Retro Replay Retro Gaming History, Reviews & Emulation
Put a Sega CD disc in the drive and let that boot screen run for a moment. The logo spins, the music starts, and a Genesis that used to swallow cartridges suddenly feels like a different machine. Then the loading begins. The future had arrived, and it occasionally wanted you to sit quietly while it found the next bit of data.
That’s a more enjoyable way into these machines than another chart of who won the console war. The TurboGrafx-16, Atari Jaguar, 3DO, and Sega CD all had games worth rearranging the television stand for. They also asked buyers to accept awkward prices, uneven support, or an expensive extra box. The Sega CD was an expansion for an existing Genesis. The others were competing platforms, each trying to persuade you to leave room for one more controller.
Spend an evening with their better games and the appeal becomes easy to understand. A CD soundtrack bursts into life. A spiderweb of enemies surges toward the front of the screen. A motorcycle race turns into a fight. The trouble was getting enough people to buy the hardware before the next machine stole the shop window.
TurboGrafx-16 and PC Engine, small cards and a much bigger library
The PC Engine arrived in Japan in 1987, developed by NEC and Hudson. The North American TurboGrafx-16 followed in 1989, with a much larger shell around its compact design. Its eight-bit CPU worked alongside dedicated graphics hardware capable of colorful, fast-moving games. The name on the box encouraged comparisons with Sega’s 16-bit machine, but a few minutes of a good shooter did a better sales job than a debate about processor labels.
Take Blazing Lazers. You weave through incoming fire, scoop up weapon upgrades, and watch an initially modest ship become a wonderfully excessive piece of machinery. The pace is brisk and the screen stays busy. Bonk’s Revenge goes about things with a much larger forehead. Bonk clubs enemies with his head, clings to walls with his teeth, and gives the system a mascot with a pleasing lack of dignity.
The Japanese CD-ROM² attachment followed in 1988. Cartridge games could already be large and ambitious, but CDs gave developers far more room for recorded music, voices, and artwork. That freedom came with disc access and a more complicated shopping list. As the hardware family expanded, buyers had to pay attention to drives, System Cards, and software requirements.
Ys: Book I & II makes the attraction audible. Its energetic soundtrack lends a sense of occasion to charging through enemies and exploring towns. A relatively small hero can feel very brave when the music behind him has decided he is saving the world. The CD presentation gives the adventure a warmth that survives its comparatively simple character graphics.
Then there’s Castlevania: Rondo of Blood, released in Japan in 1993. Richter’s deliberate movement, branching paths, rescue routes, and Maria’s very different abilities give you good reasons to return. The animated scenes and soundtrack dress up an already excellent action game. Konami’s own series history describes how the disc format supported its voices and presentation. Konami’s Rondo of Blood archive.
North American owners saw a smaller slice of that story. The TurboGrafx competed with a fast-growing Genesis library, then faced the Super NES as well. Many Japanese releases never received local editions, and the expanding CD hardware family made the full experience expensive. Calling the PC Engine a forgotten failure everywhere misses its much healthier Japanese life. For an American player looking back, the surprise is often how much of its library never appeared at the neighborhood game store.
Atari Jaguar, beyond “Do the Math”
The Atari Jaguar reached the United States in 1993 with Atari loudly selling its 64-bit credentials. The hardware behind the slogan was a mixture of custom chips and a Motorola 68000. Getting the processors to cooperate was a practical development challenge, with tools, memory use, and work scheduling all affecting what appeared on screen. A bit-counting commercial could skip those details. A programmer could not.
Jeff Minter’s Tempest 2000 is still the easiest recommendation to put in someone’s hands. Your claw skims around the rim of a web while enemies climb toward you, and the music keeps urging you into one more round. It is bright, loud, demanding, and wonderfully confident. You can lose track of the hardware argument entirely while trying to survive the next wave.
Alien vs Predator slows the room down. As the marine, you creep through corridors, watching for movement and worrying about the next encounter. Choosing the Alien or Predator changes your abilities and the way you approach the same hostile setting. The movement and presentation show their age, but that three-way structure gives the cartridge an identity of its own.
Rayman supplies another side of the Jaguar. Its rich backgrounds and cheerful animation make it an attractive game to show somebody who knows the machine mainly through its reputation. By 1995, however, pretty platforming had to compete for attention with PlayStation and Saturn releases, while the Jaguar’s overall library remained small.
