Foundation
Founded in 1996 in South Korea, Game Park entered the industry using government money. At the time, games in Korea were only made for PCs and Arcade. There was a law established after World War II that forbid importation of Japanese electronics. Some clones of Japanese consoles such as the Sega Saturn (cloned by Samsung) and Nintendo 64 (cloned by Hyundai) were holders of minor market shares. In a place where most games ran on the PC, a small place resided for video game consoles. To make changes, the South Korean government decided to fund a company that would create a console to compete against the monopolized Japanese market. A contest was held and Game Park was the winning company. Game Park was set to create the first portable video game system from Korea.
The GP32 (Game Park 32-bit), their first system, was then being designed. Several iterations of it were developed, including a metallic look, and a style issued from the original Game Boy design, and a flat panel with a screen on the upper part and buttons on the lower part. Those systems were shown at the 2000 Tokyo Game Show but failed to catch attention with their inferior hardware and games. After five years of development, Game Park opted for a more plastic look, a lot like the Game Boy Advance. Game Park's new handheld also had a major internal hardware upgrade making it more powerful than the GBA.
Read more about this topic: Game Park
Famous quotes containing the word foundation:
“[The Settlement House] must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy which will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy.”
—Jane Addams (1860–1935)
“The institution of the family is decisive in determining not only if a person has the capacity to love another individual but in the larger social sense whether he is capable of loving his fellow men collectively. The whole of society rests on this foundation for stability, understanding and social peace.”
—Daniel Patrick Moynihan (20th century)
“The most excellent and divine counsel, the best and most profitable advertisement of all others, but the least practised, is to study and learn how to know ourselves. This is the foundation of wisdom and the highway to whatever is good.... God, Nature, the wise, the world, preach man, exhort him both by word and deed to the study of himself.”
—Pierre Charron (1541–1603)