Turbo Duo...What went wrong?

[Black Tiger]

The PCE had no "killer apps" in Japan. What it had was a very diverse library of B grade titles. Unfortunately Americans in the days before FFVII were still very reluctant to read in a video game, and also had not developed the lolicon scene enough to appreciate most of these titles. Example: try selling one of those shitty WWII or Arab killer fps games to people in Saudi Arabia. They just won't want it. Another factor is that the PCE started out strong, but the popularity trickled down as the games got more otaku-based and the hardware improved. In the US the TG-16 was never successful, so asking people to pay more for a derivative of a 3/4 year old machine that nobody gave a shit about to begin with...wasn't going to work. All of those B grade RPGs and sims in Japan worked with each other to solidify a very devoted fan base. The audience got smaller, but it also became way more hardcore. We didn't have that here.[/quote]

The PCE had killer apps, but not so many games that would be killer apps for Western players.

As for price...at the risk of conflicting with several hard core fans' reality distortion field, the Duo wasn't worth the money to most people. Bonk is not as technically impressive as Sonic the Hedgehog. The same can be said for Ys versus Chrono Trigger, Final Lap Twin versus Super Mario Kart, or Neutopia versus Zelda: A Link to the Past. Don't get me wrong, I actually did buy a US Duo in 1992. I loved it. I mainly bought it for the Japanese imports that none of my friends were interested in.

Unless you're only twenty years old and don't remember what it was like at the time, the Duo was a great value because it was also a CD player. Even by the time the Duo launched, I only knew of a few people my age who had any kind of CD player. Even when the CDX came out, I bought one immediately because it was the same price as the average discman.

Your game comparisons are funny though, just like that discussion on a French forum when someone compared a screen shot from Bonk's Adventure to one of the DKC sequels. Without commenting of FLT vs SMK, the Turbo games you mentioned are still technically superior in some ways to the games you comparedthem to. Just as they are not technically superior in others. Game mags started the trend of selective appreciation and so many people to this day are completely blind to various aspects in the favor of Turbo games. They just pick out anything that could favor either SNES or Genesis and ignore the rest.

The Duo was never anything like that. You show people the opening for Kabuki Den and they go "wow!". Then they see the game actually begin and they say, "Um...is this a NES? Why is the sprite so f*cking small?" Lords to Thunder blew people's minds, but Ninja Spirit...did not.

Again, it sounds like you're unfamiliar with the 16-bit generation. Kabukiden was a FF style TM RPG. Those small sprites are better colored versions of SNES FF game sprites. FFIV and FFV are hard to distinquish from FFIII for Famicom. The main difference is the background art in battles. Pretty much every aspect of the aesthetics of FFIV/V was improved upon in Kabukiden, such as variety in background art, enemy animation, characters actually moving around in battles like FFVII, voice acting and animated portaits synced to those tiny sprites for all the FF style "cinematics" and so much more. It really makes SNES RPGs feel almost a generation behind. Even FFVII - FFIX lack voice acting and if I remember corretly, portaits.

I love the PCE because its like a NES, but with no flicker, way more color, and endless storage capacity. The Duo was the ultimate 8 bit system, but that's all it was. I love it specifically because of that, but most people don't. People who had been playing Comic Zone, F Zero, Mortal Kombat, etc were not impressed by Exile or Parasol Stars. And its not just the big time games, its the small stuff as well. Wild Guns...Wild Guns is really beautiful. I'm sure somebody can show me an bunch of screen shots and write out some tpechnical stuff about how Wild Guns could easily be done better on TG16, but it doesn't change the fact that it wasn't. Neither was FFVI (or FFIV, for that matter), Out of this World, Yoshi's Island, Virtua Racing, Phantasy Star IV, etc etc. I know you guys don't care about that stuff. That's why we are here. I know the SNES is "gay" or whatever, but that's irrelevant. What matters is that people won't pay twice as much for a system that appears to be half as powerful. They think Wonder Boy is f*cking SHIT.

The CDROM was amazingly underutilized. It might as well have been a 1TD HD since you can only hold one microscopic portion of whats on the CD in memory at any given time and then play songs of the CD, usually really bad songs.

I just don't see how there is any way the Duo could have succeeded in 1992. American's simply weren't into that.


* Shove it up your ass, 3DO fans. Nobody wants your garage sale piece of shit system. The controller sucks and the library is terrible.

