Just as Commodore saw an opening for the Amiga in some global markets against the IBM PC, a computer with improved graphics and sound was considered to overcome the PC-9801 in the home-use field in Japan.

With many multimedia innovations for its time, the FM Towns was that system, though for a number of reasons it never broke far beyond the boundaries of its niche market status.

Eventually, the FM Towns lost much of its uniqueness by adding a DOS/V (PC clone plus DOS with native Japanese language support) compatibility mode switch, until Fujitsu finally discontinued making FM Towns specific hardware and software and moved to focus on the IBM PC clones (Fujitsu FMV) that many Japanese manufacturers - who previously were not players in the PC market - were building by the mid to late 1990s.

To this day, Fujitsu is known for its laptop PCs globally, and FM Towns (and Marty) users have been relegated to a small community of aficionados.

Several variants were built; the first system (FM TOWNS model1 and model2) is based on an Intel 80386DX processor running at a clock speed of 16 MHz, with the option of adding an 80387 FPU, features one or two megabytes of RAM (with a possible maximum of 6 MB), one or two 3.5" floppy disk drives, a PCMCIA memory card slot and a single-speed CD-ROM drive.

These games usually utilize the Towns OS API (TBIOS) for handling several graphic modes, sprites, sounds, a mouse, gamepads, and CD-audio.

The FM Towns is capable of booting its graphical Towns OS straight from CD in 1989 - two years before Amiga CDTV booted its GUI-based AmigaOS 1.3 from internal CD drive and the CD-bootable System 7 was released for the Macintosh in 1991, and five years before the El Torito specification standardized boot-CDs on IBM PC compatibles in 1994.

The system has ports in the front to accommodate karaoke, LEDs to indicate volume level, and software to add popular voice-altering effects such as echoes.

Games on the FM Towns regularly use Red Book Audio CD music tracks, especially if they are designed specifically for the Fujitsu system.

This was a novelty and innovation far ahead of other PCs of the time made possible by the standard CD-ROM drive found in every FM Towns computer.