Yeah, the thing about the 8-bit CPU was a bit annoying. Should have mentioned that it's a powerful 8-bit CPU which is at least as good as the SNES's CPU or better, bits aside...
What this article does best, probably, is really hammer home the point about how unbelievably badly NEC and Hudson mismanaged the system outside of Japan. It doesn't even mention all of their mistakes, either! I mean, the article doesn't get to the stupid limited rollout, where NEC decided to only sell the TG16 in a few major markets in the US at first. There's a lot in the article I hadn't heard before, though. Unbelievably incompetent mismanagement, some of the worst the industry has seen.
I do question the point that we missed out on so many great games, though. I mean, yeah, we did... on CD. But on HuCard? On HuCard we got a not too bad limited selection of titles. Yeah, there are obvious big ones that were skipped, and plenty of smaller titles that would have been great to see here, but it's the CD system where the worst of the missed games shows... and of course, to get more CD games, you'd have to actually sell CD systems here, something that never happened. 40,000 sales (evenly split between CD addon drives and Duos) according to Vic Ireland is abysmal. Of course it's also possible that more Turbo Duos were made than that and that the excess stock was what TZD was selling over the next decade. Who knows how many they had though, surely not more than some number of thousands?
The constant stream of games that Japan never let the US release made the situation worse, of course. How are you supposed to convince people to buy the Duo in '92-'94 when NEC/Hudson won't let you bring over Rondo of Blood or Street Fighter II, blocks you from releasing World Heroes and King of the Monsters 2 (but takes your Arcade Card idea and releases their own SNK ports in Japan instead
), and blocks Mortal Kombat for TG16 as well? As the article says, in that situation of course you have no chance.
Still, I find it weird that they actually took until Summer CES to give up on TTi, considering that they hadn't had a retail release since 1993, and there were only two games released in '94, Godzilla and The Dynastic Hero... that's a long time to wait while releasing nothing and not really being in stores.
Oh, one mistake --- it claims that that Lords of Thunder video is "early". Lords of Thunder released in mid '93, so that's not early. That's in the middle of TTi's very short life.
One other thing -- it says that the Turbo CD released at the end of '89. For several years now, people on PCEFX have been saying that this isn't true, and that it probably didn't actually release until sometime in mid 1990. Do the NEC people interviewed in this article actually confirm that they did indeed ship the Turbo CD at the end of '89, or is the article just assuming that it released then because that was the previous date that had always been seen around the net?
Though it introduced the TurboDuo, TTi had never had to manufacture more TurboGrafx-16 units; in fact, says Brandstetter, the last 100,000 to 200,000 U.S. consoles were unloaded on the Brazilian market, with their expansion ports disabled. The initial order NEC made in 1989 for 750,000 units never sold through to U.S. customers. As for the Duo? "Turbo Zone Direct had Duos for at least 10 years," Brandstetter says.
As far as I know, this is the first time I've ever seen actual TG16 sales numbers mentioned, so for this alone this article is fantastic! The Turbo CD numbers they cite are just those same ones from Vic Ireland as usual, and they never mention Turbo Duo numbers, but that TG16 number is new, I think, and plausible. I had believed the "900,000" number that was out there, but unfortunately it looks like that estimate was too high. Too bad...
At the conference, Hudson didn't generate much publisher interest in the TurboGrafx. But it did succeed in alienating Electronic Arts.
"Basically, there was a kind of weeding-out of developers who could actually participate in development of the first round of CD-ROM games," Greiner says. "We wanted the kind of emphatic push that we would get from somebody who really knew how to use that kind of space -- in other words, really great game developers."
In a meeting, Hudson staffers asked EA's team if it was up to the task of developing great CD-ROM games -- "we didn't think EA was that at the time, obviously, or otherwise we wouldn't have to ask them so deeply," says Greiner. "EA took offense to that -- they kind of walked out of the meeting and said, 'How dare you question us?'"
This is also pretty numbingly stupid, obviously. :p
