Console Wars:  Sega, Nintendo, And The Battle That Defined A Generation, by Blake J. Harris

Like many children who grew up in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, I remember the console wars between Sega and Nintendo.  I tended to own Nintendo products myself, but I remember that some of my friends had Sega Genesis machines and we would happily play Sonic the Hedgehog there.  I did not personally see the two as rivals, and later on I played the N64 and Sony Playstation and the X Box similarly without any sort of hostility towards one company or another.  I simply played the games available based on what was available that best served my own interests as a gamer in role playing games, strategy games, and historical simulation games, as well as other types of games like Guitar Hero or shooters or fighting games or the like.  Given that context, therefore, the history of the console wars that heralded an age of competition between Nintendo and others is certainly of interest to me at least in theory, even if the story is not as compelling as it could have been, largely because this book is all about corporate drama and not so much about the joy of games.

This book, which is the basis for a documentary of the same name which I have not seen, is a sizable work of more than 550 pages.  It is, as one might imagine, a very detailed account that was built through interviews and a great deal of research that is conducted in a novelistic type of form rather than as a historian would do it.  That’s not a bad thing, as this book tends to figure that the reader will care about the individual people involved, most notably Tom Kalinske, president of Sega of America during this particular period and perhaps the main source of information for the book.  But when one reads about the way that people sought to deal with pressure from their corporate bosses and engage in petty fights over market share and fierce marketing and efforts at self-promotion, this book really talks about the less enjoyable parts of the console wars, and that was the corporate politics within companies like Sega, Sony, and Nintendo, and the game manufacturers that worked with them all.  The book also ends somewhat anticlimactically as Sony fired those who gave it the success of the PlayStation and Kalinske himself resigns as President of Sega of America because the fun is no longer there in the job and he sees the decline of Sega in the aftermath of Saturn’s failure.

Does one really care for these people over the course of the book?  To be sure, there is  large cast of characters who basically try to one-up each other and ensure their own personal happiness and security in the face of intracompany and intercompany squabbles and rivalries, where not everyone is on the same page.  There are compelling set-pieces here, like the time where the SOA executive eats some fugu and dares the Japanese to try some and they refuse, by which he judges them as not being daring enough like he and his cohorts in America.  There are numerous discussions of corporate culture, including Nintendo’s fear about the return of the great video game crash of the early 1980’s, which led them to restrain trade in a way that made it easy for Sega, and later Sony and Microsoft, to enter into the video game world and take away a large portion of its market share by providing effective competition.  Yet reading about the ongoing corporate tactics and strategy here is not as interesting as the author seems to think it is, and the book grinds to a halt when Sega’s trajectory declines because the author is mainly interested in trying to show the reader how cool Sega of America’s leadership team was.