TOKYO -- Japan is full of obscure videogame hardware that never left the country, often for excellent reason. Here's one.
The PC Engine SuperGrafx is one of the oddest and most misunderstood pieces of hardware in gaming history. NEC's PC Engine, released in 1987, had only the barest of power upgrades over the reigning 8-bit Nintendo. The enhanced graphics and optional CD-ROM capability helped PC Engine to a reasonably successful 2nd place position in Japan, even as it tanked in the U.S. as the TurboGrafx-16.
But as the 80's came to a close, NES saw the writing on the wall: Nintendo was about to release its Super Famicom, and PC Engine was underpowered in comparison. So some poor sap came up with a solution -- release a version of the system with upgraded graphics. Borrowing the naming convention of the U.S. branch, they released SuperGrafx in 1989. It could play all the PC Engine games, plus its own exclusive games.
SuperGrafx wasn't a major upgrade over PC Engine -- it was still an 8-bit console, and the innards were almost identical except for some extra RAM and another graphics chip. SuperGrafx served mostly as an object lesson to other videogame makers, and that lesson was do not ever do something like this. The console flopped terribly -- NEC only released a handful of games for SuperGrafx, which didn't look that much different than normal PC Engine games. They quickly ended support for the console and concentrated on making regular old games on cartridge and CD.
So as one of gaming's biggest blunders, SuperGrafx is an interesting piece of history to own, a physical reminder that producing a barely-there upgrade to your two-year-old console is a terrible idea, because consumers can't perceive the difference and game creators won't bother creating titles for a tiny new audience.
I've been thinking of buying one for a while, but decided to take the plunge this week in Akihabara. I had SuperGrafx on the brain ever since one of the system's games came to Virtual Console in Japan this week.
Enabler Jean Snow and I looked all around the city for SuperGrafx games, but couldn't find very many of them. The hilarious thing, as I discovered later, is that we'd actually found every game ever released for the system, as there are only five:
- Battle Ace, a lame and very inexpensive first-person air combat game;
- Dai Makaimura, a game in the Ghosts n' Goblins series;
- 1941: Counterattack, from Capcom's top-down shooter series;
- Madouou Granzort, an action game based on a kids' anime series; and
- Aldynes, a horizontal shooter.
I'd bought Battle Ace and Dai Makaimura for 800 yen and 3000 yen, respectively, and the SuperGrafx itself (no box) cost 8500 yen. So I'm already a little under $150 in the hole on this stupid, stupid console. And now that I know I'm a mere three games away from completion, I think I'm going to go finish the collection off this morning.
"But wait, Chris," you might say to me if we were on a first-name basis, which we are not. "Wasn't there a PC Engine game that had enhanced graphics when you put it into the SuperGrafx?"
Indeed there was: Darius Plus, another shooter. So I will also of course attempt to track this down, just for completeness' sake.
"But wait, Chris," you say again, carelessly disposing of formalities. "Isn't it true that you can't be said to have a complete SuperGrafx collection unless you also own Darius Alpha, another game with enhanced graphics that was only given out as a contest prize, was limited to only 1000 copies, and costs $1000 in Akihabara?"
No, for the same reason that you would not so rudely accuse someone of not having a complete NES collection unless they owned a World Championship cartridge.
Image: Chris Kohler/Wired.com
