The Launch of the TurboGrafx-16 (1989) | Classic Gaming Quarterly 

I had ONE friend who had one back in the day. His dad drove a Delorean. They were rich.

My uncle worked for NEC in 1989-90, and my brother purchased a TG-16 through him which we got just before Christmas that year-- along with The Legendary Axe and Blazing Lazers. We had an absolute blast with the console, and before I graduated high school and left home in June of 1990, we had added Alien Crush, Dungeon Explorer, World Class Baseball, Splatterhouse, and Military Madness to his library. TG--16/PCE games have a very distinct sound. I've always loved the music; it's a step up from the NES, but different than the 16-bit machines that followed. As you pointed out, the OST for The Legendary Axe really stands out... and both Blazing Lazers and Dungeon Explorer have fantastic soundtracks as well. Sadly, my brother fell out of his love of video games a couple of years later and sold everything... but watching videos like this triggers great memories of us tackling these games together and having a great time doing so. The TG-16 deserved a better fate here in the USA, I believe, and it's always nice to see the system getting coverage & recognition like this. Keep up the great work, sir.

Dude as a 80's kid this brings me nice memories from my childhood, greetings from chile! Btw great channel!

My father and I played Power Golf for hours on end for a LOOOOOOONG time. lol We loved that game.

Man this episode brought back some great memories. I got a TG16 a year after launch, already had a Genesis, and I just loved it. Something about the music and sound effects from the TG...it's got a unique sound to it, with some fantastic soundtracks, especially Dungeon Explorer, Legendary Axe and Alien Crush mentioned in this episode. Later I got the CD add on and was blown away by many titles like Y's 1&2, Lords/Gates of Thunder, Rondo of Blood and more. I regret selling my old system, but recently got a hold of one with a Booster. Need to find me a CD-Rom now!

Every time I hear you say "weekend rental" I get nostalgic for the old days as a kid when your parents would take you out to rent a game/movie for the weekend after school on Fridays... Ah, the good old days where the most you had to worry about was picking something that would last you the weekend and not be shitty, lol. Also, because of this I'm realizing you mention weekend rentals at least once in nearly every single video, which isn't a bad thing, just an observation ;)

The TG16 was my first "16-Bit" console. It was so special to me since nobody I knew had one or even knew what it was. I was "that guy" with a TG16 and was proud of it. Everyone I knew had the Genesis or the NES so I wanted something different. I didn't regret my purchase one bit.

Nice shout-out to Jaki Crush. I had that game growing up and freaking loved it. The fact that it had 'boss level' areas blew my mind at the time.

[Coury] Fantastically done episode. As someone who spent a bit of time with the console around its release, but never owned one til fairly recently, I can honestly say that I missed out... and am paying the price for it.

Thanks for this video! I got a TurboGrafx 16 for Christmas in 1989 and I absolutely loved Legendary Axe, China Warrior, Dragon Spirit and Dungeon Explorer. I still have the system and the turbo booster and the controllers work well. The music was and is great in these games. Watching this reminded me of being a teenager again.

I really like these more "serious" reviews on retro gaming. It's still really fun for me to watch and I get to actually learn something I might not know about these old systems. I subscribed as soon as I heard the tone of this review. Now I can't wait to check out your other console reviews. I hope you keep making these. I'm sure I'm not alone either. Thanks.

I played a lot of Vigilante on the master system back in 89, its a good game for its time

I deliberated endlessly over which console to get, but the TG16's colors and sounds got me from the start, and some games are timeless classics. I'll tell you why the system failed though, in a way that no one talks about: lack of rentals. Genesis games were out for rental almost instantly when the system came out and I'd already been renting NES games for years, but in all the years following I only ever saw one store renting TG16 titles, and the supply was very limited. This meant I had to buy any title I wanted to try (no refunds of course), and also meant many kids weren't even aware of the system. I think they really missed the boat on that one.

