The Epoch Cassette Vision (カセットビジョン, Kasetto Bijon?) was a video game console made by Epoch and released in Japan on July 30, 1981.
Despite the name, the console used cartridges, not cassettes, and it has the distinction of being the first successful programmable console video game system to be made in Japan. The system retailed for 13,500 yen, with games going for 4,000. It is believed, though not confirmed, that Sega and/or SNK made games for the Cassette Vision. Its graphics were less refined than the Atari 2600, and the only controls were four knobs (two to a player, one for horizontal movement, one for vertical) built into the console itself, along with two fire buttons to a player. Though the Cassette Vision was not a fantastic seller, it managed to spawn off a smaller, cheaper version called the Cassette Vision Jr. and a successor called the Super Cassette Vision. The latter was released in 1984, and was sold in Europe, with little success.
Except for their failed Game Pocket Computer handheld system, Epoch never had another system released.
Famous quotes containing the words epoch and/or vision:
“According to U.S. strategy, if you never see the other, his destruction will be more acceptable ... so that when Iraqi soldiers surrendered, sooner than expected, it was as if they emerged from a dream, a flash-back, a lost epoch—an epoch when the enemy still had a body and was still “like us.””
—Serge Daney (1944–1992)
“Thinking is seeing.... Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.”
—Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850)