NEC · 1994–1998 · About 300,000
NEC's successor to the PC Engine launched in Japan in December 1994 with a 32-bit CPU but no polygon hardware, betting on animated video just as the PlayStation and Saturn made 3D the only thing that mattered.
The PC-FX went on sale in Japan on 23 December 1994 at ¥49,800, weeks after the PlayStation and Saturn. Inside was an NEC V810 RISC processor running at 21.475 MHz, 2 MB of memory and a CD-ROM drive. What it did not have was a polygon processor. NEC's reasoning was that the polygon chips of the day were too weak and produced blocky figures, so the PC-FX was instead built to move large amounts of full-motion video and high-colour still images. That decision shaped the whole library. Hudson Soft, NEC's long-time partner from the PC Engine era, was directed to concentrate on games based on popular anime franchises and built around pre-rendered animated footage. The result was a catalogue of 62 titles weighted heavily towards visual novels, dating simulations and anime adventures, with three games available on launch day. In a market that had just discovered real-time 3D, a machine that could not draw a polygon looked out of date the day it launched. The PC-FX was never released outside Japan. It sold about 300,000 units before NEC ended production in February 1998, and the last game appeared that April. Its failure took NEC out of the home console business entirely, ending a hardware line that had begun with the PC Engine's genuine challenge to the Famicom a decade earlier.