PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16

The PC Engine's development story begins with one of gaming's most unusual corporate partnerships. Hudson Soft, a software developer known for Bomberman and Adventure Island, had no hardware manufacturing experience. NEC, a major electronics and computing conglomerate, had no presence in the gaming market. Together, they created a console that punched far above its corporate weight. The hardware was designed primarily by Hudson Soft's engineering team. Hudson's engineers were intimately familiar with the limitations of existing consoles from their experience as one of Nintendo's earliest and most prolific third-party developers. They designed the custom HuC6280 CPU and HuC6270 VDC chips to address specific frustrations they had encountered developing games for the Famicom. The result was a console optimized for fast, colorful 2D game rendering with minimal programming overhead. The decision to use HuCards ??credit card-sized ROM media ??was driven by both technical and practical considerations. The thin, flat format allowed the console itself to be extraordinarily compact. HuCards also had faster load times than standard cartridges due to their direct bus connection. Interestingly, the format was based on technology originally developed by Hudson Soft for a series of add-on HuCards for the Sharp X1 computer. The CD-ROM? add-on's development was championed by Hudson Soft president Takahashi Meijin (real name: Takahashi Toshiyuki), who recognized that CD-ROM was the future of game distribution well before the concept was mainstream. The CD-ROM? used a standard CD-ROM drive mechanism and added 64 KB of additional RAM and 64 KB of ADPCM buffer memory. The system cost ?57,300 in Japan, making the total PC Engine + CD-ROM setup a premium product. The creation of the TurboGrafx-16 for North America involved more than just localization. NEC Home Electronics formed an American division specifically to launch the product, but the marketing effort was plagued by organizational inexperience. NEC's corporate culture ??accustomed to selling business computers and telecommunications equipment ??clashed with the fast-paced, youth-targeted world of video game marketing. While Sega hired aggressive ad agencies and waged the 'Console Wars' with irreverent campaigns, NEC's TurboGrafx-16 advertising was comparatively restrained and uninspired. The PC Engine GT (TurboExpress in North America) was an ambitious portable version that could play standard HuCards on a built-in backlit color LCD. Released in 1990, it was arguably the most advanced handheld of its era ??a full-color, backlit portable that played the same game cards as the home console. However, its $249 price and terrible battery life (approximately 3 hours on 6 AA batteries) limited its market. The TurboExpress quietly foreshadowed the idea of home-portable gaming convergence that companies like Nintendo would later pursue with the Switch. Despite its relatively modest sales figures, the PC Engine's influence on the gaming industry was substantial. It proved that CD-ROM was viable for console gaming, established voice acting and CD-quality music as standard production values, and demonstrated that a non-traditional partnership between a software developer and an electronics manufacturer could produce competitive hardware.