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- Dan M, from Issue #3 (March 2008)
I can tell some of you have read the title of the topic and are wondering how, by Alcorn’s beard, is the TurboGrax-16 considered “exotic”? And what the hell’s a “Sheboygan” anyway? Fear not, noble reader, all will be explained. Note: please, don’t hurt yourself trying to say “Sheboygan”. If you can say it (hint-it’s said like it reads), give yourself a cookie. I’ve heard many a telemarketer, or some green sales lad trying to sell me toner, slaughter the name most heinously.
Sheboygan County is located in between, smack dab in the middle even, two of the better known areas of Wisconsin. To the north we have the Frozen Tundra of Green Bay, home of the Green Bay Packers while to the south lies Milwaukee which has been called the “Beer Capital of the World” (the Schlitz brewery even coined itself as the “Beer that made Milwaukee Famous” thanks to shipping boatloads of their brew to the Windy City after the Great Chicago Fire in 1871 destroyed most of the city’s breweries). What separates Sheboygan County and the city of the same name (one of their claims to fame is its bratwurst, which has become more widely known thanks to ESPN’s coverage of the 2006 Johnsonville Brat Eating Contest, which was won by world champion professional eater Takeru Kobayashi who pounded down fifty-eight bratwurst) is that it sometimes takes awhile for modern culture to reach its borders. It took years for Heelys shoes to arrive at our stores, even though they’ve been out in other areas for quite a while. Cell phones were a luxury when most people in bigger cities had them as a daily staple of communication.
And we didn’t have Turbgrafx-16’s… ever. I honestly can’t even recall if the only game store in the county that existed in the early 90’s even carried the system or the games. They had Neo Geo for crying’ out loud but no Turbo love. The nearby Sears sold CDi software and systems along with Nintendo and Sega stuff and Kohl’s department store was the only place in town to get a Sega Master System or its games. Even if some sort of Twilight Zone-esque curiosity shop dropped from the sky and landed on a street amongst the bars and churches you *still* probably couldn’t find a Turbo system.
“Excuse me,” you’d say to the clerk, strolling past the hanging shrunken heads while stepping around the Ark of the Covenant that had a glass jar containing the eyeball from the Loch Ness Monster resting on its lid that acted as a bookend of sorts that held the boxes of Vectrex light pens in place. “Do you happen to have any Turbografx-16 hardware at all?”
The clerk, an old Asian man who looks old enough to have actually been around to get the autograph of Emperor Qin Shi Huang on the framed bit of parchment hanging behind him, glares at you with his good eye while taking a puff of his pipe. “No, I’m afraid I have no such item.” he says loudly over the shrieks of the yeti that was living in a cage nearby. The old man turns to the creature, says something angry in a long dead language and squirts the monster in the face with a water bottle, causing it to curl up on the floor of its cell and whimper. Turning back to you while placing the bottle back under the counter, the clerk continues. “Perhaps you’d be interested in one of my copies of the Nintendo World Championship cartridges….”
I believe it was 1991 when I had been asked to investigate NEC’s offering to gaming. At the time I was a strong Sega supporter, having purchased an Altered Beast-packed Genesis the year before using my last grounds-keeping paycheck. I had read about the Turbo in my plethora of game magazines but it didn’t interest me, especially since no store within parental driving range carried the unit for me to even sniff at. Save for the before-mentioned indie store, Sheboygan County was a Nintendo and Sega only place. Unless you count the Atari 2600 stuff sold in the toy department of a local discount department store chain called Prange Way. My friend Yancy had gotten money from his mother, who lived out of state due to divorce some time before, which was supposed to be for his future education. For anyone who was or is a teenage boy, money in hand means money spent. My parents can easily attest to how much cash I spent renting Nintendo games at the close of the 80’s (over 100 if memory serves). Paging through one of my game magazines he happened across a review or preview of the game “Veigues Tactical Gladiator”.
“Dude, this looks awesome! Can you get this for your Genesis?”
I looked at the article. “No, that’s for the TurboGrafx-16. It’s some game system based on the Japanese PC Eng…”
“What else does this system have?”
