Namco System 12: The Fastest Route to the Third Dimension

submited by

Style Pass

2022-09-26 20:00:09

The shift into the 3D era of gaming was one of the most important changeovers in console and arcade gaming: powerful CPUs meant dedicated 2D game hardware was rapidly made unnecessary, but at the same time, the market moved away from 2D entirely: a new era was afoot, the era of the 3D polygonal-based gaming. And one name stands out there: Sony PlayStation, the grey box that broke the Sega/Nintendo stranglehold on the market. And you might wonder: what was happening in arcades? Did the PlayStation make a splash there too?

A major casualty of the 3D era was the decline in the number of companies making graphics hardware. The arcade game companies were particularly hard-hit by this; including Japanese arcade giant Namco. Namco did make a number of in-house 3D arcade games in the 1990s, but all of these systems were fairly complex and expensive, suitable only for the high end of the market– in terms of market positioning, perhaps most comparable to the Hyper Neo Geo. But for the mass market, what did Namco have? Without a home console arm, how could they compete with Sega’s mid-market Saturn-based ST-V cartridge system?

Enter Sony. Their PlayStation console was hitting the market by storm, but that didn’t mean they were adverse to sharing the tech in the arcades. Here we see the CXD8661R, an upgraded version of the MIPS-based PlayStation CPU. It would form the core of Namco’s new mass-market hardware: the System 12.