CONSOLE WARS
Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation
Blake J Harris
itbooks; 558 pages; $28.99
Video games have emerged as a vibrant, imaginative pursuit, the art form at the intersection of computers and interactivity. But they are also a business, one that was built by people with experience making and selling toys, consumer electronics and coin-operated amusements like pinball machines.
Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation, a new book by Blake J Harris, focuses on the history of video games as an industry rather than as a creative enterprise. The "war" here is a contest of commerce, a battle for market share between two companies that is not unlike the Coke and Pepsi wars or the Nike and Reebok sneaker wars.
Mr Harris is right that this conflict, occurring mostly from 1990 to 1995, was an important one. The 1990s were when video games matured from being perceived as a faddish toy for young children into mainstream entertainment for teenagers and, soon, adults.
At the start of that decade, Nintendo was a near-monopolist, holding 90 per cent of a $3-billion market and boasting of a video game console in one of every three American homes. Yet by the beginnings of Bill Clinton's first term as president, Sega had seized 55 per cent of sales by appealing to an older audience with flashier advertising as well as games with more sex and more violence. At the same time, Nintendo fumbled a partnership with Sony, which would soon open a second front in the hostilities by introducing the PlayStation.
Console Wars is in development to become a film by Sony Pictures, with a screenplay that is being written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who provide a dashed-off foreword for the book. And there are plenty of moments in the book that you could envision as lively scenes in a movie along the lines of Moneyball.
Like these: Hayao Nakayama, the president of Sega Enterprises, arrives in person on a beach in Maui to offer Tom Kalinske, the protagonist of Console Wars, a job as the head of Sega of America while Mr Kalinske is on vacation with his family. Considering the job over sake at a hostess bar in downtown Tokyo, Mr Kalinske spies a man ignoring the women around him for a Game Boy, Nintendo's popular hand-held console of that era.
Not long afterward, trying to persuade the buyers at Walmart Stores to carry the new Sega Genesis console, Mr Kalinske and his colleagues plaster Bentonville, Ark, with billboards, set up an arcade where people can play free games near the Walmart headquarters, and cover every seat at an Arkansas Razorbacks football game with a Sega seat cushion. In front of a Senate committee convened by Joseph I Lieberman to investigate "the threat of joystick violence", Sega and Nintendo executives squabble publicly.
Really, this could be a heck of a movie. Mr Harris has interviewed more than 200 employees of Sega and Nintendo, and they tell plenty of war stories. A few pages recap the disastrous filming of Super Mario Bros, released in 1993, which cast Bob Hoskins as Mario, John Leguizamo as his brother, Luigi, and Dennis Hopper as their nemesis, King Koopa. Dustin Hoffman wanted to play Mario, but Nintendo vetoed him. Then Tom Hanks wanted the role, but Nintendo worried that the star of Turner & Hooch and "Joe Versus the Volcano couldn't headline a blockbuster.
In other amusing chapters, the American and Japanese divisions of Sega bicker over whether Sonic, the video game hedgehog that a Sega of Japan employee dreamed up by putting the head of Felix the Cat on the body of Mickey Mouse, should have fangs, an electric guitar and a busty human girlfriend. The Americans win and all three elements are stricken.
But it's not, sadly, a heck of a book. The reconstructed dialogue can be stilted and phony. When Mr Harris isn't unfurling cliches (speed is blazing, a woman is doe-eyed, go-getters are scrappy), he is falling prey to the language of public relations. A dud of a robot that came with the original Nintendo Entertainment System is described as "groundbreaking". A new Nintendo advertising slogan is "paradigm-shifting". Sonic is compared to Michael Jordan, Bill Clinton and Kurt Cobain.
Mr Harris is also too beholden to his sources. Mr Kalinske almost never makes a mistake nor acts out of spite or anger. Mr Kalinske and his colleagues at Sega are described at one point as being able to "dream like Walt Disney", "innovate like Steve Jobs" and, yes, "take risks like the mythological trickster Prometheus". At another point, Mr Harris presents, seemingly without irony, a Sega employee who describes the release of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 as "the biggest international event since the fall of the Berlin Wall".
Under Mr Kalinske's leadership, Sega's market share in the US grew, in only three years, from five per cent to a majority share. Cool TV commercials helped make that happen. But as Mr Kalinske and Mr Harris would both admit, good marketing works only when you have good games to promote.
And this book adds very little to our understanding of video games as a creative form. The lead programmer of the video game Sonic the Hedgehog, Yuji Naka, doesn't appear until more than a third of the way through the book. To protest the once-common practice among video game publishers of withholding recognition from the actual makers and designers of popular games, Mr Naka ended the first Sonic the Hedgehog with a black screen.
Yet the screen was only "seemingly blank", Mr Harris writes. In reality it included the list of the game's creators. Each name was published in black type on a black background.
Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation
Blake J Harris
itbooks; 558 pages; $28.99
Video games have emerged as a vibrant, imaginative pursuit, the art form at the intersection of computers and interactivity. But they are also a business, one that was built by people with experience making and selling toys, consumer electronics and coin-operated amusements like pinball machines.
Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation, a new book by Blake J Harris, focuses on the history of video games as an industry rather than as a creative enterprise. The "war" here is a contest of commerce, a battle for market share between two companies that is not unlike the Coke and Pepsi wars or the Nike and Reebok sneaker wars.
Mr Harris is right that this conflict, occurring mostly from 1990 to 1995, was an important one. The 1990s were when video games matured from being perceived as a faddish toy for young children into mainstream entertainment for teenagers and, soon, adults.
At the start of that decade, Nintendo was a near-monopolist, holding 90 per cent of a $3-billion market and boasting of a video game console in one of every three American homes. Yet by the beginnings of Bill Clinton's first term as president, Sega had seized 55 per cent of sales by appealing to an older audience with flashier advertising as well as games with more sex and more violence. At the same time, Nintendo fumbled a partnership with Sony, which would soon open a second front in the hostilities by introducing the PlayStation.
Console Wars is in development to become a film by Sony Pictures, with a screenplay that is being written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who provide a dashed-off foreword for the book. And there are plenty of moments in the book that you could envision as lively scenes in a movie along the lines of Moneyball.
Like these: Hayao Nakayama, the president of Sega Enterprises, arrives in person on a beach in Maui to offer Tom Kalinske, the protagonist of Console Wars, a job as the head of Sega of America while Mr Kalinske is on vacation with his family. Considering the job over sake at a hostess bar in downtown Tokyo, Mr Kalinske spies a man ignoring the women around him for a Game Boy, Nintendo's popular hand-held console of that era.
Not long afterward, trying to persuade the buyers at Walmart Stores to carry the new Sega Genesis console, Mr Kalinske and his colleagues plaster Bentonville, Ark, with billboards, set up an arcade where people can play free games near the Walmart headquarters, and cover every seat at an Arkansas Razorbacks football game with a Sega seat cushion. In front of a Senate committee convened by Joseph I Lieberman to investigate "the threat of joystick violence", Sega and Nintendo executives squabble publicly.
Really, this could be a heck of a movie. Mr Harris has interviewed more than 200 employees of Sega and Nintendo, and they tell plenty of war stories. A few pages recap the disastrous filming of Super Mario Bros, released in 1993, which cast Bob Hoskins as Mario, John Leguizamo as his brother, Luigi, and Dennis Hopper as their nemesis, King Koopa. Dustin Hoffman wanted to play Mario, but Nintendo vetoed him. Then Tom Hanks wanted the role, but Nintendo worried that the star of Turner & Hooch and "Joe Versus the Volcano couldn't headline a blockbuster.
In other amusing chapters, the American and Japanese divisions of Sega bicker over whether Sonic, the video game hedgehog that a Sega of Japan employee dreamed up by putting the head of Felix the Cat on the body of Mickey Mouse, should have fangs, an electric guitar and a busty human girlfriend. The Americans win and all three elements are stricken.
But it's not, sadly, a heck of a book. The reconstructed dialogue can be stilted and phony. When Mr Harris isn't unfurling cliches (speed is blazing, a woman is doe-eyed, go-getters are scrappy), he is falling prey to the language of public relations. A dud of a robot that came with the original Nintendo Entertainment System is described as "groundbreaking". A new Nintendo advertising slogan is "paradigm-shifting". Sonic is compared to Michael Jordan, Bill Clinton and Kurt Cobain.
Mr Harris is also too beholden to his sources. Mr Kalinske almost never makes a mistake nor acts out of spite or anger. Mr Kalinske and his colleagues at Sega are described at one point as being able to "dream like Walt Disney", "innovate like Steve Jobs" and, yes, "take risks like the mythological trickster Prometheus". At another point, Mr Harris presents, seemingly without irony, a Sega employee who describes the release of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 as "the biggest international event since the fall of the Berlin Wall".
Under Mr Kalinske's leadership, Sega's market share in the US grew, in only three years, from five per cent to a majority share. Cool TV commercials helped make that happen. But as Mr Kalinske and Mr Harris would both admit, good marketing works only when you have good games to promote.
And this book adds very little to our understanding of video games as a creative form. The lead programmer of the video game Sonic the Hedgehog, Yuji Naka, doesn't appear until more than a third of the way through the book. To protest the once-common practice among video game publishers of withholding recognition from the actual makers and designers of popular games, Mr Naka ended the first Sonic the Hedgehog with a black screen.
Yet the screen was only "seemingly blank", Mr Harris writes. In reality it included the list of the game's creators. Each name was published in black type on a black background.
©2014 The New York Times News Service