Turbografx16 - A Look Back

[Shazam!]

I love this console, it's one of my favorite retro systems and have one still. I know many don't know about it. Some never even probably heard of it. Some have heard of it but never seen it because it didn't gain the foothold it should have. For those who are interested in a forgotten piece of gaming lore, here's a look back at the history of a console that was the talk of the gaming world and was to take the US by storm... but failed miserably. Hard for me to believe this was 20 years ago last month. Happy birthday Turbografx, I still love you!
___________________________________________

20 Years of Turbo Power
NEC's TurboGrafx-16 has one more year left until its drinking age. Find out why its influence far outreaches its sales success in America.
By Kevin Gifford
1UP

http://media.1up.com/media?id=3743754&type=lg

Imagine this: We're right in the middle of a console generation, with one company dominating the market and another one lagging behind. Suddenly, out of the blue, a brand-new outfit appears with a brand-new console, packed with crazy unique features and playing host to all kinds of new and original games from previously unknown developers. People deride the console for being too expensive and far-out at first, but in a few years' time, most of the positive things introduced with that console are considered standard in all videogames.

What am I talking about here? The images around this text probably spoiled it for you, but pretend they weren't here for a moment. It sounds a lot like what Microsoft did, introducing the Xbox in 2001 and trying to compete with Sony and Nintendo, no? But a very similar upheaval happened in the console scene way back in the late 1980s -- and while the TurboGrafx-16's battle against the Super NES and Sega's Genesis 20 years ago is all but forgotten, the standards it helped to set in Japan largely helped to define videogaming as we know it today.

http://media.1up.com/media?id=3743776&type=lg
Turbografx 16 w/CD attachment

Flash back to 1987 for a moment. Nintendo has an iron grip on the game console marketplace in Japan and America, although it wouldn't achieve behemoth status in the US for another year or so. The NES (Famicom in Japan) was king, and Nintendo took full advantage of that position to browbeat its third parties senseless, limiting the number of games they could release per year and even forcing them to sign contracts that forbade them from developing for rival platforms. It was very much the same sort of place that Wal-Mart enjoys today in general retail: If you, a fledgling game developer, wanted to release a NES game, you had to play by Nintendo's all-controlling rules, or you could take a hike.

One company saw an opportunity in this...or, actually, two. Hudson Soft, a large Japanese software company based on the northern island of Hokkaido, launched a top-secret internal project in 1985 to design a possible successor to the Famicom in Japan. Hudson's largely known here for their bippy platformers (and, more recently, their mobile and iPhone game publishing), but they were also a computer development powerhouse in the 1980s, creating the operating systems for several Japanese computers and coding the software that drove the NES's Japan-only keyboard attachment.

The chipset for this console project was manufactured by Epson and was first displayed to the public in July 1987. At the same time, NEC Home Electronics, the consumer division of Japanese computer giant NEC, was searching for a game console. Most of their expertise was in business computing and household appliances, and while they didn't have any experience in the game biz, they certainly had the enthusiasm -- and the money -- to try challenging Nintendo at their own industry.

NEC wound up using Hudson's console chipset verbatim for the PC Engine, but the monolithic manufacturer had another order for the system: It must have a CD-ROM attachment, something that Hudson had prepared for at an early stage. "NEC Home Electronics was adamant on the point of selling a game system that would eventually have a CD-ROM drive," explained Toshio Tabeta, former hardware and software developer for NEC, in a 2003 interview. "Hudson was there at just the right time to develop the main system and provide the knowledge we needed to finish it, so it wound up being something of a tandem project."

Thus was born the PC Engine, renamed the TurboGrafx-16 for its US launch in the summer of 1989. A demure white box in Japan turned sleek black rectangle for America, the TG-16 made good on NEC's promise of a NES-beating experience. It was the first system of the post-NES era, and in contrast to Nintendo's toy company approach to their 8-bit console, NEC's US division made the TG-16 look sleek, modern, and ready for the '90s. Nowhere was this better represented than with the HuCard, the tiny plastic chips (just a bit thicker than a credit card) that housed the system's games. Compared to the NES's enormous cartridges -- which, for the majority of games, are half empty space inside -- HuCards looked like they came straight from the year 2000, figuratively speaking. It was many a gamer, no doubt, who thought "How did they get all those graphics into this thing?"

http://media.1up.com/media?id=3743735&type=lg
The US version of the PC Engine (the Turbografx 16) made its debut on the cover of VideoGames & Computer Entertainment in mid-1989.

