Johnny Turbo and poor marketing's role in the failure of the Turbografx-16.

[Steve W]

Off topic but why won't Google Goggles on my Android do translation?

If your Android phone is anything like mine, it's because it sucks. If I ever meet an Android programmer, I'll kick 'em in the balls.

I think distribution plays a role in its failure to, never once as a kid did I see a TG-16 for sale. KB toys never had it, K-Mart [which was basically Walmart in power/sales back then] never had it. I also never saw one at Sears or Jcpenny back then.

Toys R' Us had them, and GameStop, Electronics Boutique, and other game stores like Funcoland had them. If you were in a city, you had access to Turbo systems and games. You had to keep an eye out for them, but they were there. Out in the boonies, not so much. GameStop back in the day was a good place to get games, since after a while they'd mark them down. I bought my Bonk 3 there marked down to $19!

But was releasing a bunch of niche titles really a way to mass market success?

But they didn't need to get mass market success. There's nothing wrong with a niche system, just look at the Neo-Geo. They were getting into a foreign market for the first time that they had no experience in, so the best they could hope for was being a niche player (Sony went mass market on their first try with the Playstation, but they spent billions to get there, and NEC didn't have that luxury). And they couldn't even manage that. When it comes down to it, the games make the system. And not a lot of great games made it over, just the easiest games to 'port'. Which is why there's so many shooters on the TG-16, very minimal text altering required.

[Bojay1997]

If your Android phone is anything like mine, it's because it sucks. If I ever meet an Android programmer, I'll kick 'em in the balls.


Toys R' Us had them, and GameStop, Electronics Boutique, and other game stores like Funcoland had them. If you were in a city, you had access to Turbo systems and games. You had to keep an eye out for them, but they were there. Out in the boonies, not so much. GameStop back in the day was a good place to get games, since after a while they'd mark them down. I bought my Bonk 3 there marked down to $19!


But they didn't need to get mass market success. There's nothing wrong with a niche system, just look at the Neo-Geo. They were getting into a foreign market for the first time that they had no experience in, so the best they could hope for was being a niche player (Sony went mass market on their first try with the Playstation, but they spent billions to get there, and NEC didn't have that luxury). And they couldn't even manage that. When it comes down to it, the games make the system. And not a lot of great games made it over, just the easiest games to 'port'. Which is why there's so many shooters on the TG-16, very minimal text altering required.

NEC was not some tiny company like SNK was in the 90s. They were huge in computers, televisions, industrial and consumer products and the PC Engine had sold quite well in Japan. Their expectation was to launch a mass market product, not some niche product like the Neo Geo AES that can sell a couple thousand copies of a game at $300 and still turn a decent profit. Plus, SNK had a large arcade market at the time and the games were consistent across the AES and MVS platforms, were arcade oriented (i.e. no RPGs, but plenty of fighting games, SHMUPS and action games that required little text) and in dual English and Japanese for the most part which meant that the investment and risk was on the arcade side and the home market was just an easy additional revenue stream.

[Icarus Moonsight]

I don't like to crap on anyone's sacred cows if it can be avoided, so accept my apologies.

I don't either. Kill 'em and grill 'em, I say!

Johnny Turbo is a proto-Kevin Butler with Asperger's and down syndrome.

[Aussie2B]

Toys R' Us had them, and GameStop, Electronics Boutique, and other game stores like Funcoland had them. If you were in a city, you had access to Turbo systems and games. You had to keep an eye out for them, but they were there. Out in the boonies, not so much. GameStop back in the day was a good place to get games, since after a while they'd mark them down. I bought my Bonk 3 there marked down to $19!

Yeah, that's what I was going to point out. The TG-16 may have started with a couple test markets (not unlike the NES), but it was ultimately a nationally released system. Everyone had access to a brick and mortar with it, but if you lived in the middle of nowhere, you may have had to leave your town to find one of the select stores (since said stores weren't quite as widespread then as they are now). The TG-16 was indeed more popular in the big cities since they had more of a marketing push there, but it's silly to suggest that all other people had to order by phone/mail. Why would they pay for TV spots and ads in nationally-distributed magazines if it wasn't available at retail outside of a select few cities?

