Enter the bit wars: A study of video game marketing and platform crafting in the wake of the TurboGrafx-16 launch. (November 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Therrien, Carl; Picard, Martin
• Is Part Of: New media & society. Volume 18:Number 10(2016)
• Page Start: 2323
• Page End: 2339
• Publication Date: 2016-11
• Subjects: Marketing -- PC Engine -- planned obsolescence -- platform -- rhetoric -- TurboGrafx-16 -- videogame history; Mass media -- Social aspects -- Periodicals; Mass media and culture -- Periodicals; Information technology -- Social aspects -- Periodicals; Internet -- Social aspects -- Periodicals; 302.2305
• DOI: 10.1177/1461444815584333
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1461-4448

Abstract

NEC's TurboGrafx-16 console, as its very name suggests, was caught in the middle of loaded discourses about technology. In this article, we seek to reflect on the initial encounter between the player and any given platform, the one that occurs through a marketed image. The authors of Digital Play insisted already in 2003 that it is essential to study the interactions between technology and marketing practices to better understand the video game experience. More recently, James Newman has demonstrated the significant role of the discourse produced by the industry and the dedicated video game press in shaping the contemporary culture of material obsolescence. The introduction of the TurboGrafx-16 at the end of the 1980s partakes in a discursive framing of technology whose impact can still be felt in the way we construct history today: It helped solidify the widespread adoption of the biological metaphor (console "generations"), and of the technological warfare rhetoric.