Three Decades Ago, Japanese Cars Got GPS Navigation From A Game Console

These days, game consoles are barely disguised computers that play mostly the same games you can get on your PC at home. Back in the 1990s, though, the game console was still a fresh and changing concept that could be anything the engineers dared to dream up. A great example? An obscure Japanese games system that was also intended to help you navigate the roads of Japan.

Countless engineers and designers had tried to solve the problem of automotive navigation over the decades since the invention of the car. Inventors dreamed of a system that could tell a driver exactly how to get where they were going, and countless concept cars featured speculative navigation systems that could do just that. It was only when GPS technology and the microcomputer hit the mainstream that the modern navigation system became a realistic proposition. By the early 1990s, automakers and aftermarket companies were rushing to develop viable turn-by-turn GPS navigation.

Fujitsu’s grand entry into this market was the FM Towns Car Marty. It had an awkward name, a huge price tag, and was never sold outside of Japan. It’s rare enough that you’d have to hunt to find a working example today. Let’s explore this innovative—and ultimately unsuccessful—solution to in-car navigation that was well ahead of its time.

Computer or Console?

In the late 1980s, Fujitsu was a successful Japanese electronics manufacturer, and it was serious about getting involved in the computer business. It found some success with the FM Towns line of desktop computers. The name made some sense; “FM” stood for Fujitsu Micro and “Towns” was a codename referencing a Nobel Prize winner, as was the custom at the company. The first machines relied on Intel’s 386 CPU running at 16 MHz, but ran their own chipsets and weren’t directly compatible with IBM PCs. Debuting in 1989, it was a capable enough machine with a CD-ROM as standard, but it entered a difficult market, with both NEC’s PC98 and Sharp’s X68000 lines dominating in the nascent Japanese microcomputer market.

As the 1990s dawned, the FM Towns had found a loose foothold in the Japanese market, and Fujitsu dared to innovate further. It took the basic underlying hardware of the original FM Towns computer and used it to build a game console under the “Marty” name. Launched in early 1993, the FM Towns Marty was effectively the desktop machine in a new case with game controllers, and was designed to plug into a TV. It used an AMD CPU instead of the original Intel part, and its graphics subsystem was tweaked to output composite and S-Video instead of the VGA signal used with computer monitors. The console boasted both an onboard floppy drive and a CD-ROM, as well as a PCMCIA slot for accessories. It was introduced at the lofty price of ¥98,000, or roughly $710 USD dollars at 1993 exchange rates. Accounting for inflation, that’s equal to approximately $1,600 USD today.

By the end of 1993, Fujitsu had a slow-ish selling computer and an oddball, expensive console. The smart business move might have been to consolidate and focus on the existing products that were already struggling in the marketplace, but this was Japan’s Bubble Era, and nothing was too weird or too unsellable to try out in the marketplace. Thus was born an idea—what if Fujitsu built an FM Towns Marty specifically for cars?

The result was the FM Towns Car Marty, which sounds marginally less clumsy in the original Japanese (エフエムタウンズカーマーティー). Launched in 1994 by car audio arm Fujitsu Ten, it was the same console, but specifically designed for installation in automobiles. It existed as a grey slab of plastic roughly the size of a small shoebox. Priced at ¥120,000 (then $870 USD, or $1,900 today), it came with a redesigned one-handed gamepad, and a slot-loading CD-ROM drive and PCMCIA slot in the front of the device.

The Car Marty could also play all the same games as the home console. The handle on top let you easily haul it between home and car, if you had the right cables.

The FM Towns Car Marty could play all the same games as the home console, but it also had a bonus feature that justified its entire existence. With the additional navigation kit for just ¥90,000 ($650 USD in 1994),  you could hook it up with a GPS module and a small LCD screen and use it as an in-car navigation system.

Other accessories included a floppy drive that could be used to save navigation data for ¥30,000, and a ¥10,000 video cable for hooking up to your home TV if so desired. Complete kits cost approximately ¥250,000 (~$1,800 USD in 1994, or $4,000 today). Beyond GPS navigation, you could also use the Car Marty to play CDs or games, too. If you had the home cable set, you could also use it with your TV.

Most users of surviving examples have to whip up their own video cables; original examples are excruciatingly hard to come by.

Navigating with the FM Towns Car Marty required installing a PCMCIA card as well as a CD-ROM with the software and maps for Japan. The one-handed gamepad, termed the “navi-pad,” was specifically designed for use with the GPS software. Japanese mapping firm Zenrin contributed to the software, with the company’s copyright noted in the software’s search function for points of interest.

The system was very much of its time in look and performance. Maps load slowly from the CD-ROM drive, and screen refreshes are slow. However, to its credit, the maps are colorful, clear, and easy to read. Sadly, it’s unclear if any fully functional Car Marty installations still exist, which could potentially demonstrate the system’s abilities at turn-by-turn navigation.

In the Car Marty, Fujitsu had something people wanted. It was a viable GPS navigation system that you could install right in your car. The only problem was that it was large, a little clunky, and prohibitively expensive. It also required a bit of work to mount in a car. The main unit had Velcro strips underneath, which mated with a plastic base that could be permanently mounted in the car. The console also had a convenient handle to make it easy to port between home and car.

However, actually getting it installed in a car also meant finding room for the GPS receiver module, the GPS antenna, and the screen. Some resources suggest the system may have had a provision to wire up to the parking brake switch so it could detect whether it was safe to allow the user to use certain functions of the navigation system.

If you went through all that, you were granted a viable navigation system that would nevertheless be very tedious to use compared to more modern units that hit the market just a few years later. We can only speculate as to the quality of its directions, too; pathfinding was a particular bugbear of early GPS units, and it’s easy to imagine the Car Marty would have suffered this malady, too.

No official sales figures are available, but community estimates suggest perhaps just 5,000 examples were sold before the product was discontinued in 1995. The FM Towns Marty didn’t last much longer, and Fujitsu’s entry into the world of consoles and navigation never really made the waves that the engineers and executives might have hoped.

Ultimately, the Car Marty was a product released just a few years before its time. Fast forward to the early 2000s, and the same functionality could be packed into a compact dash-mounted unit the size of a small paperback book. At that point, GPS navigation became practical and affordable enough to reach massive penetration. Fujitsu’s version had done the job earlier, just not in a way that many people could afford to use. Even more so than the rest of the FM Towns lineup, the Car Marty would live and die in relative obscurity, a curio from a time when its abilities were truly astounding.

Image credits: Fujitsu, Re:Enthused via YouTube screenshot, The Retro Collective via YouTube screenshot, EricTucson via YouTube screenshot