Which console
creator was your favorite? Throughout the years, these two consoles manufactures
have been duking it out. I am going to compare Sega and Nintendo and their
battles in the console generation. I will be walking the reader through the
tactics and methods each company used.
.In 1983, the
great videogame crash happened. This was when the American consumers got fed up
with videogames and thought they were just a fad. It was caused because of too
many consoles on the market, and with Atari, the biggest console maker at the
time, had no control over what games were made on their console causing too
many bad games on the market. This gave video games a bad reputation to the
consumer. At this time, savior of video game market the Nintendo Entertainment
System (NES) came out. It was advertised as more of a toy and partnering with the
Teddy Rubskin Bear Company helped get the NES on store shelves. The next year, Nintendo
did not need the partnership and NES was a huge hit. Nintendo did not want to screw
this up, so they made very kid friendly games and were very tough on not having
explicit content or violence.
After seeing the
rebirth of the videogame market, a company that previously dipped their toe in
the water called Sega, came out with Sega Master System. This is how the great
console war began. The first two consoles to fight were Segas Master System and
Nintendos NES. Sega was a more powerful console graphics wise, meaning they had
better graphics; but, Nintendo had killer applications (something that moves
hardware). They had Zelda, Mario and
Mega Man. The first fight between these juggernauts was a complete victory for Nintendo.
At end of day, there were 61 million SNES in the world and only 11 million
Sega Master Systems.
Since that console generation was
over, Sega came out Genesis and Nintendo came out with Super Nintendo (SNES). At
this point, Sega was on their more aggressive than ever. They came out with
They did have a mascot his name was Alex Kidd,
but he was a lame duck of mascots. So, Sega held a contest internally for the
new Sega mascot, and they came up with a new edgier mascot who had crazy spiked
hair and his name was Sonic the Hedgehog. He would travel faster than supersonic
speed (making him faster than Mario, the Nintendo mascot, which was also in
advertising). 
advertising such as, “Sega does what Nintendon't”. Sega also went for older
kids by bringing more violent games to Sega Genesis, such as Mortal Combat with
blood. Then, Sega went after the cool artsy crowd. Sega still had a more
powerful console but they had an identity crisis.
Sega had more games
due to fact that more people given them a chance because of the blitz advertising
and word of mouth from the previous generation. Nintendo was the good kid in
this whole scenario and just sat on SNES and kept making AAA games. To describe the game flow, Nintendo would have
5 A+ games a year compared to Segas 20B games. Just like previous generation,
they were priced same. This time Sega
had 44% of the market share and was closing in on the console crown, but only God
knew what the Sega Saturn was going to do to Sega.
Sega was getting
ready to announce their new console, Saturn, when they got word that this new
console "PlayStation" was going to have better specifications, ram
and memory, then, they rushed to put a second CPU on the console. This made it
harder to make games even though it was the most powerful console of the
generation. The other big issue was they announced the Sega Saturn release date
was for a September 1995 and it had a lot of hype; but at E3 conference 1995,
they had a surprise release date of May 1995 and almost instantly ran out of
stock. They also, in previous generation, made a bunch of add-ons which confused
the average consumer. Plus, with these issues Sega was in trouble. Nintendo did come out with the Nintendo 64
their console to compete with Sega Saturn. But, Nintendo never made a 32bit
console and sega did to stay relevant, they dropped it like a box of rock
losing even more consumer support.
Now if one was to look at how many models Sega
and Nintendo made they would find out that Sega had made 9 consoles but in the
same time period Nintendo had only made 3.Sega bet was on hardware and Nintendo
was on software. This was the first generation since the second generation of
consoles where Nintendo was not in the lead since PlayStation came in like a
hurricane. This gave Sega about 6% of the market and Nintendo with 20% and with
74% going to PlayStation. Sega final endeavor
was the Dreamcast it was hailed for being ahead of its time but with looming PlayStation
2 it was final nail in the coffin.
This was the
console war what started all console wars. This was interesting time in video
game history. We talked about Sonic origins. The first time someone booted there
GameCube and saw Sonic they knew it was over.
