Hot on the heels of The Life of Pablo, Kanye West has tweeted that "as of now," he has a name for his next album: TurboGrafx-16.
Sure, he might be joking. And even if he's not, the album title might change. Kanye has said that his new album is coming out this summer, but you might remember that The Life of Pablo changed titles a lot, including right before release.
Never heard of the TurboGrafx-16? It didn't exactly earn the mainstream success enjoyed by its competitors Nintendo and Sega, at least in America. It console, developed by HudsonSoft and NEC and known in Japan as the PC Engine, came to the states in 1989. While it was a technically superior machine when compared to the NES it was never able to topple the juggernauts of Mario, Zelda and Metroid -- especially when the SNES (you might have just called it the Super Nintendo) hit US stores in 1991.
The TG-16 had a following, though, due in part to some great games like Bonk's Adventure and Bomberman '93 (one of the better Bomberman games ever released). If you were willing to import a system and game from Japan, it was also the home of one of the better games in the long-running Castlevania series: Rondo of Blood.
And it had what Kanye says was his favorite game: Blazing Lasers.
It was an arcade-style vertical shooter might look generic now, but at the time of its release there weren't a lot of those experiences available for home video game systems. Especially not with the graphics and speed offered by the TG-16.
Kanye then went on to talk about another relatively obscure console (compared to the heavy hitters, anyway), the Neo Geo. Because his friends couldn't just have a Sega Genesis like the rest of us -- he needed the prohibitively expensive ($650!) Neo Geo.
If any of this makes you want to take a trip down memory lane and you have a Nintendo Wii, many popular TG-16 and Neo Geo games were made available to download on the Virtual Console.
