If you had worked at NEC/Hudson or T.T.I. back in the day...

[Retrocool]

1: Macross 2036
2: Sapphire
3: Spriggan
4: Spriggan 2
5: Double Dragon 2
6: Ys IV
7: Dragon Slayer 2
8: Gotzeindiener
9: Snatcher
10: War of the Dead

Working Design
Cosmic Fantasty 3,4, 4-2
and
Any of the Neo Geo ports they promised....

[2X4]

I know.

Oopsy doo

[Shrapnoid]

Nice. Interesting choices. I should have chose some of those for my list.

Good idea, BigusSchmuck. They could've maybe called it something like "SuperGrafx Twin" or "Ultra Grafx" or something.

I feel for you, Black Tiger. It must've been painful to be ignored like that.

Let this be a lesson to console developers. LISTEN to your fans. We KNOW what we want.

[SignOfZeta]

Mortal Kombat

Hudson was offered an exclusive on Mortal Kombat, but they declined because "americans are tired of fighting games"...

This situation was heavily discussed in another thread. After looking at the dates of things and considering the financial realities of the time (exclusives aren't free) I think we basically decided it would have been money down the drain. A lot of money. If they had dumped money into this idea...those last few TG games, Godzilla, etc? They never would have come out because TTI would have gone under by then.

Anyway, if I were running TTI back when they existed I would have lobbied heavily for the following games.

Street Fighter II' - This one really is a no brainer, more so than anything.

Dracula X - The number 2 no brainer, by a hair.

Macross 2036 - Hell, %90 of all American Duo owners already knew about this game and wanted it pretty bad. The same people tended to be Robotech nerds as well.

Bomberman '94 - I f*cking love this game.

Nexzer - we never got another "high end" shooter (i.e.: with cinema and such) after GoT/LoT, did we?

Cosmic Fantasy 3 - All my friends wanted this.

Ys IV - The sequel to everyone's favorite TG-16 game* never came out here. Bummer.

Kaze Kiri - This late in the game anything that wasn't a RPG or digital comic deserved attention, but even that aside, this thing is a lot of fun.

Rabio Lepus Special

Snatcher


BTW, these are not "ports" since the TG and PCE are the exact same system. They are merely localizations/translations/reprints. TTI didn't have the money to go making/porting things. That's crazy.

*Ys III never happened.

[TheClash603]

Mortal Kombat

Hudson was offered an exclusive on Mortal Kombat, but they declined because "americans are tired of fighting games"...

This situation was heavily discussed in another thread. After looking at the dates of things and considering the financial realities of the time (exclusives aren't free) I think we basically decided it would have been money down the drain. A lot of money. If they had dumped money into this idea...those last few TG games, Godzilla, etc? They never would have come out because TTI would have gone under by then.

I think that this is still the coolest "what if" scenario.  By the time MK was coming home, the system was already on the way out, as it was obviously not going to win the "console war."  Instead of going out with a whimper that not many people notice, why not at least make a splash?

Best case scenario, MK sells a ton of systems, prompting other publishers such as EA to get some games out on the system.  Worst case scenario the game doesn't recoup its investment, and the TG16 dies anyway.

The hype of MK can't be denied back in the day.  This is when I begged my parents for a Genesis and got one, and I had ZERO interest in a SNES.  I needed my MK with the blood code, and I wasn't the only one.  Mortal Monday is considered by many to be the tipping point, which put Sega firmly on the same ground as Nintendo.

Perhaps the TG16 had zero chance of catching up to those guys, even with MK.  However, maybe they could become relevant, perhaps to the point of being the only company to release MK2 on their stateside Super Grafx?  I know it is far fetched, but there really was a ton of hype and purchasing mania around MK, I honestly think anything would've been possible if they got the sole rights.

[SignOfZeta]

What if they lost money on every copy sold? They only had about $125.67 in the bank at that time. Would it be worth it then? For Mortal f*cking Kombat 1? This isn't Street Fighter II we are talking about, a game so f*cking great people still play it all over the world in huge tournaments. It's Mortal Kombat 1.

Not worth it. Maybe from a perspective of "coolness" I could see it being worth tanking the entire company if it were some other game (Tengai Makyo II) but MK really really sucks. I wouldn't trade it for the last year of TTI games, that's for sure.

Regarding the Super Duo. A neat idea, but it makes zero sense for anyone with access to a calendar. The SGX was dead within the same year it came out, well before the Super CD format. Duos were invented to make playing Super CDs cheaper and easier. They came out later still. All the "Super" stuff in the Super Duo would have been added just to play 5 three year old games in a dead format? Makes no sense...

[jayamine]

Yeah, but considering the commercial success of Mortal Kombat, it might have been just what they needed. I don't care for the series either though ...

Funny, I remember calling TTI's customer service in (failing memory) March of 94 maybe and asking them if they were bringing Ys 4. I'll never forget what the lady said.

"Well, they gave us 1-3. Maybe we'll get that one too." Even as a kid I could tell she didn't know what she was talking about.

Post Script: What's hilarious is that now Mortal Kombat banners are popping up on the advertising at the bottom of this page  (at least for me). Stupid "smart" ad engines ...

[Black Tiger]

Mortal Kombat would have had less animation than the Game Gear version. I don't know if that would have sold systems.

Regarding the Super Duo. A neat idea, but it makes zero sense for anyone with access to a calendar. The SGX was dead within the same year it came out, well before the Super CD format. Duos were invented to make playing Super CDs cheaper and easier. They came out later still. All the "Super" stuff in the Super Duo would have been added just to play 5 three year old games in a dead format? Makes no sense...