[Robocop2]

Out of all the systems I've owned over my life; only my Wii has fewer spaces in my library. I miss my TG 16 but overall it was pretty sparse on titles. Not that it matters alot of RPG's didn't make it here due to text issues but I hate JRPG's with a passion so same problem. It's not that the TG had fewer games in genres I enjoy; its just that both the SNES and Genesis had more and I was the only person I knew who had a TG. So market saturation is more of what killed the TG than anything else.

On another note; I love Johnny Turbo for his campiness and what reeks of desperation on TTI's part.

[stargate]

I love my TG-16, but felt royally screwed over when I chose to buy it over the Genny back in the day. Back then there were only a handful of TG-16 titles available on the shelves and the supply got sparser and sparser. I remember going to Electronics Boutique and the shelf space was down to a half shelf with maybe 5 titles. But the TG-16 did have promise and I always though its best games looked much better than the Genny... just bursting with color and huge massive sprites. Legendary Axe and Ninja Spirit were good examples of what this system could do. But no software support made it difficult to be a supporter and I sold mine to a retarded kid down the street for cheap. His parents actually complained that I had ripped him off. True story.

[SpaceHarrier]

I only caught the tail end of this ad campaign back in its day: Nov '91 issue of EGM. Didn't catch on to all the homo-erotic leanings until I was flipping through the mag recently..

Interesting that Johnny Turbo was based on a real person! I wonder where he is now, and whether he keeps up the good fight.

[Peonpiate]

If your Android phone is anything like mine, it's because it sucks. If I ever meet an Android programmer, I'll kick 'em in the balls.


Toys R' Us had them, and GameStop, Electronics Boutique, and other game stores like Funcoland had them. If you were in a city, you had access to Turbo systems and games. You had to keep an eye out for them, but they were there. Out in the boonies, not so much. GameStop back in the day was a good place to get games, since after a while they'd mark them down. I bought my Bonk 3 there marked down to $19!


But they didn't need to get mass market success. There's nothing wrong with a niche system, just look at the Neo-Geo. They were getting into a foreign market for the first time that they had no experience in, so the best they could hope for was being a niche player (Sony went mass market on their first try with the Playstation, but they spent billions to get there, and NEC didn't have that luxury). And they couldn't even manage that. When it comes down to it, the games make the system. And not a lot of great games made it over, just the easiest games to 'port'. Which is why there's so many shooters on the TG-16, very minimal text altering required.

Yes I lived in the sticks as a kid, which is better known as southwestern PA and that region is famous for Amish buggies to this day [yes, it was that stickish but no i am not Amish]. It is a very beautiful region that I wish to visit again someday [i now live in Miami].

My point really was that, if the sticks had NES's on sale every which way you looked, and eventually the Genesis found its way out there to, NEC lost out. Sure NEC had access to the large metro areas but it still was not distributed to the extent that NES and Genesis were. That alone cost them sales. Thats not to say it was THE reason they failed, it wasnt the only reason but I like to think it contributed a good deal.


Edit- Now that I think about it, a BB in that area did have a TG16 in stock but it wasn't displayed very well. I tried out bloody wolf on the tv hooked up to a TG16 and i thought it was a pretty cool game at the time. Sort of like Metal Gear [NES]. The TG packaging [from what i remember] was a turnoff though and I looked at the Genny stuff instead shortly after and settled on the SNES in the end, with Final Fantasy 3 [great purchase and still have both].

[Jorpho]

I was going to post a link to the Sardius Experience, but someone has tended to that already, as is right and proper. Read that, oh, eight years ago, looks like. Seems Mr. Brandstetter's ftdgames.com has gone kaput in the meantime.

