From Kevin Gifford (1UP) comes this meaty article looking back at the TurboGrafx-16 20 years later. The platform that sparked controversy with titles like Splatterhouse, gave us a loveable caveman named Bonk, and featured an ingenius storage system that allowed you to take your saves with you to specific NEC arcade machines...

Imagine this: We're right in the middle of a console generation, with one company dominating the market and another one lagging behind. Suddenly, out of the blue, a brand-new outfit appears with a brand-new console, packed with crazy unique features and playing host to all kinds of new and original games from previously unknown developers. People deride the console for being too expensive and far-out at first, but in a few years' time, most of the positive things introduced with that console are considered standard in all videogames.

What am I talking about here? The images around this text probably spoiled it for you, but pretend they weren't here for a moment. It sounds a lot like what Microsoft did, introducing the Xbox in 2001 and trying to compete with Sony and Nintendo, no? But a very similar upheaval happened in the console scene way back in the late 1980s -- and while the TurboGrafx-16's battle against the Super NES and Sega's Genesis 20 years ago is all but forgotten, the standards it helped to set in Japan largely helped to define videogaming as we know it today.

Daigoji_Gai via 1up.com »