The very first Gundam home console game was released in the height of Gundam-mania: A few years after the original TV series had wrapped up, approximately one year after the third and final compilation movie had hit theaters, but still a few years before Zeta Gundam (the second major TV series in the franchise) had begun. It debuted on a very unconventional piece of hardware for a Japanese game: The Bandai Arcadia. This was the variant of Emerson's Arcadia 2001 console that was manufactured by Bandai for the Japanese market (each country had its own version of the hardware, manufactured by a different company). The release date is believed to have been sometime in May 1983, and the retail price 3800 yen, though no official data seems to exist on either of these points. This was still a pre-Famicom market in Japan, and release dates weren't as carefully tracked.