The First Turbo Grafx I ever played.

The first time I played a Turbo Grafx 16 was in 1990. My friend's mother purchased one for him as a birthday present from a bargain bin at Monkey Wards for $50 (it originally retailed for over $200). He had Sidearms and Keith Courage.

Although I thought it would have been a better idea for him to get a Genesis (as then we could share games), I was secretly very impressed with the Turbo Grafx 16. Sidearms looked exactly like the arcade game. I didn't know what to think of Keith Courage and could not understand why that would be a pack-in title. It was just a weird game.

However, by late 1990 it was already obvious that in the United States the Turbo Graphics 16 was history.
* You couldn't play the PC Engine import games on it without a really expensive adapter. On my Genesis, I just had to break two plastic tabs and I could play Mega Drive titles.
* Very few of the titles in Japan were being released in the states due to Nintendo licensing issues.
* I knew of one place (an Electronics Boutique in the Mall of Memphis), that you could purchase Turbo Grafx games at. It usually had around four of them.
* By 1991, you could rent Genesis games. You could never rent Turbo Grafx games.

There was a Turbo Grafx Kiosk at the Mall of Memphis in Sears, and they sold the system there, but I never saw any of the games.
Here is the exact video:


I later purchased my own from a Pawn shop in 1997 for about $10.

I remember in 1991 I saw a guy wearing a tg16 t-shirt wondering what on earth it was.  I first played it a few years ago when I picked a pc engine up on ebay out of curiosity. I really like the system, especially with the cd attachment it's a great setup. The s-video out of the system is the best looking s-video I've seen come out of any console.