Let's not forget that Atari did something at least vaguely in the same direction, if nowhere near the same magnitude: [EDIT: Not really Atari. Oops.]
http://www.atariage.com/magazines/ma...CurrentPage=24
http://www.atariage.com/magazines/ma...CurrentPage=25
(Origin in http://www.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?t=12081 .)

And however flawed TTI's marketing may have been, it still makes vaguely more sense to me than Tonka's branding of the SMS with blue graph paper and Times New Roman. Gaahh.

[Steve W]

The "Adventures of Atari" were just cartoon strips in issues of The Atarian Magazine, they weren't advertisements in 'real' gaming mags. I always liked that strip, it was so hokey. Although as I read it now, the enemies tend to have that Japanese stereotype look that was used in propaganda posters and comics in World War II. That's a little weird.

[SparTonberry]

It's off topic, but when I saw "Exhibit B" in the OP, all I could think is "that's still a better ad than Nintendo's coked-up Play It Loud ads (from the latter days of the SNES)".
One went something like "Stunt Race FX lets you pick from 24 tracks, while the only thing the other guy's game (pretty obviously Virtua Racing) lets you pick is your nose.", and some random TV ad showing off a bunch of grunge teens, some occasional and very momentary game footage (from Acclaim games, of all things), and text like "Give the World a Wedgie". Especially considering online console gaming was practically non-existent at the time, WTF does that mean?

[YoshiM]

I'm going to have to step to the side of the NEC/TTI marketing folks from back then on this-when you compare the ads for Johnny Turbo or even Air Zonk, they were in line with many of the ads that were released back in that era.

Game advertising in the early 90's was all about getting in your face, having attitude, being off-the-wall, anything to really separate one from another and rise up from the behemoth that was Nintendo. And many were probably as goofy as Johnny Turbo. Look at the original Sonic ads: you just saw a blue blur that spanned the bottoms of two or three magazine pages before you got a full page ad asking who hit pause. We were told he's fast and had attitude. And.....? What's so big about a blue HEDGEHOG? Why woudl I want to play as a blue hedgehog that ran fast? Of course, the proof was in the pudding when you sat down and played it or saw screen shots or actual commercials but in the early days prior to the game being released, it seemed a bit lame.

Then go back to the ads of Zero The Kamikaze Squirrel, Aero the Acrobat, Boogerman, Haunting (starring Polterguy), James Pond: Robocod (where he's seen in a soda shop asking Sonic if he can do the same tricks the fish could). Pretty much any "mascot" style ad trying to show off how great or off beat (and thus "cool") the character was ranked pretty close to that Air Zonk ad.

With that in mind, look at what the Johnny Turbo ads really are: a method of getting the Turbo name into a prospective customer's head. It wasn't a "last ditch effort"-it followed the trend of any other early-to-mid 90's game advertising. It was so ridiculous, whether you liked the ad or not, it stuck. I would bet some Meseta that Johnny caused some gamers to take pause when they walked past a Duo, snicker about Johnny Turbo and then actively look at the system to see what it was all about.

By looking at these threads, it's obvious the advertising was a success: people are STILL talking about the ads.

One of the big things, like others mentioned, that killed the Turbo in the States was not having recognizable games that could rope gamers in. By the time these ads came out, the Turbo's destiny was already carved in stone. All they could do was just go through the motions and follow the same advertising concept that everyone else did because it "worked".

[Aussie2B]

Yeah, I'd say game advertising was awful throughout the entire 90s. Anyone remember this groan-worthy Legend of Dragoon commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEs2OlW25Ao

Or how about when Nintendo Power completely changed the style of their subscription pages at the beginning of each issue. They went from innocuous, cute stuff in the 80s to weird, gross junk in the 90s like some baseball guy's ass and a jar of toenail clippings.

That was the general direction in the 90s. It started with stuff like Ren & Stimpy where it was gross but funny, but they kept pumping up the gross and edgy factors until you got to completely uncharming garbage like Aaahh!!! Real Monsters.

