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| Founded | 1996 South Korea |
|---|---|
| Defunct | March 2007 |
| Fate | Closed, due tobankruptcy |
| Headquarters | South Korea |
Game Park (Korean: 게임파크) was a South Korean company that was founded in 1996 and went bankrupt in March 2007. It is responsible for creating theGP32 and the never-releasedXGP.GamePark Holdings was founded by former employees of Game Park in 2005.
Founded in 1996 inSouth Korea, Game Park entered the industry usinggovernment money.[1] At the time, games in Korea were only made forPCs andArcade. There was a law established after World War II that forbid importation ofJapaneseelectronics. Some clones of Japanese consoles such as theSega Saturn (cloned bySamsung) andNintendo 64 (cloned byHyundai) were holders of minor market shares. In a place where most games ran on thePC, a small place resided for video game consoles. To make changes, theSouth Korean government decided to fund a company that would create a console to compete against themonopolized 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.
TheGP32 (Game Park32-bit), their first system, was then being designed. Several iterations of it were developed, including ametallic look, and a style issued from the originalGame Boy design, and a flat panel with a screen on the upper part andbuttons on the lower part. Those systems were shown at the 2000Tokyo Game Show but failed to catch attention with their inferior hardware and games. After five years of development, Game Park opted for a moreplastic look, a lot like theGame Boy Advance. Game Park's new handheld also had a major internal hardware upgrade making it more powerful than theGBA.
TheGP32 originally launched in November 2001, inKorea exclusively. Game Park had opted for a narrow-area market approach so they could better handle the production costs. The result was small success in Korea.
Game Park did make an error: paying a large amount of money to portPlayStation games to their consoles. The porting was handled by Koreandevelopers which had never seen a PlayStation before because of its interdiction in Korea. It was very difficult for them to import games and it ended up that only one ported game was made,Princess Maker 2, a simulation so complicated it was never translated. One had to speak Japanese to play it well.
Initially, the GP32 launched with a 3.5 inch screen, 2 buttons, 2 shoulder buttons, 2 function buttons and 2 integrated speakers forstereo sound. It is almost physically the same as theGBA except for a bigger screen, higher-quality speakers and more ergonomic handling.
Though theGP32 was planned to be a gaming console, itsgame selection was not sufficient in quality or quantity to truly compete against theGame Boy Advance. One of its advantage was that in Korea noJapaneseelectronics were allowed[citation needed], theGame Boy Advance included. On January 1, 2002, however,Korea finally allowed imports of Japanese electronics. The system's success hinged on being anopen source handheld attractive to independentdevelopers and capable of supportingvideo andaudio playback.
The GP32 FLU, (Front Lit Unit) is a GP32 which has been modified to include afront light, much like theGame Boy Advance SP. The big difference, however, is that the GP32 FLU has exactly the same mold, buttons, etc. as the GP32, unlike the completely redesignedGame Boy Advance SP. This reduced the cost of the modification. This system was released in Korea exclusively again, in 2002.
The front light can be switched off to savebatterypower.
The GP32 BLU (standing for Back Lit Unit) was another iteration of theGP32 (the equivalent of the brighterGBA SP), again having nothing changed in appearance, except for a now back lit screen, much better than the FLU. The BLU gave players a very bright and colorful screen. This unit was introduced in 2004, and later that year they even released it inItaly,France,United Kingdom, andSpain.
A problem is that without the back light the screen looks very dark and it's hard to see the image, so the backlight must run continuously except when it's not necessary to look at the screen (for example, when using the console as an MP3 player).
The system has been subject to muchimportation, due largely to the fact theoperating system on it features bothKorean andEnglish support, even though it was exclusively sold in Korea for many years.
In 2003, the Game Park line still was not released in Europe or North America.
Team17, the developer ofWorms, offered to port their games directly on theGP32 for free. Although most companies demanded financial support, Team17 only asked for two GP32 units to test their games. Game Park refused, for currently unknown reasons.
In July 2003, GP32News, aFrench news web site for the GP32 took a personal initiative to show and publicize the GP32 at theJapan Expo inFrance. Game Park refused to fund the site, which would have helped give the GP32 a publicity boost.
At the Game Convention event inGermany in August, the GP32 was announced with a European launch for Holiday 2003. Numerous distributors, to sell the system, as well as the first editors of European games to start development were contacted.
The company in charge of distributing the GP32,Mitsui (a well-known company inJapan) abandoned Game Park for a bigger company,Sony. Mitsui then was in charge of distributing the SonyPSP in Europe, after having no communication from Game Park.
TheGP32 knew a small success in Europe.North America never saw the GP32. The GP32 was sold in the Americas through web stores but has become increasingly rare.
In early 2005, there was an internal disagreement in Game Park about where to take the company. Some former employees split off to formGamePark Holdings, which successfully released theGP2X handheld console in November 2005 and released theGP2X Wiz in April 2009.
In 2006, the original Game Park officially announced theXGP, the successor to their GP32. They also announced theXGP-Mini, a smaller version of the XGP with half theRAM. Later on, they announced theXGP-Kids, a redesign of the GP32, featuring the same hardware at a lower price for younger players.
None of these consoles were actually released, and in March 2007 Game Park filed for bankruptcy.[2] Gamepark's officialwebsite is currently unavailable and was previously replaced by a website for a shoe store before it was taken down
