Biggest lost opportunities for the PCE

[soop]

To be honest, there are some good points RE missed chances with regard to conversions, but personally, I guess the large number of PCE only titles is what draws me to the system more than anything.

[Arkhan]

at least the fragmentation of the CD/SCD base involved a single card.  Sure there were the Duos and SCD add on,  but really it was just a card separating CD and SCD users. 

Fragmentation of PCE/SGX is an entire system.  Sure it's backwards compatible, but it still costs money.  A lot of it. 

The SGX should have just been an add on.  Buy it if you want it.  Would have sold better as a click-on for the PCE, and would have cost less..

and screw mortal kombat.  Im glad that shitty game never showed up on our turbob.  Its retarded. We got SF2, we don't need herky jerk 90s fighters with stupid looking characters wearing halloween costumes.

If Rare would have devved for PCE, that would have added alot of nice games. But, werent they like not allowed during the NES days because of Nintendo's douchery?

Im curious why Konami bitched out on us.  They could've given us a lot of stuff. Was that more of Nintendo's doing?  lets kill them!

[soop]

@Arkhan, I can't find it, but there was an interview with someone at Hudson on the final days of Hudson and where it went wrong.  I think it was on Sega16, but it may have been put up in the period wiped out by the hacking attack.

In the meantime, this is pretty interesting (albeit in PDF format).  It does not, however shed any light on the Konami situation (yet - haven't read part 2).
http://www.meanmachinesmag.co.uk/upload/media/scans/HudsonRG_Part1.pdf


Ohh, this might be it (in a different format)
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1578/hudsons_revenge__looking_forward_.php

Nah, that's not it.  I think it was John Greiner interviewed though, but there's a ton of interviews out there with him.

[Tatsujin]

at least konami gave us the best akumajo dracula in the whole 8/16bit era, and that by a very far.
the konami shooters are also top ace ware, and a xexex was even planed. there really was only a contra thats missing from their side. uh oh and well, may be also a nice ganbare goemon j'n'r like the 2nd one on SFC. and sunset riders and mystic warriors and monster maulers and and and..

[ceti alpha]

I don't think any platform in history has ever been as fragmented as Android. It makes Windows look like the NES.

lol. That's a stretch.

[SignOfZeta]

Regarding the SGX surviving long enough to be built into Duos...


Shit like this never works, and this would have been no exception. In many ways the SGX dying as bizarrely fast as it did (I'm sure it was effectively killed before it was even released) was a blessing.

If the SGX had taken off, then we would have been in a tricky situation. Were previous owners of PCE systems supposed to basically bin their old systems purchased just two years earlier? That would suck, especially considering the price of the SGX, and the CDROM2 (planed from the begining) combined. I'm pretty sure sales of PCE in that early period were some of the best the system ever saw too. It would have been suicidal to shit on that customer base.

That is certainly one possibility, but what about this other possibility... What if the CD-ROM attachment had included extra hardware capabilities, like the extra hardware in the SGX. Could the expansion port have allowed for this? What if the stock CD unit basically upgraded the system? Under those circumstances the only people who would have been left out would be people who don't buy a CD-ROM upgrade. That might have been a way around all this. Given how expensive the CD-ROM was upon release, adding in some extra power would likely not have had a major impact on the peripheral's price, assuming it's technically possible.

Yeah, that would have been great, and that's what the MegaCD was, essentially. Unfortunately adding hardware as major as additional processors with direct memory access isn't possible on the PCE, let along economically feasible. The add-on was already $600 after all.

[SignOfZeta]

Where do you even BEGIN to list the PCE/TG16's missed opportunities???  There are so many!  As was mentioned previously in this thread, the SuperGrafx in and of itself a was a HUGE missed opportunity.  Maybe not in Japan.  That thing was going to fail there, no matter what.  But if they'd have delayed the US release a few months and released the SGX here in the US with, say, 50+ quality PCE games, the western market (for the most part) wouldn't have even known any better that it was derived from inferior hardware.  Then you'd have a situation where the PCE was still getting plenty of support in Japan and the SGX would have been getting support in the west, similar to the Genesis (assuming NEC America would have marketed the thing properly, which is an awfully big assumption).

