Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation

        I have a vague recollection of commercials when I was a kid that repeated the line “Sega does what Nintendon’t” and the frantic discordant shouts of “SEGA!”. Blake J. Harris’ Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation explores that moment in pop culture, approaching the story from the context of journalism and historical analysis. It’s a nice companion to Jason Schreier’s Blood, Sweat and Pixels or Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry. The books collectively explore the ups and downs, the rivalries and tribulations of a burgeoning industry, recreating the drama of the era.

Console Wars in particular explores the key figures in the rivalry between Nintendo and Sega, documenting all the underhanded plays (mainly by Sega) to tackle the industry giant. Nintendo presented a more wholesome and family-fun image to Sega’s more irreverent and wildly juvenile approach. The tactics are pretty entertaining, and if you’re interested in advertising and marketing I imagine that the two of them present a case study replete with do’s and don’ts.

What is most surprising about Console Wars is how precisely it recounts the conversations for key figures. In that respect, the book is novelistic. For instance, the book opens with an account of Tom Kalinske on vacation at the beach with his family when Hayao Nakayama, the president of Sega Enterprises, approached him and asked him to fly back to Japan with him. Harris reproduces the conversation Tom had with his daughter and future colleague in its full tenderness and drama.

In fact, the book follows that approach consistently. It feels like every business meeting, sales pitch, public outburst, resignation, promotion, marriage proposals, etc. is provided with a word-for-word reproduction—so much so that at times it feels outright unbelievable. How would anyone possibly remember the exact words they shared in the heat of a conflict? Perhaps it speaks to the thoroughness of Harris’ research and creativity in style. Some details, I imagine, are recorded in official records—recorded speeches at E3, for example—while others would only be verifiable through multiple corroborative interviews. If a bit implausible, Harris’ approach is nonetheless compelling as a narrative.

In terms of the details, the ground Harris treads isn’t exactly new. A number of people have given their accounts of the famed console wars—it’s kind of amazing that the whole book spans only about 6 years in real life; a whole career seems to be crammed into a short half-decade. The strength of the work is in its depth. Harris covers a lot of detail, including specific campaigns and movements. The book documents the highlights of different generations of consoles and the public response. From Super Mario to Donkey Kong Country to Sonic the Hedgehog to Night Trap to Mortal Kombat, the book runs the gamut of gaming landmarks. Harris documents the drama of developing a Sonic sequel and the internal conflicts between Sega of America and Sega of Japan, with the latter sandbagging the marketing gimmicks to the frustration of poor Tom Kalinske.

The book uses the console wars as a jumping off point to examine broader industry movements, including the legalities of violence in games and the push to create the ESRB rating system. It also documents the formation of Nintendo Power and the inaugural E3 conference. It’s compelling to see how the strife of the time period led to creation and flourishing of an industry, despite these rivals essentially trying to ruin the market share of one another.

Overall, the book isn’t anything groundbreaking. It doesn’t revolutionize the way I think about gaming, exactly, but the colourful cast of characters and the novelistic approach is very engaging as a story. It’s light, fun, and pretty informative. It hits the nostalgia buttons but also pulls back the curtain on how cutthroat and wild these fun colourful pastimes really were amongst adults while kids picked up the controller and demanded another try.

Happy reading and happy gaming, whichever side of the console war you fought for.

Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry by Jason Schreier

  This is not my first Jason Schreier book and I hope it won’t be my last. Making a name for himself with Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, Schreier now offers a compelling follow-up to the volatility of the market with Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry. Each chapter focuses on a studio or developer and how the forces within the industry that led to their rises and falls.

What really stands out to me about the book is that Schreier really knows how to tell a story. Going beyond the scope of regular reportage, every interview and board meeting and game release is imbued with a sense of high drama. On occasion, I was familiar with the games being discussed (Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite get particular attention; XCOM and the Firaxis team is a particularly tragic tale). Schreier’s ability to balance first hand accounts, raw data, and narration makes the stories riveting and dynamic. These could be presented as timelines or dry nodes on a path to a bigger picture, but Schreier’s voice engages readers far beyond the facts.