The success of the PC Engine without SuperGrafx capabilities proves that it didn't need it. But the idea behind them having included SGX hardware in the Duo was that more games using SGX hardware would have been made (and on CD) and any given Super CD game could have had hardware layered bg scrolling and zero flicker. Even if only some games were bi-compatible and even if they only did what Darius Plus does, it would still eliminate flicker in games like Forgotten Worlds.

It's an idea that would be neat for us in hindsight if it could have been pulled off without losing any of the library that we actually got, if it means we could have new games or new features in games that exist. In reality, it would have increased hardware costs on hardware which already cost more than the competition and was unnecessary for the PCE to compete.

[soop]

If I had a time machine, the FIRST thing I would have done is find the guy that decided to change the classic look of the PC Engine to the monstrosity of the TG-16 and slapped him fired him before he made the decision.

After that... Porting Street Fighter II is a no brainer.  Then I would be releasing subsequent consoles with a 6 button pad bundled.  And Bomberman '94, I'd release that.  Then I'd make a few other hindsight-assisted choices so that the TG-16 would actually be pretty level with Sega and Nintendo about the time of Mortal Kombat, and we'd have that exclusive, even though, as usual I concur with Zeta that the game is a turd compared with SFII.

Now I'm gonna start a thread about multitaps.

[arromdee]

For questions like this I always wonder if the answer should be "what would we want as fans", "what would make the most money for the company", or "what could they realistically do?"  It's easy to say "port Street Fighter II", but the property is owned by Capcom and TTI would have to license it or convince Capcom to make it themselves.  Macross is even worse with respect to licensing; there's no chance they could untangle the Macross rights situation that is a problem to this day (We *still* don't have the DYRL movie on DVD because of this).  Dracula X is also a license; Castlevania is not owned by TTI.

Furthermore, they're competing with Nintendo, who likes to force companies into exclusivity contracts.

They might have been able to put out Ys IV or Cosmic Fantasy 3, but RPGs weren't as big then as they were after Final Fantasy 7.

Also, they would have had to drastically reduce the price of the system.  It was far too expensive.

[DesmondThe3rd]

If I were NEC back then I would have hired better artists to do their box covers, I wouldn't censor games like Splatterhouse and JJ & Jeff too much so that certain scenes don't any sense, I wouldn't call that game we got the real Legendary Axe 2, and most importantly I would added a second controller port on the Turbo especially if you're going to increase the size of the original PC Engine for no reason.
Also I wish we got Castlevania X, Neo Nectaris, Shinibunman3, Out Run, Ninja Gaiden, Gradius too.

[SignOfZeta]

Oh yeah. The art. For sure. That was hardly a problem unique to NEC back then, but WHAT THE f*ck was with some of that stuff? It's not like "good art" hadn't been invented by 1990 or something.

[guyjin]

What if they lost money on every copy sold? They only had about $125.67 in the bank at that time. Would it be worth it then? For Mortal f*cking Kombat 1? This isn't Street Fighter II we are talking about, a game so f*cking great people still play it all over the world in huge tournaments. It's Mortal Kombat 1.

I think you're being a little unfair to MK. To my group of friends back then, at least, MK was a pretty big deal. Big enough that we were jealous of our few friends who had a Genesis because they got blood and accurate fatalities in their version. Turbo having MK as an exclusive would have moved quite a few systems. Maybe even enough to turn the Turbo into a break-even, rather than a loss.

More interestingly, what would a turbo-exclusive MK have done with the games rating systems? As it was, Nintendo used the opportunity to slander Sega - I'm sure NEC/Hudson, being even smaller fry, would have been positively stomped on. Would NEC/Hudson/TTi have had to come up with their own ratings system, or submit to the ESRB (or GRC?) Then again, there's no such thing as bad publicity.

Mortal Kombat would have had less animation than the Game Gear version. I don't know if that would have sold systems.

What makes you say that? It's not that different from SFII, and we know the PCE could pull that off.

Incidentally, are we assuming this would have been a hucard/turbochip, or a CD/SCD?

[Black Tiger]

What if they lost money on every copy sold? They only had about $125.67 in the bank at that time. Would it be worth it then? For Mortal f*cking Kombat 1? This isn't Street Fighter II we are talking about, a game so f*cking great people still play it all over the world in huge tournaments. It's Mortal Kombat 1.

I think you're being a little unfair to MK. To my group of friends back then, at least, MK was a pretty big deal. Big enough that we were jealous of our few friends who had a Genesis because they got blood and accurate fatalities in their version. Turbo having MK as an exclusive would have moved quite a few systems. Maybe even enough to turn the Turbo into a break-even, rather than a loss.

More interestingly, what would a turbo-exclusive MK have done with the games rating systems? As it was, Nintendo used the opportunity to slander Sega - I'm sure NEC/Hudson, being even smaller fry, would have been positively stomped on. Would NEC/Hudson/TTi have had to come up with their own ratings system, or submit to the ESRB (or GRC?) Then again, there's no such thing as bad publicity.

Mortal Kombat would have had less animation than the Game Gear version. I don't know if that would have sold systems.

What makes you say that? It's not that different from SFII, and we know the PCE could pull that off.

Incidentally, are we assuming this would have been a hucard/turbochip, or a CD/SCD?

Part of the rumor/story that goes along with the offer was that it was to be a CD2 game.

NEC in Japan pulled off an adequate port of a console-optimized port of SFII and the high profile of of the game justified the development of the expensiive size-limit-surpassing hardware, which was never used again for any other game. I don't think that pride would have allowed any decent Japanese deveopers touch the game. Which leaves Probe or whoever to do the Sega-CD version with 1/12 the space and less audio hardware and zero knowledge of the TG-16 hardware.

[SignOfZeta]

Yeah, the Sega CD version was bad enough...it loads whenever Shang Tsun morphs.