Fujitsu · 1993–1995 · ~45,000 (by end of 1993)
Released in February 1993, the FM Towns Marty was the world's first 32-bit home console — a living-room version of Fujitsu's FM Towns computer that arrived first and sold almost nothing.
The FM Towns Marty holds a genuine first: released in Japan on 20 February 1993, it beat the 3DO, Atari Jaguar, Amiga CD32, and Sega Saturn to market as the first 32-bit home video game console, and is often counted as the opening entry of the fifth console generation. It was, in essence, a console-ified version of the FM Towns, a CD-ROM-equipped personal computer Fujitsu had sold in Japan since 1989, and it retained backward compatibility with that computer's software library. Under the hood it used an AMD 386SX — a processor that is internally 32-bit but communicates over a 16-bit external data bus — clocked at 16 MHz, paired with a built-in CD-ROM drive and a floppy disk drive. It could display from a 32,768-colour palette (up to 256 on screen at once) and output six channels of FM plus eight channels of PCM audio to composite or S-Video. On paper it was a capable machine, and it drew its games from the established FM Towns catalogue rather than needing a library built from scratch. Commercially it failed almost immediately. It launched at roughly the equivalent of $700, it was expensive to expand because of its custom hardware, and it entered a Japanese computing market where NEC's PC-98 line dominated and the DOS/V standard for Japanese PCs was about to take over. By the end of 1993 it had sold only around 45,000 units. Fujitsu tried again in 1994 with the Marty 2 — a darker shell and a lower price, but, despite expectations of a hardware upgrade to match the FM Towns 2 computer, technically identical to the original, still running the same 386SX. Sales ticked up slightly with the price cut, but Fujitsu had already concluded the platform was a lost cause and dropped it in 1995. The Marty's place in history is as a footnote that deserves a headline: it was first to 32-bit, and being first bought it nothing. It illustrates that in the console business, timing at the front of a generation matters far less than price, library breadth, and the momentum of the platforms already in players' homes — all areas where the Marty, tied to an expensive and niche computer platform, could not compete.