The PC Engine is small, fast and first to optical discs

What happened

An eight-bit processor paired with a pair of custom video chips produced large sprites and colorful backgrounds that read as a generation ahead of the incumbent, which is why marketing outside Japan emphasized sixteen bits without quite explaining what was being counted. The unit itself was tiny and games shipped on credit-card-sized cards rather than bulky cartridges. In Japan it competed strongly, supported by shooters and role-playing games and by an accessory that allowed several controllers at once.

The compact disc attachment released in Japan a year later was the significant part. Hundreds of megabytes of cheap storage meant recorded music, voice acting and animated sequences, and developers began building games around presentation as well as mechanics. Load times and the price of the add-on limited its reach, and the American launch suffered from weak distribution and a library skewed to Japanese tastes, but the direction was right: within a decade every major console used optical discs.

The world at the time

Japan's console market was effectively Nintendo's, and a challenger needed a visible technical advantage to be noticed at all. Compact discs were established for music and beginning to appear as computer storage. Cartridge manufacture was expensive and slow, which constrained both file size and how quickly a publisher could react to demand.

What it changed

The system held a respectable share in Japan for years and retains a devoted following for its shooters. Its optical add-on preceded similar efforts from Sega and Nintendo's abandoned partnership with Sony, whose collapse produced the PlayStation. The North American failure is still cited as a case study in launching foreign hardware badly.