Sure, catalogs existed -- I was born in the early '80s, no internet then! However, my family was never one who bought stuff from them except in very rare occasions. I'd choose things I wanted for birthday lists by going to stores and making a list while looking at the stuff there, usually. Once I started reading videogame magazines, I'd choose games based on stuff I was interested in from reviews and such as well. (I first read Nintendo Power, which our local library got and I read from the early '90s on, but started buying and then subscribing added computer gaming magazines in '96, and subscribed to PC Gamer for four years from '97 to '01.) I do remember looking through Sears catalogs, Toys R Us ad flyers, etc. looking for games, but they usually seemed to only show a few things (with pictures and stuff, I mean!)... going to the actual store was better, you could look at the actual boxes!
But again, there never was a video game console that succeeded based on catalog sales. It didn't happen. If the only defense for national distribution is "but anyone could buy it from a catalog", I think that the point about how awful NEC and TTI's distribution was has already been very effectively made.
Did even anyone here buy TG16 stuff from catalogs during the system's life? I mean Sears or what have you, not the TZD stuff post-death.
I found Turbo goods in lots of towns with populations of <10,000 - 20,000.
I imagine that this would depend on where they were. NEC's distribution was of course extremely spotty.
In 16-bit discussions like this, you have to always keep in mind that Black Falcon is going by factoids he read on the internet years later.
How absurd... of course, the best answer to this is the obvious one, that you don't have to experienced events in order to know something about them. Almost all of the writing of history is based on this fact; I have a masters' in history, so I should know.
But even beyond that, I was around then, of course. Sure, I only played a TG16 once myself, but I read about it in magazines, etc. It was something I heard about a few times, unlike the Sega Master System, which I have absolutely no memory of ever hearing about at all during its life, or even for a long time after it. For the TG16, I remember seeing comparisons of Sonic v. Mario World v. Bonk, and the Johnny Turbo ads as well.
What Turbo players experienced firsthand during the lifespan of the platform is of little merit.
As they say, eyewitness testimony is not always reliable. What is reliable are overall trends, facts, numbers, proof of things. Proof like the actual number of systems sold, which we finally know thanks to this article. Of course peoples' stories are important too, though. Certainly. And that is there in this article, or at least in the author's other article, which is, as I say below, his personal story about his liking and owning the system during its life. The author is someone who experienced the system firsthand during its lifetime.
Like people who started saying for a while that Magical Chase was mail-order only and one of the rarest Turbo games. If the many of us who walked into the many stores selling Turbo goods at the time weren't ruining the hype with our unbelievable tall tales, MC could be hyped/gouged even further.
With distribution as poor as NEC's was, and with how much worse it got under TTI thanks to their limited funds, this should be entirely understandable. It's not about "tall tales", it's about that for a lot of people, even in areas which had TG16 stuff for a while, by mid '93 it was gone, and from that point on games did indeed seem to be mail order only. As one of the very last HuCard releases, it does seem quite likely that Magical Chase shipped in small numbers. Of course it was available in some places, though; it wasn't until the last couple of games that it seems to have really gone mail order only. Based on this article, I'd mostly suspect the two '94 releases, Godzilla and The Dynastic Hero, for that. Unless anyone here actually managed to find copies of those games in stores back then, and can prove otherwise? I would imagine that it was a slow progression over time though, as stores that had been carrying it gradually abandoned the system due to low sales.
I haven't had time to comment properly on the Gamasutra article, but it is only really useful for people already familiar with the history of the platform.
That may help, but no, this really is not true.
The quotes are entertaining to read, but there's lots of bs'ing, especially by Johnny Turbo and it's unfortunately all put together by someone not familiar with the system and has an agenda to portray it negatively.
Someone may have an agenda here, but it's not the author of that article, that's for sure! As you'd know if you read the other article, about his personal history with the system, the guy posted (also linked here, in another thread), you'd know that the author was a Turbografx fan, and did own the system during its life, and the Turbo CD, and the Duo. He even says that Ys I & II is his favorite game. So no. No anti-Turbo bias by the author, certainly. Just reality.
A stream of quotes with descriptions of who's who without the spin would have been much better and not contributed to furthering misconceptions.
The only major misconception that the article furthers is the "8-bit" thing. I haven't seen anything else mentioned of note.