I dug through some of my magazines and showed him various ads and articles. He loved the idea of Devil’s Crush, thought Blazing Lazers looked cool and Neutopia would be better than Zelda. The concept of not being able to go to a store and buy these games didn’t phase him. What sealed the deal was that somewhere, either on TV or a magazine I used to have, Yancy saw an ad for the Turbo with the offer of a free game. One of the options was Veigues Tactical Gladiator. The cash in his pocket instantly ignited, causing the flesh on his leg to itch so that the only way to soothe it was to rub the new plastic of a game system on it. Not long after seeing that ad Yance was on the phone, his long hair swallowing the phone as if it were a giant follicle squid wrapping its tentacles around AT&T’s green colored Nautilus telephone while his leg excitedly vibrated in place (more than usual as he was in the stage of drinking coffee with three-fourths of the mug filled with sugar, creating said jittery appendage) as he spoke to the sales person from one of the many mail-order places listed in the back of a game mag. A week later his package arrived in its black and orange splendor. Our group got together to observe this new wonder over at Yancy’s home, which probably was a relief for my parents’ soda supply for our regular Genesis playing or D&D gatherings. Hooked up to his twenty inch Magnavox, we huddled around on the shag-like rug to be the spectators as this machine’s new owner sat down in the green afghan-covered easy chair to play the pack-in game: Keith Courage in Alpha Zones. While we took turns sending poor Keith to his death, Yance filled out the free game form and sliced the UPC code from the box.
News of the new system spread about to our game playing acquaintances. People had to come by to see what the hell this “Turbo whatzits” was. The charged air of excitement around his home died quickly when Keith Courage began to feel like a boring, unwanted guest. Yancy started to get buyer’s remorse as his next game, the coveted Veigues, was still weeks away and he had no way to go beyond the county to attempt to find more games. One day I went to Sheboygan with my Dad to take care of some grocery shopping for his mother. I usually perused the video section, not bothering with the mundane task of probing fruit to determine its freshness or going cross eyed walking down the black and white Generics aisle. Here I discovered the cure for my friend’s remorse: this grocery store rented Turbo games! I rented Blazing Lazers and brought it back home for us to play. This new access to games caused me to perform one of many future knee-jerk purchases: I too bought a Turbo, right before the end of the promotion.
Before my purchase I wondered why I wanted it. I have a NES and a SMS, which I played regularly. My Genesis was still pretty new and renting games for that was just a ten minute ride to Plymouth. I also had a TRS-80 Color Computer with a slew of games “acquired” from a source that had ties to a CoCo club up in Appleton. The games on the Turbo I played reminded me of more spiffed up versions of the many NES games I played a couple years before. The simple answer was that it was so rare in my neck of the woods, nay dare I say exotic. Not only did I have to call out of state to buy a game (thanks to BRE Software, who supplied my Turbo gaming goodness with used copies of Pac-Land and Bonk’s Adventure), but I had to be ready at the door to pay C.O.D. It was like a home delivery drug deal as I swapped cash for digital Hu-crack on plastic wafers from some unnamed person in a brown outfit. Sure Blazing Lazers was similar to the vertical levels in Life Force or Keith Courage was a weird fantasy/future, light and RPG-less version of Zelda II but they just seemed so different. Plus where else could you play a video pinball game with slight witchcraft/Satanic overtones that also looked gorgeous? Being a Turbo owner gave me a feeling like I and my friends were some eclectic band of gamers, not afraid to walk away from the Nintendo mainstream and try something different. Like some music aficionado in video form, we felt “hip”. Well as hip as a geek (me), two long haired sportin’ trenchcoat wearin’ hard rock lovin’ loners and a mid twenties pot-head could be. Even got the local indie store to carry some Turbo stock.
Alas, just as the Turbo train was pulling away from the station in Sheboygan the engine stalled and belched forth its mechanical organs, never to run again. By the summer of 1992 the grocery store sold off its Turbo stuff as no one in the city other than my group really rented the games. The Turbo games at the Indie shopped also seemed to fade away, the shelf space being replaced by 3DO and Jaguar softs. My group discovered girls (well, not *discovered* but more like decided to actually *interact* with them) and my particular girlfriend at the time didn’t really understand my love of video games. I packed up my Turbo and sold it to a buddy of mine that I met at a some computer-related career group. Since then I never really saw anything Turbo related in the county again. After dumping my crazed girlfriend in the fall of ‘93 and hooking up with a gal who is now my wife, I was able to get back into gaming again but couldn’t find anything NEC game related at garage sales or thrift stores. Only once did I find something Turbo in the wild: complete in case Hu-cards of China Warrior, Keith Courage, Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective (sans newspaper clippings) and a CD System 1 card in a World Baseball case. That was maybe two years ago at the local Salvation Army.
Once again, the TurboGrafx-16 slips into obscurity for the gaming residents of the quiet city of Sheboygan, rarely to be heard from again.
Video Game Trader magazine & price guide is a quarterly print publication dedicated to classic and retro video gaming. VideoGameTrader.com serves as a companion site to the magazine. An iPhone app is also available by searching 'video game price guide' in iTunes App Store. 
