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Enter the bit wars: A study of video game marketing and platform crafting in the wake of the TurboGrafx-16 launch

2015/04/30 by ­Carl Therrien, Martin Picard · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Business, Management and Accounting · Computer Science · Engineering · #Digital Games and Media #Copyright and Intellectual Property #Media and Digital Communication #Obsolescence #Metaphor #Rhetoric #Framing (construction) #Video game #Sociology #Construct (python library) #Media studies #Aesthetics #Multimedia #Marketing #Computer science #Art #Engineering #Business #Philosophy

paper · doi:10.1177/1461444815584333

openalex publication_date 2015/04/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21

Abstract

NEC’s TurboGrafx-16 console, as its very name suggests, was caught in the middle of loaded discourses about technology. In this article, we seek to reflect on the initial encounter between the player and any given platform, the one that occurs through a marketed image. The authors of Digital Play insisted already in 2003 that it is essential to study the interactions between technology and marketing practices to better understand the video game experience. More recently, James Newman has demonstrated the significant role of the discourse produced by the industry and the dedicated video game press in shaping the contemporary culture of material obsolescence. The introduction of the TurboGrafx-16 at the end of the 1980s partakes in a discursive framing of technology whose impact can still be felt in the way we construct history today: It helped solidify the widespread adoption of the biological metaphor (console “generations”), and of the technological warfare rhetoric.

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