A few years ago I bought a Japanese copy of Snatcher, a cyberpunk video game designed by Hideo Kojima before he went on to create the legendary Metal Gear Solid series. There were just two problems with this purchase: the game is a text-heavy role-playing adventure with no English translation, and I don’t own a PC Engine, a cult 16 bit machine first released in Japan in 1987, which hosted some of the finest arcade conversions of the era in then-astounding visual quality. A small number were imported into the UK, but it was never a huge hit here, so getting one on eBay is a costly and risk-laden adventure. None of this put me off. I bought Snatcher because I loved its anime aesthetic and its role in the nascent career of a games industry legend. Last week, I loaded it up for the first ever time, thanks to the Analogue Duo.
Committed retro gaming fiends will be familiar with Analogue, a small, specialist maker of incredibly precise nostalgic gaming technology. It is known for building versions of the Super Nintendo and Sega Mega Drive that don’t run software emulations of old games, which can introduce lag, and will sometimes refuse to load certain titles. Instead, they’re constructed around programmable circuit boards known as field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA), which accurately simulate the original hardware so they will load and play actual SNES and Mega Drive carts as God intended.
In an email to me, Analogue founder Christopher Taber referred to the Duo as “our most niche product”, and he’s not kidding. Retailing for $250 (£196), this thing isn’t cheap even for diehard fans, and if you just want to casually sample the PC Engine, Konami made a mini console version three years ago with 50 built-in games. Furthermore, the Duo doesn’t come with controllers – it’ll work with third-party peripherals such as the 8BitDo Pce, and with original PC Engine pads, but those are all available separately. And while we’re dwelling on the downsides, it doesn’t yet support in-game save states like most of the mini consoles, but that feature is apparently coming in 2024 via a firmware update (the Duo has an SD card slot for this purpose).
However, this is truly an exotic and lovingly crafted piece of hardware that re-creates almost every iteration of the PC Engine over its decade of manufacture, and supports games on CD-Rom and the machine’s proprietary credit-card sized HuCard format, which seemed ridiculously futuristic at the time. The Duo runs games in a crisp, detailed 1080p mode, but you can also use an array of scanline and scaler options to tweak the screen image to your requirements, so that it resembles a classic CRT monitor or TV – there’s even a specific Trinitron option to emulate Sony’s high-end television tech of the era – a favourite with serious gamers. I’m playing on a modern 4K monitor, and actually the default 1080p feed is lovely, even though you don’t get that luminous contrail of fading pixels that moving images used to leave on those old displays.
I tested the Duo with my very small collection of PC Engine games. Both HuCards and CDs play perfectly, whatever region they came from, whether they were made for the original PC Engine, or the US SuperGrafx, the TurboGrafx CD, the PC Engine CD-ROM² or the Super Arcade CD-Rom (Manufacturer NEC sure did love its hardware upgrades). I bought the classic shooter R-Type recently, in memory of Jason Brookes, the editor of Edge Magazine when I joined in 1995. It was his favourite game and the PC Engine had the best home translation. Consoles came and went in the Edge office, but there was always a PC Engine with a copy of R-Type ready in the drive. Just after Jason died, I was in an email exchange with his brother Matthew, who perfectly summed up what the game meant to my old boss: “He loved the passionate attention to detail, the creativity, the graphical capabilities of the machines, the huge sprites, the multi-layered parallax, the colours, and even the superlative collision detection. I’m not sure how long he must have spent trying and eventually completing the game; Jason was surely an excellent gamer, but no champion.”
Now I’ve played that game thousands of times on emulators, but seeing it in the vibrant, exacting detail Jason would have played it in has been a curiously resonant and emotional experience – I guess like playing a beloved relative’s favourite album on a turntable for the first time. We try to pretend it doesn’t, but format matters. Feel matters. I think Analogue understands that very clearly.
However, the game I really wanted to try was my beloved Snatcher. It runs perfectly, and finally, I get to see the gorgeous bitmap visuals replicating the frames of a manga novel, the retro-futuristic computer displays, and the grimy dystopian future city heavily inspired by Blade Runner. I get to hear the weird synth jazz pop soundtrack, and to see some of the early ideas that would later bloom into the Metal Gear Solid series and beyond. What a pleasure. Now I just have to find an English translation.
This is a niche product, carefully manufactured, stylish and exhaustive. If you have PC Engine games, or want to buy some, it is a better bet than purchasing an original console to load them on, not least because NEC released so many incompatible iterations. Make the leap and you will discover a treasure trove of shooters, brawlers, role-playing games and strange platformers that exist outside the SNES/Mega Drive canon. It won’t be the most sensible purchase you make in 2024, but if you too get slightly obsessed with long-lost Capcom, Konami or SNK arcade ports, prepare for a puzzlingly emotional year.
• Analogue Duo is available to pre-order, $250+ shipping
