Hudson Soft / NEC NEC TurboGrafx-16 / PC Engine

About

The NEC TurboGrafx-16 — known as the PC Engine in Japan — is the great forgotten console of the 16-bit era. In North America, it’s a footnote. In Japan, it was a genuine rival to the Famicom, the first console to offer a CD-ROM peripheral, and home to some of the era’s finest shoot-em-ups and platformers. The PC Engine’s dual identity — massive success in Japan, commercial obscurity in the West — makes it one of the most fascinating platforms in gaming history. NEC, one of Japan’s largest electronics corporations, partnered with game developer Hudson Soft to enter the console market. Hudson designed the custom chipset; NEC manufactured and marketed the hardware. The PC Engine launched in Japan on October 30, 1987 — making it the first major 16-bit era console (though its CPU was technically 8-bit; the GPU was 16-bit). Its compact form factor — roughly the size of a paperback book — was revolutionary in an era of bulky consoles. The North American launch as the TurboGrafx-16 on August 29, 1989 at $199.99 was poorly executed. NEC’s marketing was ineffective against Sega’s aggressive Genesis campaign and Nintendo’s established NES dominance. The console’s Japanese name (“PC Engine”) was abandoned for a clunky rebrand, and many of the PC Engine’s best Japanese games were never localized. The TurboGrafx-16 sold poorly in North America while the PC Engine thrived in Japan. The PC Engine CD-ROM² (1988) was the first CD-ROM peripheral for any console — predating the Sega CD by three years. It added 650 MB of storage, CD-quality audio, and enabled games with voice acting and cutscenes. The TurboDuo / PC Engine Duo (1991) combined the base console and CD-ROM into a single unit. Several hardware variants were produced, making the PC Engine family one of the most diverse in console history. The PC Engine used a Hudson Soft HuC6280 CPU at 7.16 MHz — a modified MOS 6502 variant, technically an 8-bit processor but running at roughly double the speed of the NES’s CPU. The HuC6270 V

References

• Video Game Console Library↗