With 50+ quality SGX games, yes, it very well could have been a success in America, but where do you get the 50+ million dollars to make such stuff? The weirdly huge success of the Genesis in the US happened with a library that was *heavily* US influenced. The EA sports stuff and MK with a lot of Sonic...and quite a few of the Sonic games were US developed.

Its not really a "missed opourtunity" if it could only happen in a parallel universe, at that point its just a fantasy.

Two things make this impossible 1) where the hell are those 50 games going to come from when even the Japanese only had 6, and they were not even slightly impressive 2) Americans are cheap-asses and the Japanese, especially back then, will buy almost any gadget you throw at them. If they didn't buy the SGX nobody would.

BTW, I am SO glad that never happened. I would have loved to see the TG16 succeed by being what it was, but having it transformed into a sleezy Football/Mortal Kombat machine. Oh lord. Good taste is a hurdle to be leaped, not limboed under!

[nodtveidt]

As far as I know, adding the SGX via the expansion port was in fact possible to do. Adding it via the hucard slot might not have been doable though. I think it was Charles who proposed a method of doing it via the expansion port... since the expansion port is apparently directly connected to all the relevant hardware. Of course, there's other things you could do with the hucard port... you could add additional RAM (doesn't Populous do this?), additional CPUs (we were talking on IRC awhile back about adding a V810), sound circuitry (though it'd be monaural), etc... the hucard port offers a lot of the capability of the expansion port, just not everything.

[SignOfZeta]

wow MK as a PCE exclusive? That would have been a seriously game changer! They thought fighters were on their way out and yet they did all those neo geo fighter port? How wrong were they considering that the fighters genre only got bigger and bigger in the following decade!

Well, at best the MK deal would have been a nice foot in the door, but there is a good chance that it wouldn't have made them any money. MK eventually came out on five systems, for Midway/Aklaim/whoever to have made the kind of money they wanted to, the exclusivity fee for NEC would have had to have been HUGE, probably a money loser in itself even if the system really did take off, and there is plenty of reason to suspect that it would't have. Players already would have had to buy a new system but also two new controllers to have enough buttons, but also a multitap. Most MK players are extremely casual and aren't going to drop that kind of bread.

Also, the Mk1 fad brought huge numbers to the Genesis platform for years on, but that was due to other factors. More people already had Genesis, the Genesis was already famous for having better sports games, the Genesis had Sonic. The MK thing really piggybacked on top of that...and it was fragile hype, even then. Only MK1 was better on Genesis, after that the SNES version had all the gory shit the arcade and Genesis versions had. It was too late by that point though and the far uglier Genesis versions stayed the standard because...I think MK fans can't read, maybe?

The hoard of SNK fighters that were eventually released in Japan weren't part of an expensive exclusivity deal. Also, and this isn't mentioned, they were Japanese games. No circa 1992 Japanese executive would have made that MK deal if even it wasn't fiscal suicide. MK doesn't sell in Japan. Its oiled up white trash muscle men ripping each others intensities out. Its (barely) interactive snuff porn, as far removed from Fatal Fury as it from Faces of Death: The Game.

[Arkhan]

The supergrafx could be added via an expansion port doodad clicker onner... it would just be a video add on for the most part.

And anyway, you could add a new CPU via expansion slot anyways.  Check out the SuperCPU for C64.

Thing shoves into the back of that piece of crap, making it a faster piece of crap!

[fragmare]

Where do you even BEGIN to list the PCE/TG16's missed opportunities???  There are so many!  As was mentioned previously in this thread, the SuperGrafx in and of itself a was a HUGE missed opportunity.  Maybe not in Japan.  That thing was going to fail there, no matter what.  But if they'd have delayed the US release a few months and released the SGX here in the US with, say, 50+ quality PCE games, the western market (for the most part) wouldn't have even known any better that it was derived from inferior hardware.  Then you'd have a situation where the PCE was still getting plenty of support in Japan and the SGX would have been getting support in the west, similar to the Genesis (assuming NEC America would have marketed the thing properly, which is an awfully big assumption).

