This blog post is an unashamed, unabashed love letter to the TurboGrafx-16. Because what this world really needs is more middle-aged adult commentary on retro video games. Deal with it.
My memories of the TurboGrafx-16 are knotted with many other pivotal moments in my life. My best friend growing up was my hero. He was funnier than I was, cooler than I was, and better at trading with the local comic book / video game store than I was. I aspired to be like him. One day he had an idea. We were both too poor to get a Super Nintendo, but this TurboGrafx-16 system was dirt cheap. It was 1992 and stores were starting to clearance out TurboGrafx stuff since it had pretty much failed to catch on. If memory serves (and it’s entirely possible that it doesn’t) I think K-Mart, or maybe Venture had the TurboGrafx marked down to $50 for the console. We could jump into the 16-bit future for a measly $50! And games were also super-cheap! How could we lose?
Suddenly, anything I owned was up for grabs. What could I sell quickly to make fifty bucks? I dug through my boxes of comics and pulled out some titles that I knew had value and that I was willing to part with. I went through my stack of NES games. What was I never going to play again and how much would it net me? G.I. Joe figures, Star Wars figures, Transformers; my bedroom at that time was a veritable flea market of collectibles. I had my stack together, my friend had his stack together, and I begged my mom to drive us to the neighborhood comics / video game store. We peddled our wares and walked out with enough money for a TurboGrafx each. Then I begged my mom to stop by K-Mart (or maybe Venture) and my friend and I finally arrived home with a brand new TurboGrafx-16 each.
Of course, we had to make due with the pack-in game for a few weeks while our allowances built up.
A funny thing happens when you only have one game. You grow to like it. To this day I have a soft spot for Keith Courage in Alpha Zones just because I played it so much as a twelve-year-old.
For me, part of the appeal of the system was the TurboGrafx Hucard format.
It’s still my favorite video game cartridge, if you can even call it a cartridge. It held such mystique for my 12-year old mind. NES games were huge, tape-like things. How could they put a game (a 16-bit game at that!) on something the size of a credit card? I will admit that even as an adult and a knowledge of the inner-workings of Hucards, I find the format a bit magical.
My friend and I amassed quite a collection of TurboGrafx games over the next few months. One of the exciting things about the format was that we were the only two people we knew with TurboGrafx-16s. And with no internet, we were completely in uncharted territory. If we found a used game it was almost always case-less, just a naked Hucard with no screenshots, only the name of the game written on plastic. We had no idea what that game would be like. There was an excitement and a discovery with every game purchased.
We had Ninja Spirit, Legendary Axe, SideArms, Pac-Land, and many others. These were some seriously good games that still hold up today. The one that meant the most to me was a little game called Dragon’s Curse.
I picked up Dragon’s Curse with no prior knowledge of the game and no expectations. When I started playing it I remember being distinctly disappointed in how floaty the character sprite moved. Inertia just doesn’t work quite right in that game, but I kept playing because I had just spent $9 on it. I got to the first fork in the road in the burning castle and picked the path that lead right back to … where I started?
Wait, what? Did the level just loop or is this game so cheap and crappy that the devs re-used level design twice in a row … no, three times … no, four! What the heck!?!? I figured this had to be an intentional design thing, so I took the alternate path and made it to a new section of the castle. Hm, I thought, there’s more to this than I first assumed.
I kept playing Dragon’s Curse, eventually getting, er, cursed by the Dragon and turning into a lizard man. I kept playing and became a mouse. I kept playing and discovered that hidden inside a 2D platformer was a whole world that, at the time, felt humongous. Every time I got turned into a new creature it unlocked a previous inaccessible part of the map! There were multiple shops to buy from! There were secrets to discover!
Confession time. Despite being an NES kid, I had never played through Metroid. The term “Metroidvania” was not yet part of our lexicon. Dragon’s Curse was a complete revelation to me. I didn’t know a game could be designed like that and it captured my imagination and my play time.
For decades I thought I was basically the only person who knew about this gem of a game (yes, my world was—and arguably still is—pretty small). Later in life I tried to track this game down again and learned that it was in fact Wonder Boy 3: The Dragon’s Curse. Suddenly the similarities between Dragon’s Curse and Wonder Boy in Monsterland (which I had played on the Genesis) flooded into my mind and I wondered how I never put that together sooner. Then in 2017 they announced the remake of Wonder Boy 3 and it was one of those moments when you realize you’re not alone in the things you love.
Wonder Boy 3, Dragon’s Curse, I don’t care what you call it, this is one of my top games of all time. I replay it constantly and just love everything about it.
Knotted up with my memories of the TruboGrafx-16 is the launch of the Sci-Fi Channel on cable. I’ve always been a science fiction nut and I remember the lead-up to the launch of the Sci-Fi Channel. Boy, my friend and I were pumped!
A whole channel devoted to nothing but science fiction? Sign us up! Even before the channel officially launched, I would keep the TV tuned to it because it showed a multi-day countdown timer to the sweet, sweet science fiction programming.
In hindsight the launch of the Sci-Fi Channel was a little underwhelming. I remember a lot of reruns of Dark Shadows interspersed with the four-hour cut of David Lynch’s Dune (my continued fondness for that 1984 film comes from those days as well), but we were in 12-year-old heaven. As the Sci-Fi Channel grew I was introduced to Anime, The Twilight Zone, and many other things because of their programming. I remember spending whole Saturdays doing nothing but watching Sci-Fi until a show came on that I wasn’t interested in and then playing TurboGrafx until I’d eventually flip back to Sci-Fi to see what else had come on.
One show that came on Sci-Fi that literally changed my life was The Prisoner.
The Sci-Fi Channel ran a marathon of every episode of The Prisoner hosted by Harlan Ellison. I had never heard of The Prisoner, but after the first episode I was forever hooked.
I had never heard of Harlan Ellison, but after his biting commentary I immediately asked my dad to take me to the book store and I bought my first collection of Harlan Ellison stories. I’ve been an avid reader of Ellison’s ever since. He is my favorite author. He passed away last year. The world lost a giant and most people didn’t know.
All of these things that are so much me happened in quick succession and all exist in my brain swirling around the TurboGrafx-16. It was, however, a short-lived affair. The TurboGrafx and accompanying games were sold too soon to finance the Next Great Idea, whatever that was. If we had only known that in the year 2018 we could have be sitting on a TurboGrafx goldmine … well … it wouldn’t have changed a thing because at twelve years old I wasn’t worried about game preservation or nostalgia, I was only worried about the Next Great Idea.
Though as I now try to reclaim my TurboGrafx collection, I do wish that twelve-year-old me would have decided to hold on to this little console that never saw the kind of love it deserved in North America. It really is pretty great.