Turbo Duo...What went wrong?

[vestcoat]

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

Damn.  Zeta, that was one heck of a post.

[NightWolve]

Good post, Zeta! I didn't think too much of this thread at first, it started with a faulty premise (too many pack-in games a bad thing) but it's gotten a bit interesting since.

[jeffhlewis]

My 2 cents about the Duo's demise given that I grew up during the 16-bit wars.

For full disclosure I was a Sega child but I grew up with a Master System, so I can relate to the underdog status.

1.) Zero traction at retail. My local EB Games and Babbages' relegated anything Turbo to a small aisle in the back of the store that faced away from the entrance. You had to know where it was to even know it existed.

2.) Marketing that really only existed in gaming magazines and barely any TV spots. No visibility outside of the gamer demographic.

3.) Slightly pricey for the time and a lack of any killer apps. We all know how awesome the Duo pack-in deal was, but to your average joe - they had no clue what Gate of Thunder was or why they should care.

4.) There was already a general perception that the Turbo market was dying when the Duo was released. Seemed like a last ditch effort.

5.) Similar to my early days with my SMS, I literally knew NO ONE out of all of my friends between home, activities and school that owned a Turbografx of any kind. I never even saw one in action aside from Toys R Us, which had Keith Courage on display when the system was released. Kids buy the systems their friends have, plain and simple

But hey, we might not be here talking about the PC Engine if it wasn't an underdog here in the states!

[kazekirifx]

I agree with everything Zeta said, though yes many Turbo fans won't admit it.

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 don't think TTi ever intended to take on the SNES and Genesis (sans Sega CD) with the Duo. That's what's important to me. It was produced and priced as what I would call a 'low-end premium' system. Premium because of the exclusivity factor, and the fact that it had a CD-rom drive, which was a big deal at the time (and personally the CD audio was enough to impress me at the time), and low-end because it used the same 8-bit technology as the TG16, and was cheaper and less powerful than the Neo Geo (the high-end premium system of the time). The Duo was marketed primarily at specialty stores and through mail order, which I think was appropriate since it had no chance of succeeding as a mass produced system available at every Target and Kmart alongside the SNES and Genesis. TTi knew who its audience was, and the audience knew who they were: serious gamer adults who could afford it, and spoiled rich kids. So where did TTi go wrong? I guess there weren't quite as many serious gaming adults and spoiled rich kids out there who wanted to buy this thing as TTi had hoped.

But hey, we might not be here talking about the PC Engine if it wasn't an underdog here in the states!

And there you go. The Turbo's underdog status is almost directly responsible for getting me into purchasing import games, and ultimately leading me to learn Japanese and move to Japan. The history of the Turbo is an integral part of my life.

[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.

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 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.

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.

Wow dude, take a deep breath. You can't really compare YS to Chrono Trigger as they were like separated by a few years between release dates and Chrono Trigger wasn't out until mid 1995. As for all the hype surrounding the ps1, yes I do remember that and my parents made the mistake of getting one (man that playstation broke down *even called upsidaisium playstation at one point* and repaired more times than I could count) in Christmas of 95. I vaguely recall the playstation 1 sold like 100,000 units the first month it was out here in the U.S, but I could be wrong. At any rate, saying that there was no killer apps for the duo is just wrong, if we saw Ys 4 and Dracula X come out in 93 here in the U.S this discussion would be over. But who really knows for certain? There are some who say a Mortal Kombat exclusive would have saved the system (as said many times over in other posts) but releasing Street Fighter 2 Dash here in the U.S probably would have at the very least had people picking up Turbos just to play that version of that game as many kids (while I was growing up) picked up a snes just for the original Street Fighter 2. Call me crazy, but I got my Duo back in 94 just to play Ys books 1 and 2 after of course, I read a old EGM review "The Best game ever just happened" (and smirked when it was in the top 100 games a few years later) and did some serious begging/convincing to my folks that the system wasn't a sinking ship and it would last me a lifetime. 18 years later, I still enjoy it and even went as far as repairing my old Duo so now I have a Duo of working Duos!

