Anniversary: 30 Years Ago, NEC Rolled The Dice With PC-FX And Lost 1
Image: Aaron Nanto / Time Extension

While the PC Engine / TG-16 might not have won the console war, it was a popular enough system to claim second place in Japan (beating the Genesis / Mega Drive in that region) and secure a significant number of fans in the West – so much so that it benefitted from a micro-console release in 2020.

NEC and Hudson Soft – the two companies behind the PC Engine – were well-placed to build on its success with their next machine, but when it arrived in 1994, the 32-bit PC-FX proved to be one of the industry's most notable hardware flops.

While its rivals Sega, Sony, and Nintendo all pinpointed 3D graphics as the future of interactive entertainment, NEC and Hudson bet on the wrong horse entirely and built the PC-FX a "Direct Memory Access" machine. Rather than pushing data from the CD through the CPU bus, the PC-FX channelled the information to the video-out port via a sequencer, rendering chip, and video encoding processor.

Anniversary: 30 Years Ago, NEC Rolled The Dice With PC-FX And Lost 1
Image: Aaron Nanto / Time Extension

The upshot was that PC-FX could produce fast and high-quality video footage. While other consoles used compressed MPEG video playback, NEC and Hudson went with a more memory-intensive JPEG system, displaying a different high-quality still image for each frame of animation at 30 frames a second.

The console hosted a wide range of anime-style games with attractive video sequences but lacked any kind of 3D grunt – a curious miscalculation for NEC and Hudson when you consider how they had shaken up the Japanese market with the powerful PC Engine less than a decade earlier.

While it sold poorly – around 300,000 units, according to reports – PC-FX managed to hang on until 1998, when its final game, the dating sim First Kiss Story, hit Japanese store shelves.