Can't comment further right now, but the SNES is more of a glorified NES than the PCE, with most games feature sparse and tiny sprites and often slowdown. Even hackers were able to faithfully reproduse Super Mario World on NES, but Hudson ported Bonk to NES themselves and it barely runs.

[SamIAm]

Can't comment further right now, but the SNES is more of a glorified NES than the PCE, with most games feature sparse and tiny sprites and often slowdown. Even hackers were able to faithfully reproduse Super Mario World on NES, but Hudson ported Bonk to NES themselves and it barely runs.

"Faithfully" is being a bit generous, don't you think? In motion, this obviously is very different than the real McCoy.
vs.

And while we're on the subject, here's Bonk:
vs.

[GohanX]

I'll toss in a couple points from my perspective.
For the majority of gamers in the US (and, let's face it, the parents that funded them) a $300 console crossed the line.

From my point of view as someone who grew up at this time and loved video games, I agree. $200 was absolutely the upper limit for a video game system then, as a Christmas present (my ONLY Christmas present, mind you) so anything priced higher than that was out of reach. It didn't matter that the Duo packed in a bunch of awesome games, and to buy a SNES and the equivalent games would have cost more than $300. It didn't matter that the Duo was a complete system for the same price as the Sega CD add on. It also didn't matter that it had a CD Rom drive, and thus was a great deal for the money considering PC CD drives were often $300 by themselves. I knew all of this, but it didn't matter since it was simply too expensive for my parents to buy.

It was mentioned that the Playstation came out a few years later at $299.99, that was also out of reach and I think it was $149.99 before I got one for Christmas. This didn't really bother me, as a friend that was a few years older than me purchased a Saturn and we rented games for it every weekend.

[BigT]

I'll toss in a couple points from my perspective.
For the majority of gamers in the US (and, let's face it, the parents that funded them) a $300 console crossed the line.

From my point of view as someone who grew up at this time and loved video games, I agree. $200 was absolutely the upper limit for a video game system then, as a Christmas present (my ONLY Christmas present, mind you) so anything priced higher than that was out of reach. It didn't matter that the Duo packed in a bunch of awesome games, and to buy a SNES and the equivalent games would have cost more than $300. It didn't matter that the Duo was a complete system for the same price as the Sega CD add on. It also didn't matter that it had a CD Rom drive, and thus was a great deal for the money considering PC CD drives were often $300 by themselves. I knew all of this, but it didn't matter since it was simply too expensive for my parents to buy.

It was mentioned that the Playstation came out a few years later at $299.99, that was also out of reach and I think it was $149.99 before I got one for Christmas. This didn't really bother me, as a friend that was a few years older than me purchased a Saturn and we rented games for it every weekend.

I agree.  I'm not 100% sure what the logic was behind the Turbo Duo marketing strategy.  Though, judging by the ads, they seemed to position themselves against the Sega CD.

To get more developer support, they needed more market penetration.  I still think that price would have been the only way to do that.  The Duo was based on a mature design that used an in-house processor, relatively little RAM/ROM, and an in-house CD-ROM.  It was not as overly-complex and costly as the Sega CD design.  I don't think that they would have lost much money pricing the Duo at $199 or $249 (max).  By that time, I assume that they had pretty good yields on their chips and had cranked up CD-ROM production.  Of course, ideally, they would have also been more aggressive with pricing of the TurboCD earlier, to get some reasonable sales... by the time the Duo came out, they should have bundled the rest of their Turbo CD inventory with system 3 cards and GOT and sold them from ~$99-$149 to provide a nice upgrade path to current TG16 users.  Time and time again it has been proven that the way to make money on consoles is via software sales.

I grew up in a large market in the LA area and a lot of my friends had TG16s.  There were some early adopters like me and some other picked up TG16s when their price went down to ~$69 or so... however, I didn't know anyone who bought the CD attachment and only one person who got a duo as they cost too much for our middle class families to justify buying them for their young kids... I tried with my parents and failed miserably...  Most of us ended up getting an SNES instead.

[kazekirifx]

From my point of view as someone who grew up at this time and loved video games, I agree. $200 was absolutely the upper limit for a video game system then, as a Christmas present (my ONLY Christmas present, mind you) so anything priced higher than that was out of reach.

No offense, but the problem is that you weren't in TTi's target audience for the system. They wanted people who could afford a $300 system and plenty of $50 games on top of that. Me, I just barely managed to afford one with long-term allowance saving + Xmas money, and after I had the system I was buying new games for it so slowly with what little money I had that I doubt TTi really made much of a profit off me.

