Name: FM Towns Marty
Brand: Fujitsu

Hardware variants

FM Towns Marty (standard)

1993-02-20

32-bit home console

White chassis with both CD-ROM and 3.5-inch floppy drives — an unusual configuration that betrays Marty's true nature as a home PC stuffed into a console shell.

FM Towns Marty 2

1993-07

Cost-reduced revision

Released six months after the original to reduce production cost via stripped interfaces. Priced at ¥66,000 — still triple the cost of an SNES — and did not improve sales.

Marty Car-Marty

1994

Automotive variant

Fujitsu attempted to repackage Marty as an in-car entertainment system for automakers. Very limited production. A textbook example of Japanese enterprise 'when the consumer market fails, push it into B2B.'

Curator Notes

What this machine stands for

FM Towns Marty was the world's first 32-bit home console — released a full year before Saturn and PS1, but priced at ¥98,000 (versus SNES at ¥25,000 and Mega Drive at ¥21,000). Sales collapsed at around 45,000 units. Fujitsu repackaged its enterprise-grade PC as a console without rethinking pricing, third-party relationships, or retail strategy — making Marty the cleanest case study of 'Japanese enterprise thinking misapplied to consumer hardware.'

Turning point

Launched on 20 February 1993 at ¥98,000 — four times the price of an SNES. Third parties saw Fujitsu as a PC company, not a console maker, so almost no new titles were created for Marty. The library stayed almost entirely composed of compatibility ports of existing FM Towns PC software. Fujitsu discontinued Marty in 1995; the entire FM Towns product line ended in 1997.

Regional memory

Almost nonexistent outside Japan — never released in the Americas, Europe, mainland China, or Taiwan. For Japanese retro collectors, it is the textbook case of 'first 32-bit console that forgot to find a living room.'

Curated picks

Tatsujin

Toaplan's arcade classic ported home. One of the few Marty releases genuinely aimed at gamers, and the most consistently recommended title for the platform in collector circles.
After Burner II

Sega's arcade hit was ported to FM Towns by CSK Research in 1992 and ran on Marty in 1993. It proved Marty's hardware could handle 32-bit arcade-grade graphics — but no one was willing to pay ¥98,000 to play arcade ports at home.
Free Software Collection series

An FM Towns specialty: CDs collecting 100+ amateur-developed mini-games each. They reflect the platform's awkward identity — somewhere between PC and console — and are among the most interesting archaeological artifacts of FM Towns culture.

On 20 February 1993, Fujitsu launched FM Towns Marty — the world’s first 32-bit home console. Twenty-one months before Saturn, twenty-two months before PS1. The hardware was based on Fujitsu’s FM Towns home PC line (which had shipped since 1989): an i386-derivative CPU, CD-ROM drive, and 3.5-inch floppy, all packed into a console-shaped chassis with a 6-button gamepad.

Pricing killed it on arrival. ¥98,000 (around USD $880). SNES was ¥25,000. Mega Drive was ¥21,000. Saturn would launch at ¥44,800; PS1 at ¥39,800. Marty cost four times as much as its competition and came from a non-mainstream PC brand — third parties had zero incentive to develop new content. The lifetime library was almost entirely compatibility ports of existing FM Towns PC software.

Estimated sales: 45,000 units. Fujitsu discontinued Marty in 1995 and ended the entire FM Towns product line in 1997.

As a historical artifact, though, Marty still owns the title of world’s first 32-bit home console — beating Atari Jaguar (November 1993), Amiga CD32 (September 1993), 3DO (October 1993), and Saturn/PS1 (late 1994) to market. The title did not translate into sales, but it gave Marty an irreplaceable position in collector circles.

It is also the cleanest case of Japanese enterprise thinking misapplied to consumer hardware: Fujitsu rebranded its enterprise PC as a console, assumed superior specs would attract gamers, and ignored developer relations, retail strategy, and consumer pricing psychology. Eight months later Sega made a parallel mistake with 32X. Ten months later NEC played the same script again with PC-FX.

FM Towns Marty

Specifications

Release dates

Lifetime sales