Casio PV-1000

~ the goodbye ~

Casio came into the console market in october 1983, three months after Nintendo and Sega had both already arrived, and priced itself directly against them at 14,800 yen. The PV-1000 was a competent enough box for the money, built around a Z80-compatible NEC processor at 3.58 MHz with 16 KB of video memory behind it, drawing 240 by 192 pixels in eight colors. The controller was shaped like an aircraft control stick. It was sold in Japan and nowhere else. Against the Famicom it did not sell at all.

The odd part is what Casio shipped next to it. On the same day the company launched the PV-2000, a home computer with a keyboard, and made it deliberately incompatible with the console. Two Casio platforms on sale at once, unable to run each other's software, with some of the same game titles released separately for each. Whatever internal logic produced that, from outside it reads as a company that could not decide which market it was entering and resolved the argument by entering both.

Thirteen games came out against fifteen planned, most of them conversions of Konami and Namco arcade titles, and then Casio stopped. In 1984 the company shipped the PV-7, a machine built to the MSX standard, and moved its game publishing onto MSX. That is the actual cause of death and it is a strategic one rather than a commercial one. Casio did not simply lose. Casio decided that owning a platform was not worth what it cost and went to work inside somebody else's.

It went on sale in Japan a year before I was born and never went anywhere else, so what survives the distance is not a memory, it is the numbering. Somebody at Casio assigned GPA-108 and GPA-113 to games that had got far enough along to earn a part number, and then the platform stopped and those two numbers stayed empty. Four decades later, with no internal document surviving anywhere, you can still read a cancellation straight off a parts list, because the gap in the sequence is the document. I have shipped hardware with holes like that in the numbering. Nobody ever writes down the reason, and everyone involved assumes they will remember.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the other box ~

The PV-2000 was Casio's home computer, sold in the same window as the console, running the same kind of chip and unable to load the same cartridges. It had a keyboard and BASIC, which the PV-1000 did not, and it is sometimes described as the upmarket sibling. Two of the games that never shipped for the console reportedly turned up on it instead.

Splitting a small software catalog across two incompatible platforms that the same company launched in the same year is a hard thing to defend in hindsight. Neither product had the volume to support a library on its own, and Casio built them so they could not help each other.

~ weeks or months ~

How long the PV-1000 was actually on sale is not settled. The English Wikipedia article carries a claim that Casio pulled it after several weeks due to poor sales, sourced to a retro gaming site. Its own infobox says the lifespan ran 1983 to 1984, and elsewhere the same article says it was discontinued less than a year after release. The Japanese article makes no weeks claim at all: it says the console was short-lived because Casio released the MSX-based PV-7 the following year and shifted game supply there.

Those are different stories. One is a panic withdrawal and the other is a product being closed down in an orderly way when the company changed direction. The available evidence points at the second, since thirteen cartridges is more than a console pulled after a few weeks usually manages to ship. This grave takes 1984 and states the disagreement rather than picking a dramatic version of it.

~ what casio did next ~

Adopting MSX was not surrender so much as a correct reading of the situation. MSX was a shared standard with a shared software library, and joining it meant Casio could keep selling hardware to Japanese households without having to fund a catalog by itself. The PV-7 was cheap and it ran what every other MSX machine ran, which is the job the PV-1000 had never managed.

Casio came back to consoles exactly once more, with the Loopy in 1995, and that did not work either. The pattern across both attempts is a company that can build the hardware without difficulty and has never once solved the part that actually decides these things, which is getting other people to write for it.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »