

Players begin the game with a reloadable chamber of six bullets and a set number of lives. Played in a first-person perspective, players must use a light gun (or a joypad in the Sega Saturn version) to shoot criminals and advance through the game. Players assume the role of police officers - either Michael Hardy, or his partner, James Cools. Very few beta units of the N-Gage version were manufactured. In 2004, a port was developed for the handheld Nokia N-Gage, but was cancelled by the quality control team before its release. It included gallery extras and implementation of Namco's G-Con 2 lightgun support. The game was later bundled with Virtua Cop 2 in Japan and Europe on the PlayStation 2 as Virtua Cop: Elite Edition ( Virtua Cop Rebirth in Japan) on August 25 and Novemrespectively. Virtua Cop was followed by Virtua Cop 2 and Virtua Cop 3. It was influential on later shooter games, with 3D polygons being adopted by subsequent light gun shooters such as Time Crisis (1995) and The House of the Dead (1997) instead of the digitized sprites previously used in the genre, as well as inspiring the first-person shooter GoldenEye 007 (1997). Its name is derived from its 3D graphical style, which was previously used in Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter, and later Virtua Striker.ĭespite some initial skepticism over its introduction of 3D polygons in a genre that previously used realistic digitized sprites (most notably Lethal Enforcers), Virtua Cop went on to become a commercial success and received critical acclaim for enhancing the genre with its 3D graphics, camera system, realistic animations, and ability to target specific body parts with realistic consequences.

It was one of the first games to allow the player to shoot through glass. Emphasizing the real-time nature of the game, enemies would react differently depending on where they were shot. Virtua Cop was notable for its use of real-time 3D polygon graphics with texture mapping, with Sega advertising it as "the world's first texture mapped, polygon action game".

The Saturn version included support for both the Virtua Gun and Saturn mouse, as well as a new "Training Mode" which consists of a randomly generated shooting gallery.

It was originally an arcade game on the Sega Model 2 system, and was ported to the Sega Saturn in 1995 and Windows in 1996. Virtua Cop ( バーチャコップ, Bācha Koppu) (known as Virtua Squad for the North American Windows version) is a 1994 light gun shooter game developed by Sega AM2 and designed by Yu Suzuki.