With 50+ quality SGX games, yes, it very well could have been a success in America, but where do you get the 50+ million dollars to make such stuff? The weirdly huge success of the Genesis in the US happened with a library that was *heavily* US influenced. The EA sports stuff and MK with a lot of Sonic...and quite a few of the Sonic games were US developed.

Its not really a "missed opourtunity" if it could only happen in a parallel universe, at that point its just a fantasy.

Two things make this impossible 1) where the hell are those 50 games going to come from when even the Japanese only had 6, and they were not even slightly impressive 2) Americans are cheap-asses and the Japanese, especially back then, will buy almost any gadget you throw at them. If they didn't buy the SGX nobody would.

BTW, I am SO glad that never happened. I would have loved to see the TG16 succeed by being what it was, but having it transformed into a sleezy Football/Mortal Kombat machine. Oh lord. Good taste is a hurdle to be leaped, not limboed under!

I wasn't talking about 50+ newly developed SGX games.  I was talking about releasing the SGX in the US with 50+ ALREADY EXISTING PCE games, at launch.  The average US consumer, at the time, wouldn't have known any different that those games were developed in Japan for a slightly inferior system.  All people would have known here is that a system was launching with 50 or even 100 killer games, right out of the gate, and they meant business.  Oh, and BTW, i'm not talking about the ubiquitous bullshit software that trickled into the US market for the first year.  Think about all the Jp HuCards that were released by 1990 that you'd rate at 7+ out of 10.  Consider ALL those games being available at launch in the US.  Now THAT'S a strong system launch.

As for the system being an MK/sports machine, you're missing my point.  If games like MK and Madden had reached the US market, it would have contributed GREATLY to the success of the system in the west, and you'd have seen much better third party support for the system (because it would have been far more popular and had a larger user base).  Perhaps, then you'd have seen more things Contra, Final Fight, Rocket Knight, Gunstar Heroes, etc., not to mention English translations of all the games that never reached US shores, but should have (Dracula X, Gradius, Gradius II, Salamander, SF2' CE...)

[ccovell]

My guess is that NEC probably didn't anticipate the success of the PC Engine so they had the SGX in development to replace the PC Engine right from the get go but came time to release it 2 yrs later they were kinda caught in the middle since much resources already went into developing this thing...

The SGX was announced as a cynical way to defuse the pressure on the PCE by the upcoming Super Famicom, and newly-released Mega Drive.  It was a rush job in reaction to these newer, superior systems that had 2 background planes and other hyped features.  It looks like NEC made Hudson slap together an update as fast as possible with little regard to advancing the technology, really.  The SGX is so similar technically to the PCE that it didn't take many resources at all to design the thing.  Now the Power Console attachment, that's another story...

Just like systems such as the Apple III (and 32X), the SGX was "designed" by corporate.

[awack]

As people have suggested, the biggest lost opportunity was not having an over hyped, crap game, like MK or DKC.

I agree with fragmare..more of these games(and sports) would have meant more of the less popular but better games. I'm personally glad that didn't happen, it might have meant hundreds of sports games and generic platformers, at the cost of being the best system for shooters....and as turns out,  shmups hold up a hell of allot better than most platformers and all sports titles. 

[Arkhan]

If we would've gotten mortal kombat and EA sports games, the system would have been way more popular in the US. 

The average Americunt wanted to play shitty sports games and moronic fighters, apparently.

[spenoza]

Spenoza, that would have definitely been the way to go, but I don't think they could have done it AND managed to get the CD-ROM2 to market as early as they did.

Well, the CD-ROM attachment beat the SGX to market by a year or so... I'm not sure the CD-ROM would have suffered much by a delay of a year, given that, with few exceptions, the earliest CD-ROM games were less than stunning in every department except audio.

Given the SGX was possibly a very quick project, they might not even have known at the time the CD-ROM was released that the SGX was anywhere in the cards. Then again, if the stand-alone SGX early concept had been scrapped in favor of a CD-based SGX upgrade unit, it might have been easier for owners to swallow. I would also gather that with the rapid popularization of CD technology at the time that there would have been enough manufacturing process, technology, and part cost reductions in the intervening year since the CD-ROM addon's initial release that the SGX technology could have been rolled in without increasing the cost of the attachment.