Unless you're only twenty years old and don't remember what it was like at the time, the Duo was a great value because it was also a CD player. Even by the time the Duo launched, I only knew of a few people my age who had any kind of CD player. Even when the CDX came out, I bought one immediately because it was the same price as the average discman.

This is exactly correct. CD players were expensive back then, and if the Duo had been any cheaper it would have been rivaling the cheapest full-size CD players available at the time. (Hmmm. This is how Sony got people to buy PS3s as a Bluray player...) I think many of you are underestimating how expensive it was to manufacture a CD drive in 1992. I know a CD drive doesn't seem like a big deal compared to a cartridge slot when you think about it nowadays, but at the time the difference was huge. It wasn't realistic then to market a CD-rom system against a cartridge-only system. This becomes even more clear when you look at retail prices of other CD-based systems available at the time and others which were released in the years soon following. If anything, the Duo was on the low end of the price spectrum for CD-based systems of the early 90's.

... by the time the Duo came out, they should have bundled the rest of their Turbo CD inventory with system 3 cards and GOT and sold them from ~$99-$149 to provide a nice upgrade path to current TG16 users

This is an interesting idea. In this case as well, I think rather than $99-149, $199+ would have been a more realistic retail price for this imaginary set, given the pricing of other consoles at the time. But you are right, they had Turbo CD's just sitting on the shelves which were still way overpriced, and didn't even come packaged with the latest system card. It would have been a nice idea to do something constructive with these, rather than just jumping ship completely to focus on the Duo, and releasing the Super System Card as a mail order-only upgrade.

Overall, I see what you guys are saying, that they should have followed the philosophy of "Lose money on the hardware, make money on the software" which is common practice with consoles today. At the time, this was not necessarily the most accepted strategy, though I can't say for sure it wouldn't have helped if TTi had tried this with the Duo. It just wasn't common practice at the time, and also I imagine that they might have been actually losing at least a bit of money on the hardware because, again, CD drives were still pretty expensive at the time. Sure, TTi could have chosen to undercut all their competitors on hardware pricing and thus stood a chance of convincing kids to buy Duos instead of the other systems, and then reaping the rewards of the software market through a large user base. But there was no guarantee this would have proven successful. The competition would have likely also lowered their prices in response. The bottom line is that there is no way that TTi would have attempted this in 1992. No way in hell. They stood to lose a sh*tload if this strategy failed, and they were in no position to risk that.

[SamIAm]

No offense, but the problem is that you weren't in TTi's target audience for the system. They wanted people who could afford a $300 system and plenty of $50 games on top of that.

OK, but how many people were in that target audience? What we're saying is that the number of people in the entire US market for whom a $300 console was an option was too small to be profitable. If NEC wasn't targeting the general population, then they weren't going to get deep enough market penetration to get the 3rd party support they needed to stay afloat...and that's exactly what happened.

Also, I think the "Duo as a CD player" solution only worked for people who had a centralized entertainment setup, which again, wasn't the general population. The PS2 worked as a DVD player because a PS2's integration is identical to that of a normal DVD player. The same can't always be said of a game system and a CD player.

Honestly, I think CD-ROM based game consoles were too expensive in the US in the early 90's, period. For most of us, $300 was just not what you spent on a game system. Cartridge games still met people's standards, and cartridge systems would always undersell a CD system.

[BigT]

... by the time the Duo came out, they should have bundled the rest of their Turbo CD inventory with system 3 cards and GOT and sold them from ~$99-$149 to provide a nice upgrade path to current TG16 users

This is an interesting idea. In this case as well, I think rather than $99-149, $199+ would have been a more realistic retail price for this imaginary set, given the pricing of other consoles at the time. But you are right, they had Turbo CD's just sitting on the shelves which were still way overpriced, and didn't even come packaged with the latest system card. It would have been a nice idea to do something constructive with these, rather than just jumping ship completely to focus on the Duo, and releasing the Super System Card as a mail order-only upgrade.

