Image: Evan-Amos/Wikipedia
If a few small things had changed, might we be gaming on a Sega PlayStation right now?
That’s the picture Blake Harris paints in his new book Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo and the Battle That Defined a Generation. Available today, Console Wars is a narrative history of the brief time period in the lifespan of the videogame publisher Sega when it was on top of the world. In 1994, sales of the Sega Genesis console accounted for 55 percent of the 16-bit market, a huge turnaround from just a few years prior when Nintendo was the undisputed king of all games. That success, Harris argues, can be largely attributed to Sega’s hiring of toy executive Tom Kalinske, who serves as the story’s protagonist.
Console Wars has arrived with much fanfare; it’s already being adapted into a feature film by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who provide the book’s foreword. The book itself is a fast-paced page-turner that anyone with an interest in classic gaming history will want to read for its unique behind the scenes insight into Sega, Nintendo and Sony through the eyes of its former employees.
It feels very much like the spiritual successor to David Sheff’s 1993 book Game Over, a similar narrative history of Nintendo. In fact, Console Wars picks up almost exactly where Sheff’s book left off, with Nintendo ascendant and Sega nipping at its heels. As with Game Over, the allure of Console Wars is that it brings us behind the curtain, into the conference rooms, corner offices and limousines where the future of videogames was plotted out bit by bit, sometimes by men who were as angry and bitter at each other as Sega and Nintendo kids were on the playground. Even gaming history buffs will find themselves surprised, maybe even shocked, by some of the revelations that Harris has turned up thanks to his extensive access.
In broad strokes, Kalinske’s plan was to identify Nintendo’s weak points and attack them mercilessly. Under his direction Sega ran clever attack ads that made brilliant Nintendo games like Super Mario World appear to be hot garbage. Although the game catalogs for both consoles were similar in tone, Sega managed to position itself as the console for older kids and teens, and by extension Nintendo as the console for the Kindergarten set. Since Nintendo refused to answer these head-on attacks, it lost by default.
Kalinske also took direct aim at Nintendo’s weaknesses within the game industry itself. Publishers were under Nintendo’s thumb, and Sega gave them the chance to escape into a freer licensing situation. Sega gave the videogame magazines all the access (and advertising dollars) that Nintendo refused to.
But perhaps, Console Wars argues, the biggest credit to Kalinske and the Sega team might be for the making of Sonic the Hedgehog, the killer app that launched the Genesis into the stratosphere. The game’s designer Yuji Naka is generally credited with being the force behind Sonic’s success, but in Harris’ telling it was more a triumph of marketing than design: The original concept art of Sonic the Hedgehog, as submitted from the Japanese team to the U.S. branch, was a character that looked “villainous and crude, complete with sharp fangs, a spiked collar, an electric guitar, and a human girlfriend whose cleavage made Barbie’s chest look flat.”
Constantly pushing back against the game’s designers, Sega of America fought for the Sonic that we know today; cute and friendly with just a touch of a rebellious streak.
Besides the behind-the-scenes of the making of the first Sonic, Console Wars doesn’t much get into the actual creation of videogames. We don’t hear much about how Sega’s classic games were conceptualized, or even about the process of bringing certain games to the United States. This is a story of corporate intrigue, and the creative works themselves are largely pushed to the background.
That said, the corporate intrigue is crazy enough to carry the story on its own. We find out that Sega almost had its hands on the PlayStation and even on the Nintendo 64. Harris says that Kalinske was close to working out a deal with Sony, which was preparing to enter the videogame market and had been spurned by its erstwhile partner Nintendo, that would have seen Sega team up with Sony for the PlayStation.
When that fell through, Kalinske began to talk to Silicon Graphics, which was shopping around the idea of doing a low-cost version of its superpowered 3-D workstations that would function as a truly spectacular 64-bit gaming machine. But Sega of Japan — which is set up as Kalinske’s inscrutable, shadowy nemesis throughout the story, constantly thwarting his best plans — killed the idea, and the technology went to Nintendo instead. Both PlayStation and Nintendo 64 outsold Sega’s eventual next-generation solution, the Saturn, and Kalinske quit shortly after its launch.
Though it largely focuses on Sega, Console Wars does occasionally get inside Nintendo’s headquarters for certain vignettes, much of which concerns the internecine squabbling over the production of Donkey Kong Country (in Harris’ telling, Nintendo’s top Japanese game designers including Shigeru Miyamoto openly laughed at the American executive who suggested that a good videogame could be made by non-Japanese).
Console Wars slots in nicely to the previously existing library of history books covering the game industry. Now that the iron veil of public relations is beginning to fall from the days of 16-bit gaming, it’s exciting to finally get a no-holds-barred account of a history that has largely been kept secret from the public eye.
Bring on the movie, Seth Rogen.