The hardware itself was no terrible slouch, either. The TG-16 used the same 6502-inspired base as the NES for its CPU, but ran it at up to 7.16 MHz, four times faster than its competition. As opposed to the NES's unwieldy palette (only 56 distinguishable colors and no very useful shade of yellow), the TG-16 had 512 colors to choose from, with up to 482 displayable onscreen at once -- a number that trounced the Genesis's 64 simultaneous colors, even though that system was a year younger than the Turbo. One of the NES's biggest development headaches was its strict sprite limitations; movable elements could only be 8x8 pixels, and programmers could only display eight of them on a horizontal line before coming face-to-face with flickering ugliness. Meanwhile, flicker was the least of your problems on the TG-16 -- sprites could be any size from 16x16 to 32x64 pixels, letting you span the entire screen with them without breaking a sweat.

The result was that the Turbo was one of the easiest consoles ever to program for, free of the idiosyncrasies and weird workarounds that coders had to deal with for both the NES and its successor. "If you had a basic knowledge of 6502 assembly language, you could get something up and running onscreen after a couple hours," said Hiromasa Iwasaki, a game journalist and programmer who worked on several TG-16 titles, including Ys Books I & II. "There was no need to memorize any exceptions or special tricks, because as long as you weren't trying anything too impossible, they didn't exist." The only real complaint from developers: the TG-16's cramped work RAM, which clocked in at only 8K compared to the Genesis's 64K and the SNES's 128K.

From Game & Watch to Wii, Nintendo's videogame hardware has been designed around a common philosophy: Be original, be creative, but be affordable. It's a somewhat famous story among Japanese industry circles that ex-Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi allowed the Famicom's hardware designers to do anything they wanted, so long as he could make a profit off their final design at the price point of 14,800 yen (about $100 in 1982 dollars). To Nintendo, games -- and making money -- always came hand-in-hand.

NEC was not Nintendo. They were a computer company down to the core, and their philosophy was to pursue state-of-the-art hardware and software, emphasis on hardware, at all costs. Selling a consumer console with Hudson was no doubt an alien experience to them, and it shows in the TurboGrafx-16's early software library -- or lack thereof.

The TG-16 launched in America for $199, packed in with Keith Courage in Alpha Zones and one controller. A mediocre anime license in Japan, Keith failed to become much of a marquee name for NEC in America -- even VideoGames & Computer Entertainment, the magazine that campaigned for the Turbo harder than any other US media outlet, couldn't say much more about it besides "It should appeal to most game players." NEC, being a hardware company, simply didn't have the development prowess of Nintendo or Sega; they didn't have a single internal development studio until Tabeta helped establish NEC Avenue in 1987. Instead, they relied heavily on Hudson for the first year or so, with results that were occasionally brilliant and, in the case of JJ & Jeff, occasionally just weird.

The real showpieces of the early Turbo era lay in the rest of NEC's launch lineup. VIctor's Legendary Axe is a side-scrolling platformer that was the first TG-16 game to show off the system's eye-catching palette to the hilt. Naxat Soft's Alien Crush, a pinball sim straight out of the twisted world of H.R. Giger, spawned several brilliant sequels and a recent Hudson-bankrolled WiiWare remake. R-Type, a perfect port of one of arcade-dom's most memorable shooters, was the PC Engine's first "killer app" and a testament to what Hudson's talented coders could do with the hardware when they wanted. The system had a curious lack of RPGs at launch, despite how popular the genre was in Japan; for the US debut, Turbo owners had no choice but Dungeon Explorer, a fun but dated-looking action RPG.

(cont'd)

[Shazam!]

