{"id":5090,"date":"2024-12-30T17:58:38","date_gmt":"2024-12-30T17:58:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/?p=5090"},"modified":"2024-12-30T17:58:38","modified_gmt":"2024-12-30T17:58:38","slug":"pc-engine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/2024\/12\/pc-engine\/","title":{"rendered":"PC Engine"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img src=\"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/see\/uploads\/big\/2a73e2576de8cfd6c447143eb08f7143.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>I was reading about the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/TurboGrafx-16\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">PC-Engine<\/a>, refreshing my memory. It\u2019s incredible how everything went wrong internationally for NEC, a company born in <em>1899<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s the 1990s and most things are still local and national, but on the verge of getting international. In a way, the 90s business-wise were all about how to scale to the world. And it\u2019s a daunting task.<\/p>\n<p>NEC is very successful in Japan with its console. It\u2019s well designed for the local-first Japanese market. NEC thinks about expanding worldwide. Everything goes wrong:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>They change the name from PC-Engine to Turbografx-16, big mistake.<\/li>\n<li>The console\u2019s small size is a great feature in Japan, it\u2019s not outside (though to this day I still can\u2019t believe how small that console was).<\/li>\n<li>The console only has one joypad port, which is kind of wild as competitors doing really well (Nintendo and Sega), have two ports since the mid 80s.<\/li>\n<li>NEC is super conservative on the chip design which stiffens game development a lot while asking customers to buy add-ons.<\/li>\n<li><em>17<\/em> models were made. Imagine the costs. Meanwhile Sega and Nintendo had one 16-bit console for all markets, for 10 years. One casing, one design, just different A\/V outputs.<\/li>\n<li>Horrible marketing due to massive cultural differences I imagine. They tried to set up holdings to market their consoles better, it didn\u2019t work.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Despite all those issues and the fact that the console was never successful outside of Japan, the PC Engine stays in most game aficionados\u2019 minds as <em>the future<\/em>. As the <em>\u201cone day, I\u2019ll have it and I\u2019ll play CD-ROM games in your face.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p><img src=\"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/see\/uploads\/big\/e1c5cfea2e11326a5ade2c5d15951e78.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>This still looks dope. Late 80s tech has tons of charm. When manufacturers could mold plastic as much as they wanted, when toxicity to the planet didn\u2019t matter, when economies of scale were not tight, when it was still possible to design, build, and see what it does.<\/p>\n<p><em>What it could have been.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was reading about the PC-Engine, refreshing my memory. It\u2019s incredible how everything went wrong internationally for NEC, a company born in 1899. It\u2019s the 1990s and most things are still local and national, but on the verge of getting international. In a way, the 90s business-wise were all about how to scale to the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5090"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5090"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5091,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5090\/revisions\/5091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}