VisualBoyAdvance was started in 2004 by Forgotten. However, after the first release, development of the emulator was handed over to the VBA team. After version 1.8 beta 3 in 2004, development of VBA stopped. Many independent developers continued to improve the emulator, but they had no form of unison in order to release the emulator in one place. Although the different versions were an improvement, more focus was needed in order to put all the different improvements from different developers in one piece of software.