The calendar having flipped to August 2014, we are now 25 years out from the American launch of the TurboGrafx-16, which according to multiple sources launched at the end of August 1989. Holy hell, folks. What’s this feeling…? Oh, yes. Looming mortality.
As is my wont, I’ve put together a large retrospective on the system for USgamer. This time I asked Jaz to contribute, since he was an avid enthusiast of the system in the day whereas I knew it as the weird system with the caveman that you could pay to play by the hour at Putt-Putt’s arcade. (The system that tried to sell us on its graphical superiority by comparing Vigilante to Super Mario Bros., which was four years old at the time and hardly representative of the NES’s best.) He was a hardcore fan, to be exact; based in the UK as he was, gaining access to the TG-16 or PC Engine meant he had to import it (or at least talk the publisher of his magazine to foot the bill). You can tell which parts he contributed; they’re the colloquial bits, as opposed to my dry, dull text.
Anyway, you can add this to my growing catalog of dry, dull retrospectives for USg.
- Nintendo Game Boy
- Atari Lynx
- Bandai WonderSwan
- Sega SG-1000
- Sega Genesis (I actually don’t remember writing this!?)
- The MSX standard
- Nintendo Power
- Nintendo Famicom
- Atari VCS Vs. Japan
And I have a bunch slated for the next six months or so. Once I get every system ever made written about, I can finally transcend this plane of existence and return to my home dimension.
P.S. We also put together a video to go with the TG16 piece, because that’s how we do.
You didn’t remember writing the 25 th Anniversary piece for the Mega Drive last year? That was a great piece. Did you have to get drunk to write about the Genesis or something :)
Yeah, I wrote it in the same period of time when I had a month to relocate my entire life across the country while also still covering Tokyo Game Show and handling a bunch of big reviews. Everything from last fall is a total blur, to be honest.