Author Blake Harris still remembers the first time he started to see video games as a battle between multinational conglomerates. At the age of six or seven, he asked his dad to purchase the newly released Super NES as an upgrade to his much-loved NES. His dad refused, on the theory that "after the Super Nintendo, they'll come out with a Super Duper Nintendo, then a Super, Super Duper Nintendo," and so on.

Somehow, though, Sega's Genesis fit differently into his father's personal game hardware calculus. Thus, Harris went from being a "Nintendo kid" to a "Sega kid" when his parents got him and his brother a Genesis for Hanukkah one year.

"I was conscious to some degree that my father differentiated between these things—Nintendo and Sega were enemies," Harris said in an interview with Ars. "But they were all just video games. The company name didn't really register to me. I was just a kid. That was the first time I really realized, OK, Coke and Pepsi aren't just soda companies with different colors. I became conscious of the fact that there were two different sides, two different companies, and maybe even more... I've always compared it to the childhood equivalent of political parties."

This epiphany, shared by countless kids in the early '90s, would, over two decades later, form the basis for Harris' upcoming Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation. The 576-page book, due out in May, represents three years of research and hundreds of interviews with the executives and employees that formed the core of the Nintendo vs. Sega battle from 1989 through 1996, Harris said.

It's a story that has only been told piecemeal in a small handful of video game history books up to this point. It's also a story that has already attracted the attention of Hollywood; Sony Pictures has optioned the rights to a big-screen adaptation produced by Moneyball's Scott Rudin and directed/penned by Knocked Up's Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (separately, a straight documentary version is also being explored).

The battle between Mario and Sonic may seem like an odd choice for a biopic, but Harris likens the story to Ben Mezrich's The Accidental Billionaires and The Social Network film that followed it. Just as those projects made the story of Facebook more exciting by focusing on the people behind the social messaging system, Console Wars focuses on the people at the head of the dueling companies: Tom Kalinske at Sega of America and Minoru Arakawa and Howard Lincoln at Nintendo of America.

While Harris says he "tried not to make it a good vs. evil thing" in the book, the executives at the two companies could be pretty antagonistic in real life. He cited a story from just after the Senate subcommittee hearings on video game violence in December of 1993. "Tom [Kalinske] had said something about how he believed Nintendo had caused the Senate hearings by sending out videos of Sega's games, and Howard [Lincoln] very publicly sent out a press release with a 'Roses are red' poem that ended with '...so you had a bad day, boo hoo hoo.'

"I think that sort of epitomizes the playful but definitely conflict-ridden relationship between Sega and Nintendo. It never got physical. It never got out of control to people doing very regrettable things, but it was very fun and ultimately drove both of them to higher levels."

The rise and fall of Sega

More than any specific game or technological advantage, Harris identifies Sega's marketing savvy as the main reason it was able to break into a console market that Nintendo dominated almost entirely in the late '80s. "Nintendo had a different audience. They were really focused on kids six to 14 years old. Sega made a really concerted effort to appeal to an older audience, which was partly the realization that kids six to 14 are going to grow up, and we want to catch them and welcome them to 'the next level'... marketing to high school students, college students, adults even.

"Those first commercials for the 'Welcome to the Next Level' campaign—which a lot of people remember, which ended with the Sega scream—those first commercials aired during the 1992 MTV awards," Harris continued. "The fact that it aired in prime time on MTV and not during Saturday morning cartoons is indicative of the difference between Sega and Nintendo."

Even though both Sega and Nintendo were based in Japan, Harris said the Japan-phobic protectionism that suffused much of American culture in the early '90s may have hurt Nintendo a bit more. When Nintendo President Hiroshi Yamauchi bought a controlling stake in the Seattle Mariners in 1992, the strong backlash was pretty indicative of the times, Harris said.

CD-colored glasses It's widely acknowledged at this point that Sega's overly expansive hardware slate in the mid-'90s helped lead to the company's eventual downfall in the hardware space. Looking back, though, Harris thinks the release of one piece of Sega hardware in particular wasn't as disastrous as people remember. It's widely acknowledged at this point that Sega's overly expansive hardware slate in the mid-'90s helped lead to the company's eventual downfall in the hardware space. Looking back, though, Harris thinks the release of one piece of Sega hardware in particular wasn't as disastrous as people remember. "In the case of Sega CD, I think the failure of that is more of a retroactive analysis," he said. "I think at the time it was pretty successful and a good complement to the Genesis... Sega, from as early on as 'Genesis Does What Nintendon't,' had sort of taken the position that 'We are at the technological forefront of the video game industry.' So coming out with Sega CD at a time when a lot of people were talking about optical media and multimedia was probably the right move if you wanted to maintain that mindshare as the company that did the technological things first or the company that's ahead of the curve."



"When I go back and read articles, Japan bashing was almost accepted, to say negative things and use negative adjectives as if it was matter-of-fact," Harris said. "I do think that played a role. I think that because Nintendo became so big so fast in the '80s, there was a sense among parents who were the gatekeepers to the home that there was something ominous going on there because it was a Japanese company. I think that in some ways Sega was able to exploit that advantage. Even though it was a Japanese company, Sega of America has a very American style, especially with the marketing. I don't think people associate Sega with being a Japanese company as much as Nintendo."

After gaining a foothold with the Genesis, of course, Sega went down what would turn out to be a disastrous path in the mid-'90s, filled with a mess of ill-supported hardware (Remember the Pico? The Nomad? The CD-X?). "I remember speaking with one of the executives over there, and he told me at one point Sega was supporting eight hardware systems," Harris said. "That's really hard on any company... you can't focus on what you do best if you have to make software for eight different systems. There's no amount of marketing savvy that can make up for the fact that there's going to be weak links among that and it's just a lot of balls to juggle that you don't need to be juggling."

Lessons from the past

That's a historical lesson Nintendo would be wise to relearn, Harris said, as the company goes through a drastic change of focus in the wake of market struggles for the Wii U and 3DS. "I think the main lesson they learned during the Sega years is to focus on what they do best and eliminate the excess. What Nintendo has always done best is make great games for a very specific audience and maybe not get involved with any other things.

"I think there's a way of looking at the console wars between Sega and Nintendo as Nintendo being humbled by Sega, and then sticking to their guns and releasing games like Donkey Kong Country and Ken Griffey Jr. Baseball to bring them back on top of Sega," he continued. "I think going back to those roots would be helpful at this time. I know that's an easier-said-than-done proposition, but that would be my advice to them. I hope that it happens; I'd love to see Nintendo flourish for decades to come."

Even though the battle between Sega and Nintendo hardware is long over, the "console war" mentality that they largely originated lives on today in fanboy infighting over the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Visit any video game forum and you'll see the rhetorical battles are still incredibly intense, even if the systems and the combatants have changed.

Still, Harris sees the battle between Sega and Nintendo as decidedly different from what we see today. "The time that I'm writing about, the 16-bit battle, was a lot more the Wild West days of the industry," he said. "This was before E3, before the ESRB. This was also a time where it was much more common, especially in the early years, for third-party software companies to have to decide whether they were going to publish for Sega or Nintendo, so battle lines were drawn for them. Nowadays you see a lot fewer exclusive, third-party titles."

What system you and your neighborhood friends owned also mattered a lot more in the days before you could find a functionally infinite number of like-minded players and supporters on your nearest computer. "Because this was a pre-Internet era, [video games] were one of the things that kids around the country and the world realized we had in common, and that made the stakes a little higher. Without message boards saying whether you were a Sega kid or a Nintendo kid, [the console choice itself] was sort of your message board—'This is how I define myself.'"