Atari’s commercial retreat left owners with a short official catalog and a lot of unrealized plans. The later story is more encouraging. In May 1999, Hasbro announced that developers could publish Jaguar software without obtaining a platform licensing agreement from it. The announcement retained cautions about trademarks and claims of approval. Independent developers could get on with making games, and a community kept doing exactly that. Hasbro’s original announcement, preserved by AtariAge.
Our interview with Songbird Productions’ Carl Forhan follows that later life through the people who kept cartridges coming. For a Jaguar owner, a new release arriving years after the shops had moved on was a rather better answer than another argument about the launch advertising.
3DO, a very expensive seat at the table
The 3DO Interactive Multiplayer launched in 1993 with a different business arrangement. Trip Hawkins’ company licensed a platform that hardware partners could manufacture. Panasonic’s FZ-1 was the first model, followed by machines from other manufacturers. The pitch offered CD entertainment, 32-bit hardware, and a broader multimedia experience. The initial American asking price of about $700 made that pitch a difficult conversation at home.
Put on Road Rash and you can see why somebody might have tried having it anyway. The road climbs, other riders crowd your lane, and the race turns scrappy. The licensed music and live-action presentation give the whole thing a louder personality. It is an excellent machine for discovering that your first instinct when overtaking another motorcycle is apparently to punch its rider.
The Need for Speed offers a different fantasy. The cars have their own character, the roads invite you to push too hard, and traffic makes poor judgment expensive. This was the beginning of a series that would travel far beyond 3DO. Gex adds a wisecracking gecko and a television-themed platform adventure to the shelf. A small library could still have a lively evening in it.
The price made every weakness harder to overlook. Someone shopping for a console could compare that outlay with cheaper established systems and their deeper libraries. By 1995, Sony and Sega were also selling new hardware with aggressive software support. Different manufacturers could offer different 3DO boxes, but they still needed enough compelling games to bring customers through the door. Contemporary industry material collected by the Computer History Museum records that licensed hardware approach and its manufacturers. 1996 industry report.
The proposed M2 successor adds a whole further chapter of demos, promises, and changing plans. We follow those turns in our 3DO M2 history. With the original hardware, though, the most persuasive demonstration remains a good run through Road Rash. Bring a friend, pass the controller, and let the game do the talking.
Sega CD, the extra box with the extra soundtrack
The Mega-CD launched in Japan in December 1991, with the Sega CD following in North America in 1992. It attached to a Genesis and added its own processing hardware, memory, and disc drive. Sega’s hardware archive describes the image rotation and scaling capabilities alongside the extra storage. Developers had more to work with, while still building on the Genesis underneath. Sega’s Mega-CD archive.
The obvious demonstration is Sonic CD. You race through a stage, build up speed to travel through time, and begin looking for ways to change what happens in its future. The animated opening and music are easy to show off, but the level exploration gives you a reason to keep the disc in the drive. Our Spencer Nilsen interview goes into the studio work behind Sega’s music from this period.
Lunar: The Silver Star takes its time with a party, a journey, and a much gentler rhythm. Spoken scenes and recorded music make the characters feel at home on a disc. Snatcher uses its voices and audiovisual presentation for a much darker adventure, full of investigation and uneasy conversations. These were attractive reasons to own the expansion even if you had little patience for actors running around small video windows.
Those video games were part of the machine’s identity, too. Night Trap asks you to monitor rooms and trigger traps at the right moment. Its 1993 appearance in congressional hearings, alongside arguments over games such as Mortal Kombat, helped intensify pressure for an industry-wide ratings system. The ESRB began operating in 1994. Its own oral history follows the people and negotiations involved. ESRB’s history of the ratings dispute.
Owning a Genesis already made the Sega CD tempting, but the expansion still cost roughly $300 at its American launch. It also split the audience between people with the drive and people who only had the base console. Software ranged from imaginative uses of the hardware to games whose short video clips attracted more attention than their play. Our complete Sega CD history follows that uneven catalog in greater detail.
Today, you can choose the games without having to justify a new machine to the whole household. Start with a shooter on the TurboGrafx, spend a few rounds in Tempest 2000, trade blows in Road Rash, and leave the Sega CD boot screen running a little longer than necessary. These were expensive bets when they were new. On a good evening, they still know how to show off.
