The Nintendo Switch of the '90s: The PC Engine GT and Turbo Express! The Portable TurboGrafx-16!!
504In 1990, NEC released an amazing portable game machine that took the TV on the road...
(Chapter Markers and more below…)
Episode information
GTV 168 “The More You Know Gaming: PC Engine GT" Season 9 Episode 8
Original Airdate: April 18, 2024
Produced April 14-17, 2024
Recorded at Butsudan Studios and edited on my 14” MacBook M1 Pro! Edited and produced with Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, all paid for with Gainful Employment™ while riding the train to work and home, back and forth, day after day, and lunch breaks too!
0:00 GTV ID
0:10 Why The Nintendo Switch is Awesome!
0:29 Hop in the Wabac Machine
1:01 PC Engine GT
3:11 Turbo Express
3:50 PC Engine LT
4:08 End of Life
Here are all previous episodes of The More You Know Gaming!
TurboDuo https://youtu.be/eCsIJqQP8NY
Cassette Vision https://youtu.be/MaNbvyCluDw
Game Gear https://youtu.be/K3bvA41DY4I
PC-FX https://youtu.be/3mIY2BTLd5w
Atari Lynx https://youtu.be/qOE5IsK7t88
Great videos about the TurboGrafx Turbo Duo and PC Engine!
The Zonk Song https://youtu.be/uwKCKQWl1uQ
The More You Know: TurboDuo https://youtu.be/eCsIJqQP8NY
Who Are Kato & Ken? https://youtu.be/CtKuKTSjF_g
What REALLY Happened to Yuko After Valis III https://youtu.be/GgNLDalIBT4
Pac-Land Fever https://youtu.be/QDO9ynkxa7k
Twinbee! Be There With Bells On https://youtu.be/Dh-ISK4mngU
Bonk's Nomenclature https://youtu.be/U-m5MPGTMpA
Turbo-Grafx 16 Arcade Developer Interview https://youtu.be/0SAUfI5BBMA
At The End of the Rainbow https://youtu.be/g9j-EGPilRo
If you have a Nintendo Switch you don't need me to tell you that that absolute best feature going for it is the ability to take the same experience you get on the TV with you on the go! Or conversely, if you are always on the go you can take that mobile experience and plug it back into your tv whenever you have the time!
But the Switch is not the first to perfectly pull this off! Just hop in the Wabac Machine and turn the dial back.
Well ha.. ha. .yeah there was the Playstation Vita and the Vita TV. One of Sony’s most inelegant setups. There was also a cable to plug in the older PSP right into the TV, but only if you had the D-Connector input, which if your saying what the frigg is a D-Connector? Well, there you go.
NO! Turn the dial back some more!! To 1990!! Yeah! The same year that Bart Simpson got Kirsty out of Jail and Violator by Depeche Mode was released! That same year gave the world The PC Engine GT! The best solution to playing the same games on or off the TV ever created, at least until March 3rd, 2017. Bart and DM never left us all that time either…
The PC Engine GT is - bit for bit - a portable PC Engine, the game machine created by Hudson Soft and NEC That went head to head with Nintendo in the late 80s and early 90s. In America, the same hardware was called the Turbo-Grafx 16, which didn’t fare as well as had been hoped.
The GT came with a 2.6 inch screen in full color!! The fact that you could play games like PC Genjin, Galaga ’88, Kato-chan and Ken-chan or Bomberman on the GT was mind-blowing. Longer games like Neutopia had a password system so you could always continue in the place you left off.
So if you had a PC Engine, you already had a big library for your GT! And believe me you’d need to hang onto that money, because the GT sold for 45,000 yen! About $350 US dollars back then! But like the saying goes, you get what you pay for! Despite the unreal price tag, the GT sold over 1 and a half million units in Japan! Over 10% of the PC Engine user base. I’ll just put it this way. In Japan, before the bubble burst, you could sell anything at any price. If it was fairly novel and had MADE IN JAPAN stamped on the box, people would line up and buy it, and drop that money without batting an eyelash! A far cry from how things are today…
Ok, so enough about that, why is it called the GT Anyways? The G stands for Game and the T for Television, because it could do both! Add the TV Tuner and watch all your favorite Japanese shows about eating and shopping anywhere you could get a signal!
The U.S. got their own version of the GT, rebranded the Turbo Express! At the dead on arrival price of $249 with no games included! Yikes! To make things worse, the price actually went UP!! for a while, because all that parts inside suddenly got more expensive! To compensate, NEC offered free games! Which was a pretty sweet deal! Still, with the microscopic user base of TurboGrafx-16 owners and the giant upfront cost, The Turbo Express basically went unnoticed, only to be remembered when you took that trip to Babbage’s and gawked at all those Non-Nintendo, Non-Sega oddities you couldn’t find anywhere else. The price eventually fell to $199, boosting overall sales to 27.