I really want a TG-16 mini: So go ahead and buy me one!

My prime time as far as gaming was concerned was when I was in my teenage years, particularly my last couple of years of high school. While a lot of my friends were out getting into trouble from drinking and drugs, I was spending most days and nights at a friend's house in the neighborhood who happened to share my love for gaming. It was the age of the SNES, Genesis, and to a much lessor degree, the Turbografx-16. All of these systems were legendary for their time and one of them didn't sell very well in America. Can you guess which one?

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This was a bizarre system, that much is for sure. In an age when systems were moving to having more buttons - the Genesis had 3 and start / select and SNES came along a few years later and was like "fuck you Genesis, we have 6 buttons and start /select" and TG-16 strolled along with 2 buttons. To be fair the TG-16 was released in USA around the same time as Genesis and their controller was basically a higher quality NES controller and SNES wouldn't be released for a additional 2 years but I still think it was an odd choice to not realize that people wanted more buttons.

I would imagine that this severely limited their ability to sell the machine because of a lot of reasons but this was one of them. Out of the 3 above listed systems I have the most nostaligic memories of the TG-16 despite its limitations.

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Perhaps it was because the cartridges were just plain cool in that they were the size of credit cards and it just seemed futuristic because of it. It also could have been that the console itself had a sleek design that at the time just seemed futuristic. A third reason is probably because with rare exceptions (R-Type comes to mind) the games released on the Turbografx were exclusives and didn't exist on any other systems. Later they would release a CD attachment that totally blew people away that were able to afford the very expensive more than $300 cost at the time ($650 in today's money.)

This system was released shortly after the Famicom (NES) in Japan and actually outsold it by a great margin. While the CPU of the TG-16 (called the PC Engine in Japan) was only slightly better than the NES it had a much better GPU and sound card that resulted in superior games. Why they waited 4 years to release this system in the United States and Europe is a massive part of the reason why it didn't do well in foreign markets.

I still really enjoyed the games though. The ones that stick out in my mind are Bonk, any of the Y's games, and Alien and Devil's Crush.

I do not know what happened to my TG-16, I probably donated it to charity or lost it in a move as it got relegated to completely unused when then next-gen systems were released such as the SNES and Playstation 1, but I don't have it anymore. Someone does i hope!

The "mini" craze has kind of taken the world by storm and out of all of them the only one I really even want is the TG-16 mini and it is actually quite difficult to get your hands on in the United States at the moment.

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When it was revealed that they were going to release this thing a YEAR ago, I, like many old-school gamers, was very excited about it and was ready to shell out the mere $100 to get my hands on it.... and then Covid took over the whole GD world. The shipments were delayed, then cancelled, then put back on again, then delayed. As it stands now the retail price is still $100 but good luck getting your hands on one. I am only able to find a few of them for sale and they are from price-gougers on Amazon and E-Bay like sites that are charging upwards of $300 for them - a price that I am unwilling to pay.

At this point it seems as though NEC might have lost interest in shipping it to North America at all because the advertising was done over a year ago and there are only a handful of people out there like me that even remember that it was supposed to happen in the first place.

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It comes loaded with nearly 60 games and nearly half of these games were never released in the United States on the original system at all. Most of these games are still in Japanese and others have been translated (poorly, from what I have heard) but since most of the Japanese games that I have never played are shooters, that shouldn't really matter all that much.

So here I sit, a gaming fan who is probably older than you that is waiting patiently for this damn thing to be available at all at the retail price. I contact GameStop on a regular basis to see if they are going to get their hands on a few of them only to be told the same thing over and over: "we can't get it."

So if you have one of these things I am gonna go ahead and say that I am very jealous of you because I can't get one unless I am willing to pay 3x what the thing is actually worth. Hopefully this will change by Christmas of this year but I can't imagine that NEC is very hopeful at this point that it would even sell and a probably unwilling to spend any more money on advertising on a lost cause. Woe is me!