This past March, my wife and I were in Austin and the subject came up of how my step-mother Alice had met my father and joined our family, inheriting 3 step-sons in the process. In 1991, I was 12 years old and obsessed with video games. It was a period of major transitions in my life and looking back I now recognize just how large a role video games played as a coping mechanism for everything going on around me. Divorce isn’t easy for any child and I remember feeling a profound lack of control. For the first time in my life, I was rarely the center of attention. There were more important, more adult, things going on and I had no ability to stop the quick changes going on around me (and probably within me)! For the long time Geekscapists keeping score, this was around the time in my life that my father drove me to Dallas to play in the Nintendo Championships.
He recognized, probably more than I did, how valuable a tool video games played in giving me back that sense of control that important in building a kid’s self confidence. It was a difficult period in my life and I remember spending countless hours playing on my Gameboy, my NES, my PC 386 and then one day my Sega Genesis. Writing this story now, I don’t think I’m exaggerating the importance of those games in seeing me through the anger, sadness and frustration that I felt. I’ve always recognized it their importance or I wouldn’t be playing games today.
My 1990 school photo. Note the Nintendo Championships shirt.
That’s why it hit like a bomb, listening to my step-mom Alice tell us the story of how she had first met my father and moved into our home, when she said these words: “one of the most difficult things was constantly hearing that Sonic the Hedgehog music playing on the TV. Jack and I thought that I was going to go nuts.”
My 35 year old jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe it… but then again, how could I not believe it? The moment that Sonic the Hedgehog entered our home, it had immediately replaced Altered Beast, my Gameboy, the Kings Quest saga and multiple other games as the constant soundtrack to my adolescence. Looking back, of course I understand how the constant barrage of music would drive anyone insane. It had temporarily driven me insane during the summer of 1999 when I caught Pokémon fever while playing Pokémon Red to the point where I couldn’t tell if my Gameboy Color was switched off anymore because I would still constantly hear the music in my head! Gameplay Music Insanity was real and looking back at that time and the frequency with which I played there was no way to avoid it.
Still, I couldn’t help but feel a tiny bit betrayed at my step-mom’s revelation. I mean, this was the woman who, while she was still my father’s girlfriend, had taken me to video game arcades in order to spend time with me and get to know me. She had used video games as a bonding mechanism, as a way of understanding me (even going so far as to buy a Game Boy and master Tetris), and now it was revealed that I had almost driven her crazy with my constant video game playing? No. That’s not right at all. She did everything right and out of love (and still continues to). So maybe it was my own self that I truly felt betrayed by, as if I should have realized at my younger age just how addicted I had become to the 16-bit Hedgehog and that this addiction, like any addiction, had an effect on those around me as well! How selfish had I been? Or was it just my self preservation in a time in my life where I needed something, anything, to see me through what I was experiencing?
I don’t know. That all happened over two decades ago and the answers aren’t easy to extract.
But today, I do know one thing. I better understand to a great degree the exterior mechanisms that brought all of those emotions and actions into play, set in motion by rival executives at Sega and Nintendo half a continent away during that period of my life. And I know this because I have read my friend Blake J. Harris’ book Console Wars, about the battle between Sega and Nintendo during the early 90s and the birth of the modern video game industry. And it’s an incredible read.
Nintendo’s 1989 CES Booth
If David Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game is the greatest sports book ever written then Console Wars is possibly poised to become the greatest book on video games ever written. It is just that illuminating and engaging. And it is already one of my favorite pieces of narrative non-fiction.
Writing a true events book like this isn’t easy. As research, Blake undertook over two hundred hours of interviews with the people involved, both from Nintendo and Sega, in addition to multiple individuals who were also involved and could recall the events in person. And the events told in the book read like a laundry list of our favorite childhood moments: the release of the NES system in the U.S. in 1985, the slow decay of the video arcade, the release of the Gameboy and the Sega Genesis, the creation of Sonic the Hedgehog and Echo the Dolphin. It’s all in here in fine detail and from multiple perspectives, each moment brought to life as vividly as if you were there. And not just the well known, broad strokes either but personal recollections of the dinner meetings and all nighters that would lead to major events like the first global release of any video game ever, the birth of the Sony Playstation, the creation of the Sega CD and the erosion of Nintendo’s dominant 90% marketshare within just a few months. This book puts voices and faces to the men and women that helped shape our childhoods and will no doubt answer many lingering questions about events that are still playing out today.
One chapter I thought fascinating regarded Nintendo’s debacle of the 1992 Super Mario Brothers movie, considering that it followed in the footsteps of recent and successful kids films like Home Alone, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Dick Tracy and that Nintendo’s plumber brothers held a popularity greater than any of them at the time, what could have possibly gone wrong? Well, as Console Wars illustrates… what didn’t? From passing on interested actors like Dustin Hoffman and Tom Hanks to a revolving door of writers and directors, this particular chapter is a horror story of Hollywood production at a time in which Nintendo couldn’t risk having egg on its face. No doubt Console Wars, which was recently optioned to be adapted into a feature film by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (who are about to see a $40 million dollar weekend with Neighbors) won’t suffer the same fate. It’s narrative pace is constant and clear, sometimes retelling events in the order that they happened and at others jumping decades back for an individual or company’s specific backstory. And every angle that Harris chooses to explore is an interesting and appropriate one. I never found myself skimming through portions of the book or wanting to jump forward to certain individuals or events. In addition to Rogen and Goldberg’s Hollywood take, Blake is co-directing a documentary based on his book.
Console Wars author Blake J. Harris
Console Wars does a careful job of not playing favorites either. It’s easy to pitch this book as a dramatic underdog story, and surely the story of Sega of America’s fresh behind the video game ears CEO Tom Kalinske and his team of upstarts is an engaging one. You absolutely find yourself rooting for Sega to kick and scratch and make a name for itself in the face of impossible odds. But Blake does an equally good job of letting you see things from Nintendo’s perspective (and eventually Sony’s), even as the market leader uses tactics like shorting retailer orders and demanding store and publisher exclusivity in order to protect it’s market share. In some instances, it’s pretty clear that Nintendo used their dominance to further bully retailers and game developers. Still, Console Wars does a painstaking job of making you understand why these things happened (in this case, because Nintendo was justifiably concerned with repeating the Atari’s market over-saturation, poor quality standards and eventual demise).
And that’s probably Console Wars’ greatest success. It doesn’t just give you a retelling of what happened behind the closed doors of one of the most important periods of video game history. It goes to great lengths to let you understand why these events happened and why they played out the way they did, both from a business and a human perspective. Reading it, I couldn’t help but feel a personal connection with all of the parties involved as reading through the events in this book helped me reconnect with a major time in my life, one in which I was just too young to be fully cognizant of.
But even if you don’t find yourself hooked by the subject matter, which you should considering this is Geekscape, Console Wars is a fantastic read because it covers so many bases, on multiple sides of the events in question, and does so in an accessible, personal and engaging way. Yes, this is the story of how video games, after a rocky gestation period, finally entered our homes for good and helped to define an entire generation (face it, you were either a Nintendo person or a Sega person back in the day). But it’s also a story about people and progress and how individuals, their interpersonal relationships and their rivalries, can shape an industry and the world around them. And just like the media they helped created, it stays with us on a personal level. I can’t recommend this book enough (and I’ll no doubt be getting my step-mom Alice a copy of Console Wars soon… I think she’ll love it).
Console Wars will be released May, 13th. You can order your copy here.
