How did Hudson Soft help create the PC Engine?

The PC Engine is usually filed as NEC's console. The division of labor was stranger than that. Hudson Soft, a games company, had spent the early 1980s designing chips, and in July 1987 it completed the C62 system, the silicon family the new console would be built around. NEC, a manufacturing giant with no games business, partnered with Hudson to turn that silicon into a product. The PC Engine launched in Japan on October 30, 1987, developed by Hudson and manufactured by NEC.

Inside the machine, the Hudson parts are the parts that matter. The CPU is Hudson's HuC6280, an enhanced 65C02 design running at 7.16 MHz with a built in six channel sound generator. The graphics come from two more Hudson chips working as a pair, the HuC6270 video display controller and the HuC6260 video color encoder, the dual 16 bit graphics hardware behind the machine's 512 color palette. Even the games carry Hudson's name in the format itself: the HuCard, Hudson Card, a credit card sized ROM medium descended from the Bee Card Hudson had made for MSX software, renamed TurboChip in America.

The pattern repeated at every step of the machine's life. The CD-ROM2 add on of December 1988, which made the PC Engine the first home console to play games from CD, grew from the same partnership, and the console's RPG golden age documented in the PC Engine RPG Gallery ran on Hudson published and Hudson adjacent software, from Ys to Tengai Makyou II. When the partnership tried once more with the PC-FX in 1994, the chip at its center, the HuC62, was again Hudson's own design. Hudson was never the PC Engine's manufacturer or its American marketer, and the Library's Machines shelf documents what NEC's American arm did with the name and the shell. But as an engineering matter, the PC Engine is a Hudson machine that NEC built.