It was 1990, and I had just read about a revolutionary video game system only available in Japan. The tantalizing article in GamePro was short and to the point, making me covet this amazing game system (with its yummy 16-bit graphics) all the more. Everything about it – from the weird name, to its diminutive size, to its plethora of exotic game titles – was the stuff of dreams for a 12-year old American video game geek. I obsessed: would it ever be released in the U.S.A.??

Not long after I heard about the PC Engine, a friend of mine actually got one! On a trip to Japan, his parents bought him a PC Engine, a Famicom, and a slew of games. (It was obvious to me that his parents really loved him.) We spent many weekends playing Dragon Spirit and PC Genjin and I knew that when the PC Engine was available in the US I had to have one.Now, if you know anything about video games and gaming consoles, you likely know the story of the US-version of this revolutionary game system. If you’re not familiar with this product, let me tell you a few of the cool aspects of the PC Engine:

#1 It was elegant. You could hold this tiny, sleek, white game console in the palm of your hand. The games were on small cards. It was everything that the big black clunky American game systems were not.

#2 The game box art was cool. As an anime fan (back when typical fare was a Japanese-language bootleg of Akira I bought at a comic-book convention), I loved the artwork on the PC Engine games. The pictures were immensely appealing and made me want to play the games.

#3 The games were top-notch. There were tons of cool games available for the PC Engine. And many of them were really weird – but really fun.

So the PC Engine had a lot going for it as a video game system. There were a lot of 13-year-olds like me, and you’d have to assume that NEC could translate the games and sell the exact same thing to American teens and make a ton of money. Right? Right. But that’s not what NEC of America did. They turned the ultra-kickass PC Engine into a totally different product. Here are the steps they took:

1. They super-sized it. They figured a small game system wouldn’t make it in the land of Cadillac’s, Lincoln Continentals, and Ford F-150s – so they made the American version of the system three times as big. No longer was it a sleek-looking addition to the entertainment center; now it was an oddly-shaped space hog.
2. They changed the name. Why they did this, I’ll never know for sure – but it was an imbecilic idea. I think I know how it went down: some executive at a board-room meeting elecited ideas from his staff. “You know,” someone piped up, “today’s kids want everything to be extreme and loud…I think we need to change the name to something more ‘totally awesome’.” It went downhill from there, until eventually they concocted a descriptive but totally & radically lame moniker.
3. They used different artwork for the games. Different and more retarded-looking artwork, that is. Instead of big-eyed anime chicks and spiky-haired warriors with swords and ultra-cool robots there were strange and sometimes irrelevant pictures that were probably drawn by some NEC exec’s nephew. Who wasn’t a very good artist. I really mean it: almost all TurboGrafx-16 artwork absolutely sucked. Take at look at the following examples if you dare:

Who in their right mind would replace cool artwork (i.e. the Japanese artwork) with crappy artwork (the TurboGrafx-16 art)? That’s right: the TurboGrafx-16 marketing department was insane.

I really believe that the biggest cause of the TG-16’s failure was bad marketing. From the bad decision regarding it’s new name, to its clunky new look, to it’s offensively horrid box art – the presentation of the product was an abysmal failure.

And I guess that tells us something else: even if a product functions and performs well, consumers will shy away from it if it doesn’t look like a good product. So the lesson here is to present yourself professionally, present your business as the best, present your product as a quality product, etc. because presentation can make all the difference in whether you are successful or not!

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[tags]pc engine, turbografx-16, tg-16, 16-bit, video game, bonk’s adventure, dragon spirit, nec, hudson, turbografix, famicom, gamefly, arcade, console, nintendo, wii[/tags]

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