Most of the buzz surrounding the TG-16's American launch, however, focused around the TurboCD unit, awkwardly called the CD-ROM² System (pronounced "CD-ROM-ROM System") in Japan. CD-ROM drives -- to be more exact, DVD-ROM drives -- are a standard part of any modern PC, but two decades ago, it was luxury high-end technology mainly used in reference libraries. "At the time, trying to get CD-ROM into the living rooms of the general public was an extremely uphill battle," Tabeta noted. "It cost upwards of 250,000 yen [ed. note: about $2000 in 1987 dollars] to connect a CD-ROM to a personal computer around that time. So the fact that we launched the [PC Engine] CD-ROM in December of 1988, at a price nearly one-fifth what the computer companies charged, was nothing short of amazing."

It was an achievement, no doubt about that, but the sticker shock was still palpable. The TurboCD cost $399 in America upon its 1989 launch, twice the price of the console itself and way more than anyone was paying for NES hardware by that point. This, combined with a lack of interesting CD-ROM games (in Japan, the system launched with lame arcade port Fighting Street and even lamer dating sim No-Ri-Ko), meant that HuCards were the preferred medium for developers for both the TG-16 and the PC Engine's early years.

http://media.1up.com/media?id=3743773&type=lg
TurboPlay, a small, subscription-only bimonthly mag, was the closest thing the Turbo had to its very own Nintendo Power.

Things didn't change appreciably until 1990, when Hudson released Iwasaki's Ys Books I & II in America. This was the game NEC was waiting for -- a showcase piece for the TurboCD, something that immediately captured the minds of gamers whenever they visited a (rich) friend's house to check it out. The action RPG's visuals provided one of the first examples of a truly modern, cinematic graphic package in a console game, with everything from voiced cut-scenes and CD-quality music to an opening sequence that still gets recalled with fond, far-viewing eyes by however many tens of thousands of people that bought the thing in America. Originally two separate titles on Japanese PCs, Ys left an enormous impression on the Turbo's history and helped open developers' eyes to the amazing possibilities this new media offered.

Still, TurboCD adopters were nothing if not patient. It took nearly a year after the accessory's launch for gamers to enjoy a full library of titles, from the Cosmic Fantasy series to experimental adventures like JB Harold Murder Club. Ultimately, however, it wasn't until 1992 -- and the launch of the TurboDuo and Super System Card -- that CD-ROM became the de-facto standard format for Turbo games. The new and improved Duo had 256KB of work RAM, four times the original TurboCD -- a seemingly small upgrade that wound up changing the platform's games irrevocably. The extra RAM allowed shooters and arcade ports to be far more faithful to the original than before, gave original games (such as the highly celebrated Gate of Thunder) an amazing visual look that easily held its own against the Genesis and SNES, and -- in Japan, anyway -- took the "girl game" genre to new heights.

http://media.1up.com/media?id=3743777&type=lg
Bonk, a bald cartoon caveman that attacked by bashing his head into things, was the TurboGrafx-16's "mascot" back when such things were important.

In Japan, the PC Engine was a fair to middling success, beating the Genesis in market share and selling through a good 7 million consoles between all the different hardware variations NEC released over the years. The power infused in the system's hardware in 1987 proved surprisingly resilient, allowing it to host a notorious 1993 port of Street Fighter II Champion Edition that rivaled the SNES and Genesis versions in authenticity. Several world-renowned classics, such as Taito's Super Darius and Konami's Dracula X: Rondo of Blood, were available only as PC Engine imports, and the final original PCE game wasn't released in Japan until 1999. (There was also the PC-FX, NEC's abortive successor to the PC Engine, but that's an episode that I think everyone involved would like to forget.)

Meanwhile, the TurboGrafx-16 found some mild success in America after its 1989 launch, but was all but doomed in the long run. Only the most hardcore of gamers bought it, appreciating its mix of hardcore shooters and Working Designs-localized Japanese RPGs. The problem was partly one of price and partly due to a lack of standout titles -- NEC had trouble convincing wary Japanese third parties to sell their wares overseas, and support from American software studios was all but nonexistent. There was one final push in 1992 -- when TG-16 sales were spun off to California-based Turbo Technologies Inc., a joint venture between NEC and Hudson Soft -- but by then it was far too late to have a chance. The Turbo was officially discontinued in 1993, and TTI's old stock was eventually sold to mail-order retailer Turbo Zone Direct, which continued supporting the system before finally closing down in late 2007. In the end, approximately 2.5 million Turbos were sold in America, a far cry from the 14 million Genesis units Sega shifted.