I remember playing the console about 4 times as a kid at my buddy's house who was the only kid I knew with it. I loved it and it was pretty ahead of its time. Now that I am old, I can afford to collect for the TG16/Duo.

Even though I talk to you on Twitter, I never put it together somehow. Saw this video a while back. Worth multiple views! Oh ya, that kid you speak of, was me!

Amazing video I remember my younger brother had that for Christmas of 1989. I think I played that video console more than he did as I managed to complete the games and he would just love watching me doing so. Good memories.

Great video.. I really dig the set up and how you lay it all out. The audio is super clean and the video looks pretty. The facts are on point and your opinion isnt forced...(all things I aspire for my channel to be lol) for all of these reasons.. you get a sub. Cant wait to see more

The games were amazing for their time. Makes you wonder where might the console have gone if it had taken off. I feel NEC is the only console outside of Nintendo and SEGA that truly deserved a chance to see where it could go. SEGA & Atari had their chance and fought hard but NEC tried so hard but was never given a chance.

Hey really great work. You really had a lot of great info for this video. The Turbo Grafx 16 was a system that I had a lot of fun with. Some of the CD games were incredible. So many great rpgs, shooters and action games in that TG16 hu card and CD library.

There's something very early-90s about your narration and gravitas. It's great! Thanks for the good reviews.

"But the plot was completely changed during localization and is now amazingly stupid.." Haha my goodness that is great

I guess it was 1989 when I saw and played the TG16 at a Children's Palace. I played Keith Courage and I never forgot the gun headed enemies. I rarely saw the system after that encounter and I never knew anyone that had it. After that day the TG16 just seemed to fade away and Nintendo and Sega dominated the video game market in my area of the U.S. for years to come. Thanks for the history lesson.

Over here in the uk we got a limited release of the machine thru telegames. I have a pc engine and turbo grafx now and i love it. You laughed at someone for having a turbo grafx16 at school? here in the uk we laughed at someone if they had a NES when i was in secondary school everyone has a sega master system

+1 to the research done in this vid. Not that I wasn't expecting it to be well done like the others, but the extra back story was very expansive. Nice.

An absolutely fantastic and thorough review! I really learned a lot from everything you presented here and I'm glad you called out our younger, less informed reviewers who inaccurately criticize China Warrior and oversimplify Dungeon Explorer as a "Gauntlet" clone. Just subbed and am going to go through all of your other videos. Keep up the good work! :)

Very cool video. As a kid, I never even laid eyes on a TG-16 outside of magazine ads. I just got my first PC Engine and I couldn't be happier. I love this system! Much moreso now than I would have back in the day, since I was all about the SNES RPGs in the early 90s, but prefer shooters and action-platformers these days.

The TG-16 was a very good system for its time. However, when stacked against SEGA's superior hardware combined Tom Kalisnke's mastery of marketing, it really had no real fighting chance in the US market.

I was the one kid who had one in my school and all my friends loved to play bomber-man. They knew it rocked

Great video. I was one of those people you mentioned at the beginning of the video who owned and was a die hard fan of the TurboGrafx-16 back in the days, but was mocked for it, becasue it was not as popular as the Genesis or Super NES.

Excellent video bro, a quite in depth coverage of the Turbografx 16 console and available launch games.

Thumbs up due to the fact no one ever covers Blazing Lazers. That game was the system seller back in the day. Would like to see more coverage including Bonk, Neutopia and others!

"people who like to repeat things that they hear other people say" 🤣 I love the tone

Really glad I discovered this channel. GameSack, HappyConsoleGamer, MetalJesusRocks....RU-vid could always use more dudes showing their love for retro games :)

I was lucky enough to get a TG-16 when I was a kid, it was a $99 special that came packed in with Keith Courage and Bonk's Adventure. I was also not the only kid in school with one, so I was able to borrow and play other games such as Legendary Axe and Aero Blasters. Unfortunately not long after buying this, the AV port started getting loose and I was unable to get it to work. I never replaced it since the system was no longer sold in stores and eventually got a Genesis.

