Feeling the heat from the awesome sales of
Nintendo's
Game Boy,
NEC counteracted by releasing the
PC Engine GT. Instead of playing its own
dedicated games, the
GT played
every single one of the
PC Engine's
HuCard games,
and then some. The GT was way ahead of its time (and justifiably so, considering its ¥44,800 pricetag). It featured a
backlit 2"
active-matrix LCD screen (active-matrix greatly reduced the
blurring of moving images, compared to the Game Boy's
spinach blur-fest of a
dot matrix screen), and a port to link up two GTs for
multiplayer gaming (although games had to be specially programmed to utilize that feature). It could also be used as a
television, thanks to the separate
TV Tuner. Its shape was the same vertical setup as the Game Boy's, but was even less
pocket-friendly. The six
AA batteries (which were sucked dry within a couple of hours) weighed it down heavily, but besides that, just imagine lugging around this
brick of a system. On the up side, you could play any
PC Engine game anywhere, and
in the dark no less!
Simply radical.
Known in North America as the TurboExpress.
Return to the TurboGrafx 16 metanode