In the interest of fairness, I'll share a couple of things I've just read on the PC Engine's Japanese wikipedia page.
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Also, the article talks about the Core Concept (コア構想), an official term that I know I've seen elsewhere. The idea, as we all basically know already, was to have one heart, or one driving "engine" at the center of a variety of peripherals including different media formats.
Yes, from day one, that meant the CD system.
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If you want to think of the base-PCE-Hucard system, the SuperGrafx, the CD-ROM2, the Super System Card 3.0, the Duo and the Arcade Card as all fitting into one tight PC Engine concept, I wouldn't tell you you're wrong. Even I like to shorthand a lot of things as "PCE" when I'm typing up a message. However, if you feel that in reality, the systems and libraries naturally separate out into at least two very distinctive groups, Hucard and CD, and if you feel that there seems to be an honesty and simplicity from a user perspective to thinking of things on these terms...well, I'd agree with you.
That goes whether you're a western gamer in 2016 or a Japanese gamer in the late 80s/early 90s thinking to yourself "57,300 yen? 1000x storage capacity? Separate and exclusive game library? Pop idols and anime girls galore? Peripheral my ass; this CD thing's a console of its own!"
It's an "expandable" system ... with different levels of expansion, each providing more capabilities, and with each level having games that support those expanded capabilities.
That wasn't a hugely strange concept for a buyer to understand back in the 1980s.
Heck ... it shouldn't exactly be that strange of an idea to anyone that's ever played an RPG!
You buy the base system, and then you just add on more and more bits as your desire and finances allow.
You're hung up on the whole "a console mustn't change or be expanded" mindset, probably because your personal memories of games really start at a time when the whole market, and marketing had stratified into distinct segments.
The early to late 1980's were the Wild West of home computer and videogame development. Anything could happen as people and companies experimented to see what could work, both technologically, and in terms of consumer acceptance.
Back then, a PC was just a Personal Computer, IBM hadn't wiped everyone else off the map.
It was an exciting time.
Speaking of which, can-of-worms time: is the SuperGrafx really a PC Engine, too, or was it a separate console?
Can it play all the existing Core PC Engine games? Yes.
Can you plug it into all the existing Core PC Engine perihperals? Yes.
What is it internally? A PC Engine with an extra VDC controller.
So ... it's just another member of the expanable PC Engine system.
I can certainly accept the idea that people can/should consider the games for the diffent expansions as belonging to different "groups", but they're still part of the same "System".
Perhaps we're just getting hung up on semantics again.
Perhaps you'd be happier if I said "Concept" instead of "System"?
But that's not really the right use of language ... a Concept is a just an idea, but a System applies both to an idea, and to a realization of that idea.
Anyway, in conclusion, rather than inducting a newbie by telling him to think of the PC Engine as being more like 1.5-ish systems and having at least two different libraries, I think I'll just start by telling him it's all a goddamn mess and he better brace himself.
I think it's pretty simple.
You can buy in at various levels of capability, and you can expand your original purchase.
That applies to the CD, the Super System Card, and the Arcade Card.
I love the elegance of the console concept, too, and I think it's a pity that it seems in danger of breaking down.
Like any industry, everything has matured now, the excitement and unknowns have gone away, and people have set expectations of how things should work and be marketed.
From what I see, the "console" concept is still alive ... in the iPhone and Android worlds.
The idea of, and need for, dedicated videogame consoles has pretty much passed away.
20 years ago, consoles had superior game-playing hardware to personal computers.
That's not been the case for a while.
And now Personal Computers themselves are morphing from being productivity devices on desks, into being mobile entertainment/consumption devices with integrated telephones.
From what I can, most consumers are exceedingly happy with that, because they didn't have the time or interest in being slaves to keeping their computers maintained and up-to-date.
A) That still doesn't fracture it that much. The games are going to be compatible. Supposedly, one disc will play on your PS4 or your PS4.5 in 4K or VR, unless I am missing something.
I think that you're overlooking the commercial realities of development.
It's poor economics to target such different resolutions/capabilities ... which means that what-will-happen is what usually happens in those cases.
You'll get simple up-rezzing tricks to make things look better on the new version, and it'll all be a bit of a disappointment to the people that pay extra for the new versions.
The whole VR thing has so many practical limitations at the moment, that I fully expect it to be just like all the 3D-TV hype of a few years ago.
I could be wrong ... but I certainly won't be an early-adopter.
Take a step back. From a consumer standpoint, the way Hudson carried out the Core Concept plan is kind of bullshit. One could say that by not calling the white-base-Hucard system a "Core", but rather marketing it as something whole when this big game-changing CD attachment was in the works from the beginning, Hudson was being dishonest. They didn't want people to be put off from buying the white-base system because it seemed like it might not be the focus of support.
Errrr ... what???
AFAIK Hudson supported the original PC Engine with HuCard games for as long as it was economically possible to do so, and well passed the time that most consumers had already abandoned them.
CD games started out as an "extra" and remained that way until the SFC/SNES blew the entire HuCard market out of the water in 1991 ... and then Hudson still kept on releasing HuCards.
As the HuCard market dried up, they had the SuperCDROM available as an upgrade for anyone with a core PC Engine that wanted to stay with them and enjoy the experience of CD games.
I don't see any dishonesty, quite the opposite.