Overall, I see what you guys are saying, that they should have followed the philosophy of "Lose money on the hardware, make money on the software" which is common practice with consoles today. At the time, this was not necessarily the most accepted strategy, though I can't say for sure it wouldn't have helped if TTi had tried this with the Duo. It just wasn't common practice at the time, and also I imagine that they might have been actually losing at least a bit of money on the hardware because, again, CD drives were still pretty expensive at the time. Sure, TTi could have chosen to undercut all their competitors on hardware pricing and thus stood a chance of convincing kids to buy Duos instead of the other systems, and then reaping the rewards of the software market through a large user base. But there was no guarantee this would have proven successful. The competition would have likely also lowered their prices in response. The bottom line is that there is no way that TTi would have attempted this in 1992. No way in hell. They stood to lose a sh*tload if this strategy failed, and they were in no position to risk that.

Does anyone have an idea of what the manufacturing cost was of the Turbo Duo?

The system board seems like it would be pretty inexpensive.  They were using the same basic design as from 1987.  I doubt that the HuC6280 was very expensive... heck, 65c02 chips were pretty cheap back then.  Memory was also not that expensive in 1992.  Especially, since the Duo probably uses pretty slow ram and only has 256k main cd ram + 8k work ram + 64k VRAM + 64k adpcm buffer + 256k bios rom...  the cd-rom drive is the wild card... I have no idea what the oem cost was for a drive back then... retail prices were high, but that doesn't always indicate production costs... nec did produce them in house and the PC-engine duo was released 1 year prior to the Turbo Duo, while the original CD attachment was released a few years prior to that, so I'd assume they would have reduced production costs over 4+ years since the original PC engine CD drive was released.  All the main R&D was done years prior!

The SegaCD seems like a different story... they added a bunch of custom hardware for graphics and sound (which were sorely underutilized and limited by the poor color palette of the Genesis) and added a redundant (albeit faster) 68k processor (68k series was significantly more expensive than the old Mostek/WDC 65c02 chips... also, it did have quite a bit more ram... so I could totally see it being more expensive to develop and manufacture than the Turbo Duo.

[kazekirifx]

OK, but how many people were in that target audience? What we're saying is that the number of people in the entire US market for whom a $300 console was an option was too small to be profitable. If NEC wasn't targeting the general population, then they weren't going to get deep enough market penetration to get the 3rd party support they needed to stay afloat...and that's exactly what happened.

Yep. TTi knew it, and that's why they only made it available at specialty stores. NEC had already been going with virtually zero 3rd party support with the TG16 for a few years, and I'm sure TTi didn't expect that to change dramatically after the release of the Duo. The number of units produced was probably a lot for a 'specialty' system, but still I'm sure it was not nearly as high as the number of SNES's and Genny's Nintendo and Sega had produced - even in their initial runs. Again, they weren't going for an SNES-size launch. They knew that was out of the question. The $300 price tag clearly shows they were targeting gamer adults and spoiled kids whose parents were loaded. They didn't expect the casual gamer to shell out that kind of money.

If they really wanted to take on Nintendo and Sega, then they could have done it with the TG16, not the Duo. And we all know there are a lot of things NEC should have done differently with the TG16 too, but that is a whole separate discussion in itself.

[esteban]

First, I want to thank you all (especially Zeta, who crafted many hilarious, at times ludicrous, lines!) for turning this thread into a goddamn masterpiece.  

Second, although there have been some persuasive arguments/counter-arguments presented, I was surprised by how the "16-bit wars" we're characterized by...everyone. It was never TG-16 vs Genesis at the dawn of the 16-bit era. It was Genesis vs. firmly entrenched NES. And the NES wasn't dethroned instantly, simply because it had aging hardware. Far from it.

A crucial piece of the puzzle you folks missed: The NES never died! It would be far more accurate to say that the NES led a full life and gradually receded (faded) from the market. So, really, our beleaguered (doomed) TG-16 and the (Young Turk) Genesis were competing with the NES juggernaut, first and foremost, for the price-sensitive consumers (parents) of the mainstream market. Forget about any niche markets (NEC's business plan was intent on capturing the mass-market—at least, that was their original goal upon launch). We have already established that mass-market, mainstream success (NES) creates a momentum that insures continued sales—despite fresh, new competitors (Genesis, TG-16).  Let's not forget that the existing user base for NES was huge, with money to spend on new software, thereby ensuring that publishers would continue supporting the aging NES. Surely you remember how many fantastic NES games were released in late-1989, 1990, 1991...some of the most critically acclaimed and profitable NES titles co-existed with the dawn of the 16-bit era.

Why bring this up? The continued success and popularity of NES pushed TG-16 even further into the periphery.

