Turbo Duo...What went wrong?

[NightWolve]

A videostore called "Ken's World of Video" in Illinois had most of the HuCard library available for renting. Can't say I ever saw the CDs available for rent anywhere, though...

[BigusSchmuck]

Price had nothing to do with it IMHO, just think not even 3 years later the Playstation 1 came out and it had a $300 dollar price tag and it sold like crazy. Again, as many people have pointed out, if we saw half of the killer apps the Japanese were getting we all would be singing a different tune.

[NightWolve]

You can't go that far and say that price had "nothing" to do with it, but bringing up the Playstation is a good point I guess. Of course, I'm the guy that always waits around for the price drops, so I had to sit it out a few years before buying one. At this point, the TurboDuo had achieved underdog status in my eyes and I remember feeling a little jealous/surprised at how easy it was for Sony to just swoop down into the videogame market and become so successful in such a short time having watched the TurboDuo struggle. I believed in the CD format as the future as opposed to expensive carts (so I ditched N64 and stuck with Sony after years of loyalty to NES/SNES especially when I heard that Squaresoft would only develop for Sony), so why didn't the first CD console system do better? Why didn't NEC/TTi get that kind of marketing and 3rd party support that Sony got just as soon as they arrived on the scene? I suppose Sony's brand recognition had a lot to do with it, but this was their first entry into the videogame market and they handled it like experts, all the right moves right out of the batter's box!

[spenoza]

I suppose Sony's brand recognition had a lot to do with it, but this was their first entry into the videogame market and they handled it like experts, all the right moves right out of the batter's box!

They had also worked with Nintendo for a time. Sony's decision to enter the console market followed Nintendo's surprise decision to partner with Philips instead of Sony for a CD add-on (which never materialized). I doubt Sony was working with Nintendo without attempting to learn something from the experience.

[esteban]

Was that trade in offer run by TTi?  What would they have done with a bunch of SNES and Genny consoles if everyone had started taking advantage of this?

It was a very limited trade-in campaign (promoted via a couple of ads with limited audience).

Here are some of my thoughts (from eons ago): It's Like Getting 50 bucks to have fun. I won't repeat myself in this post, even though I'm tempted



This advertisement originally appeared in TurboForce #3 (which had very limited distribution, to, essentially, the Turbo-faithful)).

[Tatsujin]

lol, the old US of A trade in your old used car and get a new one for cheaper sales strategy. I think it didn't quite work as well in the video game segment.

[kazekirifx]

I can see why the price would be a limiting factor if comparing to the SNES or Genesis, but why would you compare it to those? I never saw the price as unreasonable. I was a kid at the time, but $300 seemed like the appropriate price to me. At the time, CD drives were still quite expensive to make; and I understood the hardware difference between a cartridge and CD rom system and was willing to pay a lot more for CD-rom technology.

After all, it was cheaper than buying the required TG hardware separately, or buying a Genesis and Sega CD. A combination cartridge/CD-rom unit from Sega had yet to be released, and when it was, the Sega CDX was priced at $399 (high price partly due to the compact size and portable CD player functionality). The CDX pack-in software was Sonic CD, Ecco the Dolphin, and Sega Classics Arcade Collection. JVC had also released a Genesis/Sega CD combo called X'Eye a bit earlier, and this was priced at $499.99 including only one game (Prize Fighter), and encyclopedia and karaoke discs.

Looking back, even taking inflation into consideration, I think the Duo was a steal at $299. And the included software is still the most appealing pack-in of any console ever made. If I had been an adult with a job at the time, I would have bought it on the release date. As a kid, I had to wait until Christmas and chip in my allowance to help Santa pay.

[DragonmasterDan]

I can see why the price would be a limiting factor if comparing to the SNES or Genesis, but why would you compare it to those?

You would compare it to those, because those were the primary 16-bit era game consoles. I was reasonably fortunate in that I owned all three platforms, plus eventually a Duo and Sega CD shortly after both of those released. Most kids got A Genesis or A SNES. By the time the Duo was released the core hardware, regardless of what games it came with was triple the price of the core model Genesis and SNES. That was a big problem and greatly limited its appeal to kids who had parents with greater financial resources, teenagers who had jobs and their own money to buy one, and adult hardcore gamers who were at the time a much much smaller segment of the marketplace than today.