[turbokon]

The pce/tg16 is like NES except with better sound, more colors and bigger sprites. It's almost like 16-bit, hmmmm  .
Edit: I say it's better then just a slightly improvement over then the nes.

[BigT]

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.

Yeah, and that was a huge difference at that time.  I was in my early teens and chose to get an SNES because:
* It was a much easier sell to the parents at that price.
* The SNES had SF2 and Mario as well as various EA sports titles... if figured that if I got a Duo, I would be missing out on a large segment of games.
* I already had a TG16, but could never afford the CD attachment... I think that by the time the Duo came out, the war was over... realistically, NEC should have been much more aggressive with pricing from the start.

When the Duo came out, they had no position of power... so their only small chance would have been to compete aggressively on price... $199 would have been doable and then they could have hoped that the games caught on so that they could make it up on software sales... Bringing over SF2 and Dracula X would have helped as well... also, if they wanted to brand it as a more mature system, more sports games would have been nice (i.e., a deal with EA - John Madden Duo Football showed that the system could handle these quite well!)...

[kazekirifx]

When the Duo came out, they had no position of power... so their only small chance would have been to compete aggressively on price... $199 would have been doable and then they could have hoped that the games caught on so that they could make it up on software sales...

I think they would have just lost more money then. As many here have been echoing, the battle had already been lost by the time the Duo was released. There was no point in taking on Nintendo or Sega. They could only hope for a respectable niche market of hardcore gamers at best. Their target was primarily people who already owned an SNES and/or Genesis, not kids who were trying to decide which one console to save their allowance money for. (Though I've known people out there who grew up with only Turbo hardware too. More power to them!)

There are lot of things TTi could have done better in marketing the Duo (especially regarding which games they should have released), but I have to agree with the direction they took regarding pricing and projected market penetration. In that respect I think they did what they could with the cards they had already been dealt.

[SignOfZeta]

The PCE is nothing but a slight improvement over the NES

Oh come on now. You make it sound so negative. The NES is a great system! OK, well, the NES is actually pretty terrible, honestly, but the PCE is like the ULTIMATE NES. That's not an insult, its a compliment. NES games are fun by design, but incredibly ugly and flickery. Its easier (for me) to have fun with something when the sprites are more than four colors and they aren't %50 flickered out %75 of the time. Example: most PCE shooters are very fun, most NES shooters are zero fun, yet there really isn't much separating them, fundamentally speaking.

Even from a technical perspective, the TG16 is pretty much half way between the NES era and the SNES era. Technically, historically, chronologically, aesthetically. Have you ever played a SNES game as crude as Keith Courage or Energy? I haven't. I know, you like Keith Courage and Energy, thats fine, but seriously....JUST LOOK AT THOSE GAMES. Are they more like NES or more like SNES? Honestly. No bullshit. If you saw Blue Blink for the first time today would you assume it was for Neo Geo or CPS2 because of how insanely great the 16-bit visuals are?

Come on. Its OK to wall yourself off into your own little world. We all do it a little every day to stay sane. The problem comes when you fail to admit/understand that this is what you are doing. China Warrior is shite. It just is.

The Tengai Makyou games have hilariously puny sprites. They just do. Its OK though! Overall the games still go toe to toe with the best the SFC had to offer (and obliterate the offerings on Mega Drive). That's why the PCE is f*cking great!

and its library is entirely second rate, eh? Go f*ck yourself.

See, this, also, isn't meant to be negative. I'm a huge fan of B-grade games. I usually don't play Doom, Elder Scrolls, Xenosaga, Modern Warfare, Grand Theft Auto, Donkey Kong Country, Just Dance, Morta Kombat...all that shit. There is a lot of charm and character in second rate titles. If Startling Odyssey had the budget of Final Fantasy it might have sold more units, but it just wouldn't have been the same. Ys is fun because instead of drilling through a million menus and raising chocobos you just slam into shit and watch the story go by. Once in a while I need that. Most of the time I need that.