Why did the TurboGrafx-16 fail in the US? Several reasons:

- Poor Marketing Decisions. Like with many American branch offices of Japanese game outfits, all the decisions were made by the head office in Tokyo, leaving the US directors powerless. "In 1992, TTI was offered an exclusive on Mortal Kombat," claimed TTI sales director and Turbo Zone Direct founder Steve Garwood in a 2001 interview. "But this one particular software guru in Japan said 'I think Americans are tired of fighting games.' Need I say more?"

- Lack of Interesting Games. NEC was stymied by Nintendo's iron grip when they launched the Turbo; their avoiding the Turbo meant less must-buy games for users, and the resulting lack of userbase made it even harder to attract developer interest in later years. Street Fighter II was one of many PC Engine games seen as being too expensive to launch Stateside for NEC; the list also includes classics like Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys, Neo Nectaris, Spriggan, and more.

http://media.1up.com/media?id=3743733&type=lg
By the time the TurboDuo was released, NEC didn't have much of an option besides throwing in a ton of free software with each console.

- Lack of Advertising. In the US, NEC produced semiconductors, signal processors, supercomputers, high-end technology. The TurboGrafx-16 was their first major consumer launch in the region, and the company simply didn't have the funding (or the interest) to play with the big boys. "In Japan, you can buy advertising time in three TV markets and you've covered 90% of the country," said Garwood. "In the US, if you've bought three markets, you've barely scratched the surface. The decision-makers were appalled at the cost of the type of advertising necessary to introduce the TurboDuo to the US. Sega and Nintendo outspent us 10-to-1 in TV ads in 1992. What we had left was guerrilla marketing, and that may be why to this day, there is an intense following for this platform."

- It came out near-simultaneously with the Genesis. The PC Engine had a year-long head start over the Genesis in Japan; in the US, the Genesis actually beat the Turbo to market by a couple weeks. That year-long grace period in Japan allowed the PCE to develop its brand -- it gave them time for PCE-specific game magazines to launch, for an extensive game library to fall in place, for a userbase to form. By the time the Genesis hit Japan, the PCE already had a firm reputation among hardcore fans for great arcade ports and other hardcore titles. Meanwhile, in America, Sega captured that exact same audience before NEC realized anything was amiss.

So why celebrate the Turbo's 20th birthday? Why remember the system as anything besides a funny Japanese gadget that bombed before it had a chance to establish itself worldwide? Because while the system only saw success in Japan, the innovations it brought to gaming was unlike anything else in the industry. That starts, of course, with the CD-ROM format, which was arguably years ahead of its time. It wasn't until the Saturn and PlayStation in 1995 that the disc became the default game format for a system, but the fact that Turbo users were enjoying fully-voiced games with orchestral-quality music in 1989 is often overlooked and incalculably important. "If it weren't for the existence of the PCE CD-ROM," said Tabeta, "I think it would have taken another year or so for the format to get fully adopted worldwide."

NEC's obsession with the state-of-the-art didn't end there. The system was first to offer a "mutitap" that optionally let up to five players enjoy the system at once. It was the first to let gamers store save data externally, separate from the games themselves. It was the first to come out in a fully compatible portable model, the TurboExpress. It was the first Japanese system, and the first one after the 1984 crash, that offered backward compatibility in later models. (If you really wanted to push it, you could say that all the girl-games released for it triggered the "moe" boom that took otaku-dom by storm a decade later. But let's keep things civil here.)

That's where the comparison to the Xbox comes in. Both NEC and Microsoft had small internal groups trying to build a world-beating console despite no previous experience in the field. Both the Xbox and Turbo are packed with new, revolutionary features and a level of power never seen before in the market. Both had their setbacks -- NEC's tendency to release tons of hardware for no good reason, Microsoft's original, massive Xbox controller -- but both have left indelible marks on the industry. Who knows? If NEC had the money and the tenacity of Microsoft, I might be talking about them in the present tense right now.