The Book Of Genesis

The battle for 16-bit supremacy is the subject of Blake J. Harris' Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation (It Books, 576 pages, $28.99). Harris speaks this weekend at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo as a member of a keynote panel that includes, among others, Tom Kalinske, the maverick former Mattel CEO who rode hyper-aggressive marketing and the iconic Sonic the Hedgehog to the top of the heap, and then back down to the bottom.

Despite a string of poorly considered business decisions surrounding hardware like the 32X and Sega Saturn, Harris believes the gaming industry wouldn't be what it is today without Sega. Sonic is now collecting paychecks from the enemy, but the lessons to be learned from the era are still interesting to tech watchers today.

Everyone in the pool!

In order to build a catalog that could compete with Nintendo, Sega invited developers spurned by Nintendo's rigorous standards. Similar to the Google Play marketplace for Android apps, the responsibility of sorting through the garbage fell to the consumer. The result was, for better or worse, a deluge of Genesis titles with wider availability than the highly polished, yet curiously scarce offerings for SNES. 

"Part of Sega's road to success was to be as friendly as possible by teaming up with Nintendo's enemies and being accommodating to retailers and third-party developers," Harris says. "Nintendo had a smaller library because they would be very secretive and unwilling to send out development kits until later, whereas Sega would be much more open with developers to give them more time. Nintendo weren't bad guys, they just had a very different philosophy. Sega was more edgy and wanted to offer more freedom, but with that also comes crappy games. The philosophy was, 'Sure, make a game and we'll release it—it will be up to the consumer to decide.' Nintendo, on the other hand, was notoriously strict with who could make games, but the result was great quality. They were involved in a lot of antitrust and monopoly cases where people would make games that wouldn't be released because Nintendo had very rigorous standards."

Push the envelope.

Sega knew from the beginning that Nintendo valued being a family-friendly brand. Finding a niche and exploiting it is Business 101, which made getting the Genesis in the hands of maturing gamers priority No. 1. While the SNES port of the arcade blockbuster Mortal Kombat used green-blue fluid for blood and lacked the game's signature "Fatality" sequences, the Genesis version was as graphic as possible if the user knew the not-so-secret "blood code."

And who can forget Night Trap, the controversial Sega CD game that then-U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) deemed so vile it spawned a subcommittee hearing that resulted in the creation of the Entertainment Software Rating Board? The game ultimately sucked, but where would Grand Theft Auto be today without Sega paving the way?

"Sega argued in the hearings that 60 percent of their consumers were adults, where Nintendo said they would never release a game like that," Harris says. "In 1990, and even today, Nintendo was very childish. They're sold in toy stores. I would ask my dad to play, and he would look at it like the boy version of a tea party. Sega knew Nintendo had a stranglehold on the children's business so they saw the opportunity to go after teens and college students rather than competing for the attention of kids. That spawned their in-your-face sensibility that was personified in their 'Welcome to the Next Level' campaign and their commercials ending with someone screaming, 'Sega!'

They were pivotal in pushing the boundary of video games towards more mature content, and we can award them with all the success and negativity that comes with making games more realistic and graphic and bloody, which people love to complain about."

Choose your tribe wisely.

Before Internet-driven first-person shooters and MMORPGs began devouring the lives of obsessive gamers, console gaming was a wholly social enterprise. Because games were expensive—remember, Nintendo cartridges still cost about $40 in 1994, the same as they do today—people wanted to trade them with friends.

To marketers, the SNES-vs.-Genesis feud created wrinkles well before techie brand devotion was an exploitable angle. To kids, it was a matter of hanging out with the neighborhood bed wetter with the smelly dog because his dad scored him a copy of Streets of Rage 2 the day it came out. 

"I'm 31 years old, and when I was a kid between the ages of 7 and 12, video games were the social lubricant of my childhood," Harris says. "I never would've classified myself as a gamer, but that was what you did. You didn't call up a friend and say, 'Hey, you wanna come over and talk about girls?' You would say, 'Hey, wanna come over and play Genesis?' And then you would talk about girls and sports. It was the same role that a bar would play nowadays. In terms of affecting my social life, I definitely had friends that had a Super Nintendo, whereas I had the Genesis, and you would base whose house you would go to and where you would sleep over around that."

Content is king.

By the time Nintendo released Donkey Kong Country for SNES in November 1994, Sega was ready to move past the 16-bit game. The result was the 32X—an adapter for the Genesis that was intended to serve as a stopgap until the impending release of the Sega Saturn. While Nintendo enjoyed huge success with 16-bit games until the last SNES title was released in 1997, Sega's pre-emptive hardware assault led to product shortages and a dearth of high-impact titles to compete with the likes of Donkey Kong Country and Killer Instinct. Both consoles waned, but Sega had spent a lot without much to show.

"Super Nintendo ended up having better games than Genesis in the long run, which can be attributed to Sega's downfall when they released the Saturn and abandoned the 16-bit system," Harris says. "They released the 32X in November of 1994, at which point Nintendo released Donkey Kong Country. Nintendo played the long game while Sega kept moving on to new systems.

Even though Sega had 60 percent of the market at the time, Super Nintendo eventually sold more units because they stuck with it. If you had to pick a moment when Sega jumped the shark, it would be Sega Saturn. If that system had been successful then I think they would've been able to salvage all the mistakes they made up to the point of finally getting into the 32-bit game.” 

GO: The Portland Retro Gaming Expo is at the Oregon Convention Center, 777 NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. 9 am-midnight Saturday, 10 am-5 pm Sunday, Oct. 18-19. Blake Harris speaks at 1:30 pm Saturday. Weekend pass $27 in advance, $32 at the door; Saturday pass $22 in advance, $27 at the door; Sunday pass $16 in advance, $21 at the door. Children 10 and under free. retrogamingexpo.com. 

WWeek 2015