[GarrettCRW]

It's a bit facetious to say that Turbo games in the US were selected for the ease of translation when one of the pack-ins for the CD add-on, Ys Book I & II, featured top voice acting talent (Michael Bell, Alan Oppenheimer, Dan Gilvezan, and Jim Cummings) nearly a decade before any other publisher attempted to hire such talent for their games.

[Tempest]

I don't think the TG-16's failure can be blamed on Johnny Turbo, the comic was just as bad as so many other gaming comic/advertisements back then (remember GamePro's comic?). Like most people here have been saying, the TG-16 and Duo died because of lack of distribution and marketing. The ONLY place I ever saw a TG-16 around here (SE Michigan) was at Babbages on their advertising video they used to play in the front of the store (god I miss those days). I never saw one at TRU, K-Mart, K-bee, or anywhere else that sold video games. In fact the only other place I saw coverage of it was in GamePro, which made me want one so badly.

I never did get one because all my friends either had Nintendo or Sega so that's what I wanted. When you're in your early teens you generally want to have what your friends have, regardless of how good or bad it is (thankfully the NES and Genesis rocked). Of course if I was older back then I probably would have gotten it and shunned what everyone else was doing.

I never saw the Duo advertised anywhere. I barely remember the CD attachment. GamePro did a little write up on Addams Family which made me want the CD add-on badly, thankfully I never got one because that game SUCKS. The TG-16 and CD were odd expensive toys that only weird hard core gaming people had, at the time I didn't really care that I was missing out on it. Of course now I'm one of those weird hard core gaming people and absolutely love my Duo.

EDIT: I take that back. In the TG-16's last days I do remember seeing it at TRU. They had a tiny little TG-16 (might have been CD and Duo stuff too, I can't remember) section because they had a little kiosk there with Air Zonk in it and I loved playing it. The section was super tiny and no one was ever there. It disappeared shortly after.

Tempest

[Bratwurst]

I don't think the problem was advertising either, when the TG-16 was being sold the only place you could get stuff for it in my area within an hour's drive was a single Toys R Us.

Still one of my favorite systems.

[YoshiM]

EDIT: I take that back. In the TG-16's last days I do remember seeing it at TRU. They had a tiny little TG-16 (might have been CD and Duo stuff too, I can't remember) section because they had a little kiosk there with Air Zonk in it and I loved playing it. The section was super tiny and no one was ever there. It disappeared shortly after.

That's the only place I saw a TG-16:at a Toys R Us and on clearance. The city I lived by wasn't small-47,000 I think at that point perhaps which was on par with Green Bay, but no Turbo.

It was about as bad as the SMS. Only place in town that had the stuff was Kohls department store.

[Tempest]

It was about as bad as the SMS. Only place in town that had the stuff was Kohls department store.

I do remember seeing SMS stuff at TRU in the early days because the games looked so odd and I wondered what system they were for (like Alex Kidd and the Lost Stars). As Nintendo's dominance started to assert itself the SMS section pretty much disappeared and it was NES and some C-64 stuff (well into the 90's which I thought was odd).

Tempest

[Edmond Dantes]

I read an article just recently (actually, I think it was the Trivia section at the Mortal Kombat wiki) which said that a Turbo version of MK1 was planned, but TTI dropped the project because "Americans are sick of fighting games."

That, to me, explains it all about why the TG16 failed.

Sad, but sometimes great projects are in the hands of complete doo-doo heads.

[Tempest]

I read an article just recently (actually, I think it was the Trivia section at the Mortal Kombat wiki) which said that a Turbo version of MK1 was planned, but TTI dropped the project because "Americans are sick of fighting games."

That, to me, explains it all about why the TG16 failed.

Sad, but sometimes great projects are in the hands of complete doo-doo heads.

Yeah I don't think that's a great loss. MK on the TG-16 would have sucked pretty hard.

Tempest