

How Sega Planned To Crush Nintendo, 24 Years Ago - sheltgor
http://kotaku.com/how-sega-planned-to-crush-nintendo-24-years-ago-1575042229

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jsnell
I very strongly disliked Console Wars, the book this is an excerpt from.

The chosen style of the book is overly detailed recreations of events with
cheesy dialogue. It's a very grating style, and one that makes everything feel
incredibly fake.

Also, I'm sure that there are a huge number of awesome stories that could be
told of that industry and era. The author of the book found very few of them.
Instead the rather thick book is filled with retellings of cheap marketing
stunts, ad design, junkets, uninteresting human interest stories of people who
aren't important enough to the story to really merit fleshing out, etc. And of
course all told with way too many words. There's actual material for maybe 150
pages, not 550 pages.

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Tyr42
Having just finished reading it a few days ago, I have to disagree with you.

I really enjoyed it, and as a programmer and gamer, found it really
interesting to read about what goes on outside of just writing a great game
and shipping it.

I didn't find the dialogue cheesy and I was quite immersed in the story. I
felt sad once the book was over, and started playing through Sonic the
hedgehog.

I do wish it had more about what was going on at Nintendo. It was much more
about Sega, or really just Tom Kalinske.

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swivelmaster
If you want to know more about what was going on at Nintendo at the time (and
earlier), check out Game Over:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Over_(book)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Over_\(book\))

It was originally written in 1993, but received revisions up until 1999. I
read the original version so I have no idea how the revised content stacks up.

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bruceb
I have not read the book but I would think they credit EA for a major assist
for the Genesis. Madden, NHL, Basketball all launched on Genesis which brought
it older fans.

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DiabloD3
I wrote about the history of Sega awhile back:
[http://adterrasperaspera.com/blog/2006/01/03/the-downfall-
of...](http://adterrasperaspera.com/blog/2006/01/03/the-downfall-of-sega-
part-1/)

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neutronman
If you do follow up with a new article you should cover why the Dreamcast
failed in more detail. As I recall it failed for a variety of reasons but the
one that stands out was it's high price but lack of DVD playback while the PS2
and XBOX were priced competitively but had that.

I had a dreamcast when they launched. Sega Bass Fishing, House of the Dead 2,
Sonic, and Crazy Taxi were awesome.

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anonbanker
Dreamcast was largely a commercial success. It largely failed due to the
massive debt incurred during the Saturn/32x era. Sega just couldn't back it
like they wanted to.