I remember as a young man selling these at Radio Shack...own a TG16 and PC Engine these days...a very decent piece of tech.

These videos never cease to amaze me. The best on RU-vid for sure.

i really like your videos, the information you provide and the fact that you seem to spent more time preparing your vids, instead of uploading a video every week!

Never heard of it!

great video man ! :) love the TurboGrafx-16 ... keep the great work up

My buddy's dad had one and wouldn't let any of the kids play it or even go near it so we just made fun of him

I was the kid in my neighborhood who had the Turbo Graphic-16. And they made fun of me too, until I got everyone together to play 5 player games years before the SNES and Genesis. There was Moto Roader, Bomberman, Dungeon Explorer, and Battle Royal. Shooters were the best on the TG-16. It had Alien Crush and Devil's Crush two of the best pinball games ever made. It even had a 2-player racing RPG, Final Lap Twin. I even got some mileage out of that system when I took it to college before the Playstation dominated the market.

I wanted a TurboGrafx back in 1990 for Pac-Land, Splatterhouse, and Bonk alone. I got a Sega Genesis (along with Ghouls and Ghost, Castle of Illusion, and Ghostbusters) that year and my cousin (who lived the next block over) got the TG-16 (along with Alien Crush, Blazing Lazers, and Ninja Spirit). I got the games I wanted and played them over his house until I got my TurboDuo in 1993 for Xmas. :P

Damn, it seems like i need a TurboGrafx/PC-Engine, 5 joypads, the Turbo Tap & Dungeon Explorer to play with some friends, looks like a lot of fun! Thanks for the video, keep it up bro!

About the racing game...you know there were trucks racing offroad in Paris-Dakar-Paris rally, right?

The Legendary Axe is bad ass! I'm loving it.

Man happy to have stumbled across this channel, great stuff man, subbed!

This video was really informative and gives me a much better idea as to why the TurboGrafx sadly didn't succeed.

Glad I found this channel pretty cool stuff you got here subscribed!

The Off Road trucks are support trucks for the rally drivers, technically the teams are not allowed to be supported. So the semi trucks are part of the Dakkar rally, so by entering the rally the rules says that you can be helped by fellow "racers". Hence why you see semi trucks in the game.

In blazing lazers there are power ups you can shoot that make a 'ping' noise. If you keep shooting them they turn into a glowing ball that you can collect to blow up everything on the screen. This also has the effect of allowing you to restart immediately from where you were blown up. As a kid I didn't know this, but I always got to max power quickly and didn't need extra power ups, so I shot the power ups into glow balls :). I could beat the game on 1 credit everytime since I could continue on the final boss.

Loved my TG-16 Bonk's Adventure was so good

An incredibly detailed synopsis. Nice job!! My only disagreement is the number of quality titles available. I got the TG16 at launch for Christmas. The number of games actually AVAILABLE in stores was extremely limited. I remember searching every local gaming store and most of the classics we now know and love were very hard to find back in the day. It seemed that most stores gave up on the system early on. And there was no internet so no way to buy online. So most of us were stuck with a few good games and a bunch of duds. The TG16 should have won the console war over the Genesis, but poor marketing and support killed the system. When NEC finally rebooted their marketing strategy it was too little too late. It's a shame. But you are right, the colorful graphics on this system really gave it a look and style of its own.

I love the TurboGrafx-16. I still have mine (and it still fully works), and I have the TurboExpress which was the best handheld at the time since it played the original console's turbo chips directly. The only drawback was the screen resolution was so bad, you couldn't read the tiny text of most games. However, I really only played Devil's Crush which I've always thought was better than Alien Crush by far, and it was the perfect game for the TurboExpress' tiny screen. My next best favorite was Military Madness. Best strategy game right up until the 'Advance Wars' series came out on GameBoy Advance.

