turbo points

[esteban]

goddam, that mug does indeed rule...mostly the TG-16 logo since the LA II text is generic.  but who cares? that mug is gorgeous!  

i have/ had a legendary axe II shirt (white).... but the art on the front was very, very corny (one of the reasons why I disliked it back in the day but love it now). I can't find it though.... but i did find my devil's crush shirt (black)... but the art is not nearly as goofy kool as the LAII shirt.

[Keranu]

You should try looking up the Splatterhouse mug because it had the bloody Splatterhouse title along with the TG-16 logo; absolutely stunning!

Damn a Devil's Crush shirt must rule! Of course no one in public would quite understand what it was, but it's still awesome to us Turbo fans.

[trapjaw76]

Hey, I'm heading back to my folk's house in like 2 weeks, I'm planning on diggin through some of my old junk.  If I find it, I will let you guys know...but it'll be mine baby...sorry.  If I can't stick my milk money in the pockets of my Roos any more, I can stick my snack machine bills into my TG wallet!

[Michael Helgeson]

you guys are hopeless,the turbografx had lame marketing,johnny turbo still gives me nightmares.I own a Pc Engine briefcase combo with arcade card pro now.No more crappy box and cover artwork for me!!!

[Black Tiger]

you guys are hopeless,the turbografx had lame marketing,johnny turbo still gives me nightmares.I own a Pc Engine briefcase combo with arcade card pro now.No more crappy box and cover artwork for me!!!

Well, they did have marketing other than Johnny Turbo. All the years before JT and the Turbo Duo he was created to promote and after.

I still remember commiting to buy a Turbo CD asap after seeing some of the early ads with screenshots of Ys & Valis II.

The carniverous caveman Bonk's Adv & multi-game TV spots impressed all my console-wars Genesis & NES-loving friends.

And they nailed the best campaign with the "It's easy to beat the competition when you've got them outnumbered" ads(back when the TG was supposedly in the lead).

If only they'd stuck to bringing out the quantity that when filtered out still yielded at least as many quality titles as the Genesis.

[esteban]

you guys are hopeless,the turbografx had lame marketing,johnny turbo still gives me nightmares.I own a Pc Engine briefcase combo with arcade card pro now.No more crappy box and cover artwork for me!!!

awesome.  you might be sincere, or you might just be teasing us ... but I was inspired to respond...

tg16 didn't have too many television ads (and those they did have didn't run too long)... but this was due to $$$$.  the tv ads that did run were not bad (more on this later).

but when you go back and look at print ads, and really look back at them... it's actually pretty surprising.  the genny print ads weren't as amazing as i thought they had been, and the tg16 ads were much kooler than I had given them credit for:
splatterhouse 1
splatterhouse 2
devil's crush 1
devil's crush 2
of course, here's a third party ad... certainly not the koolest or hippest tagline:
SHOOT 'EM or SCOOT 'EM
(I pulled all of this, by the way, from one issue of TurboPlay, October / November 1990.

until the last year or so, i thought that the tg16 print ads were amateurish compared to the professional, hip genny ads...  but i've been going through 1989-1993 magazines a lot recently, and damn... sega had some bad, bad ads (the segaCD ads, as a whole, were particularly lame).  of course, sega had some great stuff as well... sega 3rd party ads were uneven as well (of course, tg16 only had 2 viable 3rd parties anyway).
sega + third parties must have had thousands of ads (literally)... while the total tg16 ads number in 100-200 range... so to level the playing field, we'd have to talk about the crap : kool ratio in ads.  i don't think tg16 ads would do much worse than sega or nintendo.

i could get into nintendo's marketing as well... but i used sega as a reference point because sega had a much hipper, kooler sense for ads (and, "sega does what nintendon't" and "welcome to the next level" were done by different ad agencies for Sega, IIRC)...

anyway, the point is that tg16 marketing wasn't as lame as you put it.  tg16 ads weren't as SATURATED as Sega and Nintendo (you need $$$$$ for that)... but the actual content of the ads weren't that bad.  did tg16 ads have the kool dude screaming SEGA! at the end? No, tg16 ads weren't that hip.

nonetheless, the early tg16 commercials (launch 1989) were totally kool... they appeared before Genny's (at least in the NYC area) and were an andrenalin rush montage of Blazing Lazers and other launch titles.  

finally, johnny turbo has become an urban legend.  i love the sardius site and his documentation of JT (it's funny as hell), but the JT campaign consisted of only 3 ads over 3 consecutive issues of EGM, gamepro, VG &CE ... and that's it.  JT is funny as hell, totally insane, but hardly represents tg16 marketing.  It's an anomaly, not the trend.

P.S. your pcengine suitcase set-up is very, very kool

[nodtveidt]

I remember ads on TV for the TG16 way back in the day. They were comparing the TG16 to the NES. The funniest part is when they showed that the TG had the CD attachment and compared it to the NES...with a record player. That ad also had shots of Legendary Axe II in it, which didn't hit our shores until two years later.

And of course who could forget Sega's cheesy stuff? Anyone remember "Genesis Does What Nintendont"?

[Keranu]

you guys are hopeless,the turbografx had lame marketing,johnny turbo still gives me nightmares.I own a Pc Engine briefcase combo with arcade card pro now.No more crappy box and cover artwork for me!!!

Hey this is just part of the reason why we love the Turbo so much! And also I love all of the ads, even if a few are not so great. The ones Steve mentioned are some totally badass ads and I think they are just as cool if not cooler than ads any other company threw out . The only TG-16 commercial I have seen is that Bonk one and a TG-16+CD one that's on PC Engine FX, which I both thought were awesome! I also love the two Duo commercials PC Engine FX has hosted.