PC-FX

On 23 December 1994, NEC and Hudson put the PC-FX on Japanese shelves. Sony's PlayStation had arrived three weeks earlier. Sega's Saturn a month before that. Both were built around dedicated 3D polygon hardware. The PC-FX had none.

What it had instead was a chip called the HuC6271, built to decode Motion JPEG and play video full-screen, in real time, at thirty frames a second. NEC pointed Hudson at a particular kind of game: anime licences and pre-rendered footage. The instruction had teeth. It kept Bomberman and Bonk, Hudson's two most recognisable characters, off the console entirely. Sixty-two games were released for the PC-FX. None of them were sold outside Japan.

The 3D chip did exist. Hudson developed it with Kubota, the agricultural machinery company, filed the patent in May 1995, and gave it a name: Aurora. It never went into a PC-FX. It shipped inside the PC-FXGA, an expansion board for NEC's PC-98 computers, built for a follow-up console that was never made. The chip ran. It ran in the body of a desktop computer.

NEC Home Electronics left the console business in June 1998, and stopped operating altogether on 31 March 2000. Fumihiko Itagaki, who worked on the machine's chipset, has said there was never any intention to build hardware 3D for it. Another account says the chip was simply late. The two have sat beside each other for thirty years, and the version people remember is not the one told by the man who was there.

The PC-FX launched in Japan on 23 December 1994 and was never sold anywhere else. Sixty-two games were released for it, most of them visual novels and anime-licensed adventures. Estimates of how many machines were sold disagree sharply, ranging from about 111,000 to around 400,000; no single figure can be stated with confidence. The disagreement about the missing 3D hardware is likewise unresolved and worth stating plainly rather than settling. Hudson engineer Fumihiko Itagaki, who filed the patent for the HuC6273 (nicknamed Aurora, co-developed with the agricultural machinery firm Kubota, patent published 22 May 1995), has said in an interview reported by Time Extension that there was never an intention to develop hardware 3D for the PC-FX. The Japanese-language Wikipedia entry says instead that the chip was intended for the console and was not ready in time. The HuC6273 was real, and shipped in 1995 inside the PC-FXGA, an expansion board for NEC PC-98 computers, described at the time as preparation for a next-generation PC-FX that was never built. Separately, in a 1992 magazine column, Bomberman's creator Shin'ichi Nakamoto wrote that bringing traditional animation techniques into games would draw creative people from other industries and speed development up considerably.