Best retro game show CGQ. I think I've seen each of these launch videos a dozen times. Still fun to watch when I'm bored

Pretty informative video! Glad to see some love for Dungeon Explorer, I played the hell out of DE2 on the Turbo CD, when my friend owned one.

I'm gonna assume you don't know why the "big-rigs" are there in the off road sections of Victory Run because you don't know what the Paris Dakar rally is ;)

I got a story...my dad used to be a trash truck driver back in the day and I think it was Xmas of ‘93 my dad comes out w 2 huge boxes wrapped up and me and my brothers were all stoked and we opened them and it was 2 Turbo Grafx 16’s (loooong after its death 💀) As we were already on the Genesis and SNES tough, we were like wtf is this and my dad says “These shits cost me a pretty penny so you better take care of them.” (He actually found them lol). Only one place called Electronic Boutique still had games but that was it. Needless to say it collected dust but just thought I’d share lol...(I still have it somewhere too 😄)

Well, there are trucks competing in the Dakar Rally, so I guess they were just trying to make Victory Run a little more realistic...

"Which I thought would be smaller" Don't know why but I actually laughed out loud when I heard that.

The TG16/PC Engine was a great system. Only about 90 of it's 200+ games got released in NA, and in general they failed to properly market it, etc. It was popular in Japan, moreso than the Megadrive in fact. The weird thing about the TG16, is that Hudson was the main exclusive developer for the system, yet they still also made games for NES, GB and SNES.

Very cool.. i luv da blazing lazers.. i would like to see more turbo games / hidden gems.. think about doing another turbo episode sometime.. thanks

I bought the TurboGrafx-16 in the fall of 1990, just over a year after it came out in the U.S. and about 6 months after I got the Genesis. The amazing thing was, with the purchase of the TurboGrafx-16 I had the mail-in offer for my choice of a free game. I chose R-TYPE because it was one of the most talked about games on the PC-Engine (released in two parts in Japan). I also really enjoyed the Sega Master System version of R-Type. So anyway, fall 1990 goes by and in the afternoon of Christmas Eve, a UPS truck shows up and the delivery guy has my free copy of TG-16 R-TYPE... I'll never forget that! I played that game and Military Madness the most of any games on TG-16.

Fantastic review man!!! Thank you!! I remember this from my single digit aged childhood. My older brother rented it a couple weekends in a row. Being the àsshole older sibling he was at the time, I spent a lot more time watching, than I did playing. However, I still remember being mesmerized by a new system and new games .

Keith Courage and Legendary Axe really pissed me off as a six year old. I hated those spikes you couldn't see until you fell into them.

OMG love this console. Taking it to the hoop is a really good basketball game. It features players with huge heads and small bodies. The bonks games are fun as well. Keith courage came with my console. I like it. I like the music in the overworld. But love the music in the underworld. I have my original console and those two hucards. But dont play it anymore. Since I don't have time to play games that I cant save for later play. So I play these games on my nes classic. That way I have 4 save states for each game. Perfect!

I remember when I was 7 my father's cousins in they're late 20's had a TurboGrafx and told my "F@#k Nintendo, this is the best" my pops that Christmas bought me one with Keith Courage, bonk and bonk 2.

Growing up poor w/ cheap parents has its benefits - we always got the "off brand" consoles when they were discontinued, and we ended up getting into all sorts of obscure games years before they were considered classic. I got a TG16 X Mas 1992 for $50 at Toys R Us, and ALL the games were only $10. Parasol Stars was one of my best finds. At least till I got a Genesis and picked up Gunstar Heroes on clearance at the same store...

6:02 old gamepro magazine reviews lol. Neogeo games would always have 5.0-5.0-5.0-5.0 on their games lol

I still want one.

Hello Kanye fans.

These videos sure do take me back. I got a TurboGrafx-16 when I was a kid, but only after NEC dropped the price to $99 due to poor sales. It was a cool system, although the way they nickel'd and dime'd you for little things that came standard with the Genesis, I can see why it wasn't very popular (with parents at least). There were so many games I wanted for it back then that I would never get to play until 20 years later due to rerelease and emulation.

