Struggles in North America
Initially, the TurboGrafx-16 sold well in North America, but it generally suffered from a lack of support from third-party software developers and publishers. One reason for this was that many larger software companies such as Konami supported the PC Engine in Japan, but also produced games for Nintendo. Due to their exclusivity practises, many developers were compelled to pick the immensely popular NES over the upstart NEC console, resulting in a catch-22 for the TurboGrafx-16: most developers would only consider taking a risk on the TG-16 if it became more popular, and yet it could not accomplish this because only a handful of North American publishers would support it. As a result, most of the games published for the TG-16 were produced by NEC and Hudson Soft.
Another reason for the TG-16's lack of success in North America was the system's marketing. NEC of Japan's marketing campaign for the PC Engine was mainly targeted to the largest metropolitan areas in the country. This proved to be quite successful there, but when the same kind of marketing was used in the much larger North American market, it resulted in a lack of public awareness outside of the big cities. The TG-16 ended up being far more competitive and popular in certain local markets such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, while in smaller and more spread-out areas, it garnered less success.
The TurboGrafx-16 was originally marketed in North America by NEC Home Electronics based in Wood Dale, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. As the system's popularity fell, the platform was handed over to a new company called Turbo Technologies Incorporated (TTI), based in Los Angeles, California. This company was composed mainly of former NEC Home Electronics and Hudson Soft employees, and it essentially took over all marketing and first-party software development for the struggling system.
By 1991, the Sega Genesis had clearly surpassed the TurboGrafx-16, putting NEC's console in a distant fourth place in the video game market (Nintendo held the #2 and #3 places with the brand new SNES and the aging but still popular NES respectively). NEC, who was relatively new to the market, had an increasingly difficult time convincing consumers who already owned a Sega or Nintendo system to give the TG-16 a try. This may have been in part to the somewhat fractured brand identity of the various systems: in a mascot-heavy era of gaming, the TurboGrafx-16 was represented by Bonk, while advertising comic books were inserted into copies of various gaming magazines, featuring characters such as the alter-ego of game developer Jonathan C. Brandstetter: Johnny Turbo.
Compounding the problem was that the vast majority of the titles that made the system so successful in Japan were produced for the CD-ROM add-on. In the American market, this add-on was difficult to find outside of large cities, and it was widely considered to be overpriced (debuting at nearly $400). TTI tried to address this issue by releasing a combination system called the TurboDuo, as well as dropping the price of the CD add-on to around $150. Unfortunately, at $300, the cost of the TurboDuo was still too high for most American consumers, even when NEC took the bold step of including seven pack-in titles and a coupon book with the system. Despite all these efforts, the company failed to attract much of a mainstream audience.
Many of the CD games for the Turbo platform were well-received, but the cost of the add-on system was a strong deterrent to buyers, especially when the competition sold for considerably less. Some of the most popular Japanese releases, such as Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, Ys IV: The Dawn of Ys, Tengai Makyo II: Manjimaru and Snatcher, never made it to North American shelves (later, the PC Engine version of Snatcher was converted over to the Sega CD in North America, Europe and Australia, but never was released in Japan. Castlevania: Rondo of Blood was eventually released on the Wii Virtual Console as an import game outside of Japan, and fully translated as part of the Dracula X Chronicles on PSP).
Read more about this topic: TurboGrafx-16
Famous quotes containing the words struggles, north and/or america:
“These were not men, they were battlefields. And over them, like the sky, arched their sense of harmony, their sense of beauty and rest against which their misery and their struggles were an offence, to which their misery and their struggles were the only approaches they could make, of which their misery and their struggles were an integral part.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“We should declare war on North Vietnam.... We could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be home by Christmas.”
—Ronald Reagan (b. 1911)
“People nowadays have such high hopes of America and the political conditions obtaining there that one might say the desires, at least the secret desires, of all enlightened Europeans are deflected to the west, like our magnetic needles.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)