The TurboGrafx-16 Mini is a great plug-and-play console that doubles as a history lesson

When I was a kid, I spent almost as much time reading about games in magazines as I did actually playing them. There was always so much that was beyond my grasp: a role-playing game from Japan that looked like an anime come to life or fighting game machines that would never come to my local arcade. I would often obsess over expensive consoles that I knew I would never actually own.

The TurboGrafx-16 was one of those consoles. The device — which debuted in North America in 1989, fitting snugly between the NES and SNES launches — wasn’t a big hit outside of Japan where it was known as the PC Engine. It was expensive and unwieldy and didn’t have a killer app like Super Mario or Sonic the Hedgehog to boost sales. But that didn’t dampen my...

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