This is a great link. Thanks so much for posting it.
The company they are talking about has to be NEC, just by the description. Another reason why I find it easy to believe is that some time ago, possibly 10 years ago or more, I read a post here (or maybe on the Mailing List, can't remember) by an American super collector living in Japan. I think it must have been George Palamara aka: GeoPal, but I can't remember. It could have also been Chris Barker...maybe?
Anyway, the basic gist of what he said was that some magazine (I think it was a "real", non-gaming mag or paper) wanted to know about NEC's console involvement and when they went to the company they had f*cking nothing, so somehow they knew about George/Chris and sent the reporter to his puny apartment to check out his collection. NEC had nothing, and he had almost everything. That was ages ago, so I'd be surprised if anyone at NEC knows jack about PC Engine. Also, consider the fact that NEC's creative contributions to the PC Engine are fairly small compared to Hudson's, and what NEC did create basically sucked (ie: the PCFX, the SGX, and a million stupid boosters and shit). I can see why they wouldn't be that proud of it.
This preservation thing is a serious concern, IMO. When movies were a new thing, they were also considered tacky disposable entertainment. Because of this its estimated that %85-90 of all movies from the silent era are lost forever. This is...incredibly depressing, IMO. And they aren't all gone because celluloid rots. Some of them are literally just...lost. No one knows WTF happened to them. Many many many of them were destroyed in wars. Towards the end of WWII the allies main strategy was basically a giant carpet bombing campaign that just obliterated the f*ck out of the occupied countries, the lost works of art are uncountable. Sometimes, some dick tater burns your shit out of ideological spite.
With newer games we are lucky because they can often be copied digitally, perfectly, and easily backed up and stored anywhere/everywhere. Its not always that easy with the old stuff though. A Pong machine, for example, has no CPU or RAM. You can't just get a ROM, and even when you can get a ROM, its not always easy to figure out WTF to do with it. Fixing a broken Duo because the caps leaked is trivial compared to trying to resurrect a much more scarce arcade board who's caps or backup battery has leaked all over the PCB and destroyed long out of production proprietary chips. The world needs a master copy of Osman!
Topic: No video game archive for NEC? (Read 277 times)
