The rivalry between Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario Bros. is leaving your junior high bedroom and jumping to the big screen. Sony announced today that it would back the film Console Wars, about the early 1990s video gaming rivalry between Sega and Nintendo. Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, who created Superbad and other films together, will direct. The film is based upon , a book by Blake J. Harris due in May (Rogen and Goldberg wrote the foreword, so the movie deal is no surprise).

So many years and generations of gaming consoles later, it can be easy to forget the heat with which the Nintendo-Sega rivalry burned. (Were you a Nintendo kid or a Sega kid?) But this was more important than bad blood. The competition between the two spurred critical advancements in gaming.

For example, rewind to 1990, the early days of the Genesis' 16-bit challenge to the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was a year before Nintendo's own 16-bit Super NES came to America. Back then, PopMech covered the new wave of gaming systems coming to challenge NES, led by Genesis. What caught our editors' attention, besides the jump from 8 to 16 bits:

Resolution: "Genesis offers a resolution of 320 X 224 lines, while Nintendo offers 256 X 240."

3D: Where Nintendo characters typically moves against a stationary background, "Genesis independently scrolls both the foreground and background to achieve perspectives that almost three-dimensional in appearance." Progress!

Play by phone: Okay, this one didn't actually materialize at the time. When PopMech was writing for February 1990, Sega was working on a way for players to challenge rivals across the country via the TeleGenesis modem. "Data exchange is virtually instantaneous," PM wrote... perhaps exaggerating. Alas, the system that was known as Sega Meganet in Japan never actually came to the United States. Online gaming, so huge today, was a little ahead of its time with 1990-era modems, but it would come to Genesis and Super Nintendo in the years to come.

And thankfully, PM editors didn't miss the most important Genesis innovation of all: the third button.

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