It's funny that you say that China Warrior is reminiscent of games like Kung Fu... as the game on the PC Engine is called The Kung Fu.

I always liked the look and style of the TG-16. Those controllers were great, though they had a short cord. Splatterhouse, the original Street Fighter and Castlevania: Rondo of Blood were all really good games for the system.

We had a PAL version of it in the UK,which seems kind of odd now,,I guess in retrospect they wanted a global footprint but, I'd of thought they would of wanted some success in the US before spending money on rejigging it for (shitty)50Hz PAL.Never seen one physically here,only on ebay.Great video BTW.

very nice channel and love your videos! sure bring back memories

i was that 1 kid that had a Turbo Grafx-16

how have I never heard of this console?! it was even in my era of consoles. travesty.. what a machine though! I would have loved to have owned one, to be that guy that had the one console no one else did.. Or even wanted. everyone loves the underdog!! love the vid

Blazing Lazers was a launch title? That's a strong start for the console.

This system shot itself in the foot by only having one controller port.

Nice rundown, well done. As one of those mythical kids that actually owned a tg16 (and had 2 friends with one!) I would love to see you do a video on ys book 1&2, preferably from the perspective of a 14 year old kid in '91....blew our minds when the intermrssion kicked in between book 1 and 2!

YES YES YES DANIEL BRYAN CHANT! This was AWESOME 👍

I couldn't care less for the system before I watched this video, but now, i really like it

I started gaming life at the release of the Sega Genesis. Then I got a SNES as a second system when it released. I ran across the Turbo Grafx 16 one day at a local toys-r-us. I knew what it was from game magazines. I purchased one and never looked back. This became my favorite console of all time and has remained my top choice in retro gaming today. I even own a PC Engine now, plus a Turbo duo, and a Turbo Express. I still have my Genesis and the SNES, but this system gets all the love. I have became a retro gamer over the years having more affection for those order games than anything the modern systems can offer. Great posting man. This console failed on the US soil due to the crappy marketing that NEC gave it. They just did not understand our culture. If this system had been marketed, at the start, with some top notch titles it would have been more successful. Not saying that it would have been bigger than the other two guys, but it would have had more of an impact, longer life span, regardless of the power under the hood. The games have always been the make or break of a console.

i was the only one out of my friends that had the tgs as i called it but i loved it

There were over 500 titles out, in Japan, when the sabotaged US version was released, as well as about 50 peripherals. It is criminal how badly the marketing idiots screwed it up!

real proper review, well done!

Actually, the Legendary Axe was a joint collaboration effort between Hudson and Atlus. Then they hired Victor to publish it. Jun Chikuma did the music to the game.

You were really thorough👌👌 Nice job

Keith Courage was a good game back in the day.

Love TG 16 very underrated had this with snes and sega

Great video man! I really like these launch spectacular videos, and I'll give a +1 for the Sega Saturn launch . And it was really fun to get some information about a system that was never released here in Europe :)

Whoa.. move over Gaming Historian, you got some competition :)

Sega master system: I always wondered why there was a flow chart printed on the fucking console.

Watching all your vids! Brings back good memories.

Ah forgot about vigilante, I played this in the arcade. I looks like the port the turbo gfx was pretty identical

Thanks for your job man, i really appreciate it, greetings from Mexico :D

i have an incredible amount of appreciation of this system I never played or owned.

Amazing Video, seriously this was History channel-worthy! I was an early adopter, bought it here in Chicago in 1990 at Toys R Us. I remember staring at the 'wall of game tickets' and being sold on it, LOL. I recently found one that an ex NEC employee had sitting in a box with 4 controllers, a turbotap and 10 games complete in case, all in mint condition. I got my childhood back for $175. Thank you for this video, it brought back some very sentimental memories.

Who else misses pack in games?