Feature

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.

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.