However, most people don't see things this way. They want Super Mario Kart. The Duo doesn't have a single racing game that comes anywhere near Super Mario Kart. Don't be offended, in 1992 nobody else had made anything better either. Probably still haven't. Don't get pissed of and jealous and build a wall of psychotic denial just because Super Mario Kart is awesome. Appreciate it for what it is, fantastic...but does it have an RPG mode where you can say, "I did it dad!!!". No, it doesn't, so it doesn't do everything. So you need Final Lap Twin as well, or rather I need Final Lap Twin as well.

[soop]

But hey, we might not be here talking about the PC Engine if it wasn't an underdog here in the states!

Ah, I would.  As a kid, in this country, a lot of magazines focused on the GT as a portable rather than the PC Engine, and what I saw was mind-blowing in a very non-underdog way.

As for the NES... the NES is a great system.  There are some crap games, but for the most part, it's infused with a sense of adventure and fun.  I've some good memories of that system.

As for B-grade titles...  I'm sure there are some, but as someone that hates Mario Kart, I'd say there are more bad games on the SNES than on the PC Engine, and probably even less good titles on the SNES than the PC Engine.

But what Zeta is referring to as A-grade games, I think is a tad disingenious - the titles you refer to, and FFVII, are basically AAA platinum games, the kind that sell systems on their own, and the SNES does have more of these than the PC Engine does.  In fact it has more than most systems, and in a very clever way for the first time.

I just had a quick look through my collection, and if the fact that I play my PCE more than my SNES doesn't say enough, I think that if I compared some of my favorite SNES games to the PCE games (Kirby, Mario Land, Yoshi's island for example) There are very few games that can hold a candle to that level of polished design.

But if I compare ALL my SNES games to ALL my PCE games (and I'd like to think I have good taste, no duds) the PCE games generally shine through.

Make no mistake, the PC Engine has A-grade games, it just doesn't have many once-in-a-generation genre defining AAA titles.

[SignOfZeta]

Your grading system is more subtlety neuonced than mine.

[Necromancer]

Oh come on now. You make it sound so negative. The NES is a great system! OK, well, the NES is actually pretty terrible, honestly, but the PCE is like the ULTIMATE NES. That's not an insult, its a compliment.

Give me a break; it's obvious you meant that as a dig, furthering your dismissal of the PCE as incomparable to the mighty SNES.  You're a SNERD - loud and proud and willing to dismiss anything that doesn't fit into your preconceived notions of what the PCE can do ("it can't do transparencies without flickering!").

NES games are fun by design, but incredibly ugly and flickery. Its easier (for me) to have fun with something when the sprites are more than four colors and they aren't %50 flickered out %75 of the time. Example: most PCE shooters are very fun, most NES shooters are zero fun, yet there really isn't much separating them, fundamentally speaking.

But there's a huge difference between PCE shooters and Genny/SNES shooters, right?  If the PCE is just a minor improvement over the NES, then what is the SNES with its substantially slower processor or the Genny with its slightly slower processor and washed out colors?  I guess the only thing that matters to a fanboy like yourself is that the PCE lacks mode 7, loads of reverb, and blast processing.

Even from a technical perspective, the TG16 is pretty much half way between the NES era and the SNES era. Technically, historically, chronologically, aesthetically. Have you ever played a SNES game as crude as Keith Courage or Energy? I haven't.

Never seen Ultraman, Pit Fighter, or Home Alone, eh?  Not that it matters, as only a fool would take some of the blandest looking games in the library and use that as an argument of what the system is capable.  Plus, how many latter day PCE games look as crude as K.C. or Energy?

I know, you like Keith Courage and Energy, thats fine, but seriously....JUST LOOK AT THOSE GAMES. Are they more like NES or more like SNES? Honestly. No bullshit.

You do know that I'm not Ark, right?  It's no secret that I think K.C. is bland and that Energy sucks.

Come on. Its OK to wall yourself off into your own little world. We all do it a little every day to stay sane. The problem comes when you fail to admit/understand that this is what you are doing. China Warrior is shite. It just is.

Yep, I'm still not Ark.  China Warrior is more of a great tech. demo. than anything else.

