Console Wars

Despite some particularly crushing news in the "I'm looking for a job" front (the place where I worked last year rated me as "mediocre" and ineligible for rehire), I finished Console Wars, a great 540+ page tome my brother bought me as a gift. It recounts the early part of the 1990s from Sega's POV and the team, led by former Mattel exec Tom Kalinske as they went to battle with the Big N and almost ended up winning. It's a tale of underdogs, the creation of Sonic (particularly humorous is the amalgamation that Sonic was conceived of: no spoilers) but instead of winning the big game in the end or at least a moral victory, it also has the fall of Sega: the constant battles with Sega of Japan, the rise of Sony, and how Nintendo was the hated rival (or at least rival) that got hurt before it fought back.

While it ends with Sega's loss following the botched release of the Sega Saturn and talks about a great variety of video game related subjects in that particularly heady area (and of course, since Sega is the "protagonist", it's more on them than the Big N), it also vindicates Tom Kalinske and the rest of Sega of America from Sega's more terrible choices (32X, the early Saturn launches). It also appears to give Sega more praise than it was worth, despite Sega really forcing Nintendo to play their hand and truly make a real video game industry instead of an expensive toy, it downplays what Sega did best: after all, Sega Genesis was really a rather poor system, and because it was released a few years earlier before the SNES it was absolutely inferior in every way, but they managed to make it work thanks to an innovative new game (Sonic The Hedgehog, of course) and some rather effective marketing (like the fictional "Blast Processing" compared to SNES's Mode 7).

It also made me realize why Sonic hasn't been doing too well in the last 10 years or so, compared to Mario, despite being long in the tooth, still manages to make money: Sonic was conceived as a "cooler" alternative to Mario. But while Mario is fairly timeless, Sonic just feels too much like a product of the era and was never able to really shake that impression.

All in all, I really loved it, although I wish that there was something like it for the rest of the console wars that followed. In the bittersweet ending, Sony's PlayStation goes onto a big success, but it doesn't even get to the release of the N64, which does not fare too well either against the PlayStation either. The other intriguing thing is that while Sony and Nintendo had parted ways soon after the "SNES CD" debacle (which isn't discussed terribly deeply, either, and why Philips didn't make an add-on to the SNES instead of Nintendo licensing their most valuable characters for Philips to mangle, isn't discussed), Sega had tried to court Sony to release a 32-bit console together, and that actually came close to happening. Imagine if they did. That would definitely put Nintendo in the dust.

I wondered if in pursuit of the 32-bit partner, if Sega had ever contacted Apple, which could've resulted in a far better console than with the Pippin.