Brand recognition? Must-have games that everyone is talking about? Software that you can easily lend to/borrow from others? The NES was crushing even the mighty Genesis (and Sega had superb marketing and a compelling library of games).

What were parents/price-sensitive shoppers going to buy in 1989 and 1990?

NES. (Everyone has one! It provides good entertainment for a reasonable cost.)

What were folks with more expendable income going to get?

Genesis.

What was Zeta going to buy?

He saved his money for years and purchased 3DO at launch.

What was Cook going to buy?

He was busy playing the games that were included with Windows 3.0.


    What went wrong with the TurboDuo?

Wrong question. We should be asking ourselves: "How did TTi manage to launch the Duo and stick around for as long as they did?"

[DragonmasterDan]

A crucial piece of the puzzle you folks missed: The NES never died! It would be far more accurate to say that the NES led a full life and gradually receded (faded) from the market. So, really, our beleaguered (doomed) TG-16 and the (Young Turk) Genesis were competing with the NES juggernaut, first and foremost, for the price-sensitive consumers (parents) of the mainstream market. Forget about any niche markets (NEC's business plan was intent on capturing the mass-market—at least, that was their original goal upon launch). We have already established that mass-market, mainstream success (NES) creates a momentum that insures continued sales—despite fresh, new competitors (Genesis, TG-16).  Let's not forget that the existing user base for NES was huge, with money to spend on new software, thereby ensuring that publishers would continue supporting the aging NES. Surely you remember how many fantastic NES games were released in late-1989, 1990, 1991...some of the most critically acclaimed and profitable NES titles co-existed with the dawn of the 16-bit era.

This was about the TurboDuo not the TurboGrafx 16. By 1992 when the Duo came out the NES was no longer dominating the market. In fact that was the case by 1991 when the Genesis finally outsold it. If we were talking about the TurboGrafx 16 from its start in 1989 then obviously the NES would be hugely important. But this was more about the Duo, which came out three years later and was more of a premium item aimed at a far more dedicated gaming audience.

   What went wrong with the TurboDuo?

Wrong question. We should be asking ourselves: "How did TTi manage to launch the Duo and stick around as long as they did?"

The answer to this is simple. NEC Home Electronics USA wanted out of the home video game market. Hudson and NEC of Japan were not ready to give up,both of them pooled together some resources and the end result was TTI. As far as how they managed to stick around as long as they did, the small scale of the operation towards the end tells you all you need to know with games allegedally having print runs of merely 500 copies towards the end.

[soop]

If you guys ever agree, you should collaborate on a "history of the Turbo Grafx" for Wikipedia.

and we should totally split PC Engine from TG-16 on wikipedia.

[spenoza]

Another thing we forget about the success of the NES is that it was constantly patched along by extra hardware included in the cartridges. All the awesome games we remember from about 2 years into the life of the NES used mappers with additional hardware to make up for the shortcomings of the original NES design.

[Arkhan]

we dont need that. there are no PCE shortcomings!

also, Contra for NES was epic-sweet, and LACKED over the Japanese one. 

All of the awesome games from 2 years in is a bit of a stretch.  There weren't that many using extra mappers.

And, some of what did wasn't even released here so it doesn't even count.

[spenoza]

we dont need that. there are no PCE shortcomings!

also, Contra for NES was epic-sweet, and LACKED over the Japanese one. 

All of the awesome games from 2 years in is a bit of a stretch.  There weren't that many using extra mappers.

And, some of what did wasn't even released here so it doesn't even count.

Super Mario Brothers 2 and 3 used extra mappers. Punch Out used a mapper. Kirby's Adventure used a mapper. I could go on, but the thing is, most of the best-regarded games used a mapper that did more than simply allow addressing more memory. Sometimes it was simple, like allowing a stationary bar for game information, but that's still something that was difficult to replicate on the stock NES.

[DragonmasterDan]

Super Mario Brothers 2 and 3 used extra mappers. Punch Out used a mapper. Kirby's Adventure used a mapper. I could go on, but the thing is, most of the best-regarded games used a mapper that did more than simply allow addressing more memory. Sometimes it was simple, like allowing a stationary bar for game information, but that's still something that was difficult to replicate on the stock NES.

All of those games are more than 2 years after the platform launched. Remember, the Famicom came out in 83, the earliest game mentioned Punch Out, came out in 87. The use of mappers didn't really start until then. To the US, yes that was two years later, but four years into the Japanese life of the platform.