I've always wondered why there were so many Western titles for the FM Towns Marty, and why a number of those titles were developed in the UK. Reading through the recently released scan of Raze issue 1 (http://www.outofprintarchive.com/catalogue/raze/Raze1.html), Fujitsu was planning on releasing the Marty in the US and Europe. And, they were offering a $100,000 incentive to developers to develop games for the system. I wonder what impact the FM Towns would have had on the US/European game markets? My though is that it would've been too expensive, similar to the 3DO and Neo Geo systems. It would have made a nice alternative to the PC as a game machine. But, it might have stifled the hardware advances that came from the PC being such a poor gaming machine.
I imagine the Lucasarts games were made for FM Towns without the Marty system specifically in mind, I think aside from GPU & OS FM Towns computers are just a PC variable. A strong factor in their favour was the CD-Rom as standard, I doubt they wouldve made much of a splash here as the market was narrowing at the time.
The Saturn is also home to many and I mean many western PC adventure and strategy games yet they were only ever released in Japan. That always seemed vert strange to me.
There's also Phantasmagoria or Phantasm as it was called it Japan. Crappy game on any platform, really.
Although it does have a lot of custom chips it does share a number of i/o ports, the FM Towns can run MS-DOS 3.1 and can run programs that would run of the FM-R series of computers (which was basically a PC with Kanji support but wasn't a DOS/V machine). The NEC PC-9801, FM Towns and the computers that ran DOS/V all had hardware similarities so they could run the same low level programs. MS-DOS up to ver 6.2 was available on the FM Towns... The FM Towns II like the PC9821 did have Windows 95, but unlike the PC9821 it never got a version of DirectX. Back to the main point, as it was back in 1990, the machine would have been the FM Towns rather then the marty and it woudl have been a 1300 pound machine or around $2000 so the main issue would have been the cost of the machine even if it was the Marty it would have been far too expensive for the average teenager being around about 650 pounds or $950... a price that made the 3DO look like a bargain... it would have came out, sold to the people that could have afforded it and died a slow death...
Already mentioned there's Zork, Return to Zork and Phantasmagoria. There's also Death Mask, Dark Seed, Dark Seed 2, The Psychotron, Blue Chicago Blues, Cyberia, LuLu, Myst, Riven, Prisoner of Ice, Quantum Gate and The Unsolved. There's more too but you get the idea. Virgin Interactive were also porting 7th Guest over to the Saturn but it never did get a release. I even have video footage of that on the legendary VHS tape I have / had back in my parents place in the UK. Yakumo
Waooo, the FM Towns in US/Europe would have been great !!! It's hard to tell how much of an impact it would have had though... maybe it would have followed the steps of the MSX in Europe, maybe not...
I'm not quite sure. The Marty, at least, would have been a computer without the IRQ/config problems of a PC.
