systems being shipped in December 1997. Development environments were officially supported on Linux, Windows 95 and Windows NT, with MacOS having unofficial support.

Great effort was placed into naming the Nuon. 400 to 800 names were internally suggested over the course of a year in a half, including Active DVD, Actavid and Intervision. Ultimately the Nuon name was decided by the outside firm Lexicon, with Nuon being selected because it was under five characters and possessed consonant harmony. Interestingly there was an unrelated version of the Arcadia 2001 which was already named the Intervision, It is unclear if VM Labs was aware of this usage, though given they didn't pursue the name, it is somewhat of a moot point.

The Nuon became one of the first consoles to boast about using ray traced graphics in pre launch demos, though it is unclear if any released titles actually used real time ray tracing.

By 1999 Toshiba had publicly announced interest in the Nuon platform.

Launch
The first models of DVD players using Nuon were released in mid 2000 and sold for between $300 and $350. The company had hoped to attract non-traditional gamers to the platform.

Nuon games struggled in the market, with Nuon games often being accidentally placed in DVD sections in stores and less than 10,000 sales for Freefall 3050 A.D.

Five Nuon players were made by Samsung, two by RCA, and one by Toshiba.

The platform was discontinued in 2003.

Compute
"The Nuon was "interesting" to program on."

Uniquely for the time, the Nuon platform used four VLIW Media Processor Elements, full processing cores that all ran at 108MHz. Each processor element had four kilobytes of RAM. The system was advertised as being 128 bit and capable of performing 1.5 billion instructions a second (1500 MIPS). Third parties described performance as closer to 864 MIPS typically.

Despite the design of the system being intended easy to program, the poor performance of the system made developing ambitious titles difficult.

Notable games
Eight games were released for the Nuon platform while the system was on the market. In a strange turn of events, it was announced there would be a limited official re-release for Iron Soldier 3 for Nuon in 2021.

2000

 * Tempest 3000
 * Freefall 3050 A.D.

External Resources

 * Video Game Kraken - Nuon page.
 * Video Game Console Library - Nuon page.