See, this, also, isn't meant to be negative. I'm a huge fan of B-grade games. I usually don't play Doom, Elder Scrolls, Xenosaga, Modern Warfare, Grand Theft Auto, Donkey Kong Country, Just Dance, Morta Kombat...all that shit. There is a lot of charm and character in second rate titles. If Startling Odyssey had the budget of Final Fantasy it might have sold more units, but it just wouldn't have been the same. Ys is fun because instead of drilling through a million menus and raising chocobos you just slam into shit and watch the story go by. Once in a while I need that. Most of the time I need that.

However, most people don't see things this way. They want Super Mario Kart. The Duo doesn't have a single racing game that comes anywhere near Super Mario Kart. Don't be offended, in 1992 nobody else had made anything better either. Probably still haven't. Don't get pissed of and jealous and build a wall of psychotic denial just because Super Mario Kart is awesome. Appreciate it for what it is, fantastic...but does it have an RPG mode where you can say, "I did it dad!!!". No, it doesn't, so it doesn't do everything. So you need Final Lap Twin as well, or rather I need Final Lap Twin as well.

Unlike you, I'm not stuck in denial about anything nor am I jealous.  I'll freely admit that the PCE has nothing like Super Mario Kart (nor a top notch brawler or a run and gun), but it certainly has A-grade titles (Gate of Thunder, Dracula X, Ys IV, etc.).

In conclusion: go f*ck yourself.

[KingDrool]

Wow. Hostile!

I see what Zeta's saying, and as a giant Turbo fanboy/nerd, I don't begrudge him any of it. In fact, I agree with a lot of it. I think Soop nailed it:

Make no mistake, the PC Engine has A-grade games, it just doesn't have many once-in-a-generation genre defining AAA titles.

This shouldn't turn into a fanboy "This console is better than that" argument. But I will say that Bonk is my favorite game of all time. Is it nearly as polished and brilliantly designed as Yoshi's Island? Absolutely not. But that's okay. I still love it.

[SamIAm]

I'll toss in a couple points from my perspective.

*It wouldn't have mattered if the Duo had Sonic AND Mario AND everything else. For the majority of gamers in the US (and, let's face it, the parents that funded them) a $300 console crossed the line. There was a perceived market value of video games in general, and it was $100 for a console and $50 for games. Nintendo and Sega would have given NEC hell no matter what. As it's been pointed out, even the Playstation, which IMO is perhaps the most perfectly executed console ever made and benefited from a maturing market, didn't take off until it got down to $200, and that was years later.

*None of the Japanese-only Duo titles would have made a big difference if they had been released here. They were too late, they weren't THAT amazing (sorry Dracula X), and most of them were in unpopular genres.

*1992 was just too late in general. Hindsight is 20/20, but I think the writing was on the wall. NEC had lost in the US by then, and that was just about that.

*To paraphrase Redlettermedia's Star Wars prequel trilogy reviews, I hesitate to even say what they should have done instead, because the answer is basically everything. Marketing, internal management, hardware, software, price...each one of these areas had a plethora of problems that kept the TG16/Duo down in the US.

*I love my Duo, but basically, I agree with SignOfZeta about the nature of the system and its library. Its best stuff gives it tremendous charm, and I'm awfully glad to have another flavor in my cabinet besides Nintendo and Sega. However, I feel absolutely no regret or sense of injustice about having bought an SNES in 1992.

[spenoza]

I think all the consoles sit pretty comfortably on a sliding scale if you look at their ability to push around colorful sprites and graphic elements. The SuperNES, being the most recent design, does have some of the most formidable capabilities. The PCE, being the earliest of the 16-bit generation, has the least formidable raw capabilities. Some PCE programmers were clearly capable of overcoming the PCE's limitations just as some were ill inclined to even try. This is the same on all platforms.

Really, what I think this all boils down to is that the public perceived the 16-bit generation as an extra background layer prompting vast hori and vert platformers to show off that free-floating background layer. The PCE didn't have an extra background layer and didn't have as many of those massive platformers with that extra background lurking behind. To most folks, that was case closed. If only the PCE had been capable of an incredible AAA title like Bubsy!