[thesteve]

the price is definatly what kept me out of DUO, 3DO and NEO at the time.
the TG16 was cheap, and much better then is comp

[KingDrool]

To expand upon the "too late" and "too expensive" thoughts, we can also look at it this way: The Duo took one product that nobody was buying (TG16) and combined it with another product nobody was buying (TGCD) and expected people to buy it...for a premium. Yes, it was "only" $100 more than the SNES (at least for a time), but it's still $100 more than the "it" item.

I'm not saying that the Duo wasn't awesome. It was. I had one right after it launched and it's still my favorite system. But I think even TTi had to have known it would be a niche product at best. I think they did a decent job with the resources they had, but there was no way the Duo was going to break out.

[DragonmasterDan]

To expand upon the "too late" and "too expensive" thoughts, we can also look at it this way: The Duo took one product that nobody was buying (TG16) and combined it with another product nobody was buying (TGCD) and expected people to buy it...for a premium. Yes, it was "only" $100 more than the SNES (at least for a time), but it's still $100 more than the "it" item.

I think we already established this. By the time the Duo came out, the SNES was 99.99 for a core model. And at most 150.00 for a model bundled with two controllers and Super Mario World. So it was 2 to 3 times as expensive depending on which bundle you bought.

[SignOfZeta]

Price had nothing to do with it IMHO, just think not even 3 years later the Playstation 1 came out and it had a $300 dollar price tag and it sold like crazy. Again, as many people have pointed out, if we saw half of the killer apps the Japanese were getting we all would be singing a different tune.

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.

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 Y's 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.

As for the PS being the same price three years later, well, come on. Are you just quoting wikipedia or are you only 20 years old or are you just senile? Don't you remember how much the the PS f*cking AMAZED people back then? "Three years later" was post-polygon. The PS was doing nearly arcade perfect version of stuff like Ridge Racer, which was still a nearly state of the art game and a top earner at a lot of arcades. The PS was the hottest shit on the planet from the time it was launched until the DC came out 5 years later. It was the first polygon-based affordable mainstream console.* You could also buy it at a lot more places. 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.

$300 for a console you've never seen run in person was a lot. Minimum wage was $5.25/hour then. This was before everyone had a $100 monthly bill for their iPhone and the overriding lust for technology. Hell, people still paid for music back then, that's expensive. Twenty years of inflation ago...$300 meant more to teenagers then.

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 technical 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.

[Necromancer]

The PCE is nothing but a slight improvement over the NES and its library is entirely second rate, eh? Go f*ck yourself.

[DragonmasterDan]

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.

A lot of the reading part has to do with the audience video games were marketed to at the time. The perception was that video games were a toy for children. And outside of the Neo-Geo  no one attempted to market at an older audience, platformers, fighters and action based games were more popular than RPGs at the time because RPGs required reading and there was a perception that grade schoolers didn't want to come home from school and homework and do more reading.

As for the PS being the same price three years later, well, come on. Are you just quoting wikipedia or are you only 20 years old or are you just senile? Don't you remember how much the the PS f*cking AMAZED people back then? "Three years later" was post-polygon. The PS was doing nearly arcade perfect version of stuff like Ridge Racer, which was still a nearly state of the art game and a top earner at a lot of arcades. The PS was the hottest shit on the planet from the time it was launched until the DC came out 5 years later. It was the first polygon-based affordable mainstream console.* You could also buy it at a lot more places. 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.

Here's two other things about the Playstation, the target audience wasn't children. It was teenagers and young adults, I think when they launched the system the target audience was 18 year old males in the US. Also... the Playstation didn't sell fantastically that first holiday season, it and the Saturn were neck and neck in the US until that spring when it dropped in price to 199.99 in May 1996, that's when sales really started to rocket.

[spenoza]

Need I remind you, Zeta, that there was a time when the NES was getting long in the tooth and the SNES wasn't yet out that the PCE outsold the declining NES? Also, regardless of how well Sega's titles sold the Genesis in the US, the Mega Drive never really stood out in Japan. In the 16-bit race, the Mega Drive was 3rd place. So even without a "killer app", it appears the PCE was more than enough to take on Sega.