I’ll have to admit that I don’t remember most of the details from each of the chapters. I was along for the ride, but my memory is pretty faulty when I don’t take notes. Some of the trends that emerged across contexts were conflicts between executives and developers, budget adjustments and restructuring, teams working on projects piecemeal, and other kinds of corporate challenges. Schreier really exposes the challenges of being a game developer—beyond the regular effects of crunch and burnout, the number of times that developers find themselves unemployed is wild. Studios get closed and employees get reshuffled. Employees get jobs and move across the country for a year or two only to watch projects fall apart. Employees finish a project they’ve worked on for years and find the next day that they’ve been laid off. Teams get collapsed or rejigged and people get lost in the shuffle. It’s intense and it’s unpredictable. The book tells stories of individuals in the broader context of an industry that is routinely exploitative, exploitative as a matter of course. Hopefully this book serves as the impetus for widespread unionization, but I’m not holding my breath for now. 

Unfortunately, I don’t have many notes to extend this conversation. All I can say is that Press Reset was a wild ride that was both informative and entertaining. Since Schreier has a knack for finding the emotional core of the story; the ‘angle’ he finds and the way he digs in makes something as commonplace as turning on a video game console into an epic tale of betrayal, desperation, and empowerment.

It’s definitely worth a shot.

Happy reading!

The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone, illustrated by Josh Neufeld

  Years ago, I was teaching a Grade 10 English course and had some students reading The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone, which was adapted into its graphic novel form by Josh Neufeld. Parts of it stuck with me for a long time. I remembered it as being an illuminating exploration of media and I was hoping to use it, at least in part, for my media studies course. I remembered the book as talking about the funding structure for media and how that impacts the kinds of messages we get to see (think: Noam Chomsky). 

There is some of that, but it isn’t exactly how I remembered. Essentially, The Influencing Machine is a history of journalism. Gladstone hops between different time periods and watershed moments in reporting and discusses the impact of the media in relation to peoples’ everyday experiences. She quotes from a range of primary sources, noting the reactions that people had to news when it became widely available in print—and then widely available on television—and then widely available on the internet. Perhaps it’s because Gladstone is a journalist that she’s able to tell it all as a story. She draws some clear parallels between different historical points in time, the most notable of which (for me) being the way journalism shifted during the Vietnam War and beyond.

There’s a lot to talk about in terms of media evolution: the changing relationship between journalists and the military, the way polls sway us or not (posting this on election day feels serendipitous…), the way that we have come to trust and distrust information. The vignettes Gladstone choose are effectively representative and the balance between her own narratorial voice and the accounts of others is nicely achieved to reflect the times and the commentary on the times. If there’s a downside to Gladstone’s historico-anthropological approach, it is that it is doomed to the marching on of time: even since the book’s publication in 2011, we have seen immense changes to journalism and reportage. While Gladstone references Stephen Colbert’s idea of “truthiness”, the book isn’t so current as to address “fake news” or living in a post-truth AI-content-generated world.

In a book like this (namely: a long-form essay turned into a graphic novel), it runs the risk of being bland, but Josh Neufeld’s illustrations add a liveliness and expressiveness to the work as a whole. The depictions of Gladstone herself are often amusingly cartoonish, transplanting her into different historical eras complete with period-appropriate garb. For a book that is intent on telling the “truth” (while “objectivity” is problematized), Neufeld does not shy away from some creative embellishment. The pages have a liveliness to them that captures the spirit of the time, if not the letter of the time (although there are specific speeches and letters that have been illustrated here).

Gladstone’s book gives us a lot of food for thought, especially as we progress into a world increasingly unchecked for factuality and manipulated into sensationalized stories. Granted, these tactics are nothing new—ever since the conception of news, there has been mis– and dis–information, but the book needs an update, a revised text that explores how the media industry is being influenced by big tech’s privatization of information and its subsequent manipulation over us. The debate of privately / publicly funded news is given an engaging voice with uncertain answers here—and it’s time to take action. Like the book itself, I’ll end this review with a reminder: we get the media we deserve. It’s time to claim it.