Console Wars
I picked up Console Wars over a year ago on some Audible buy 1 get 1 free deal and its just been sitting in my library for some time. This was the time when I had some time to read through it and I must have blazed through this listen in a week or less.
Console Wars basically talks about the Home Console market from the early 1980s to the late 1990s. This also happens to be the time when I became aware of video games and even though my family was always too poor to own a unit, we always had great exposure through friends and other family to all of the consoles mentioned in the book.
In other words, this was recounting my childhood entertainment (and in many ways, adult) obsesssion. The book, as the title suggests, mostly talks about the USA market between Nintendo and Sega in its spiciest years, around 1989 to 1994, and has a little bit of history before that, like how Nintendo basically ressurected the entire console industry back from the brink of Atari sponsored death (made famous by the ET catridge incident), to how Sega went from having almost no USA market share to edging out Nintendo 55% to 45%, and to just about the start of the Sony Playstation era.
It mostly follows the exploits of then-CEO Tom Kalinske, about how he was recruited by then-CEO of Sega Japan Hayao Nakayama to run the flagging Sega of America business. What Kalinske did from 1989’ish on was nothing short of Amazing. From a 10% market share, he evantually built up a juggernaut, thanks to clever marketing and a great relaunch of the Sega Genesis hardware to evantually beat Nintendo in terms of Market Share.
Unfortunately life happens, and the 32x and Saturn conspired to thank Sega of America, leading evantualy to its bankruptcy and withdrawal entirely from the hardware market.
The book goes through a lot of titles that happened during that pivotal time of my life, from Street Fighter, to Super Mario World, to Mortal Kombat. It recaptured that part of my high school and early college life in a way that no other book has done so.
I hvae to recommend this book to anyone who’s intersted in the Console Market of the 1990s, its not a bad business book, but a lot of what was done in the 90s was because of the lack of internet. Nowadays you probably wouldn’t do half the things that they did, but maybe for historical purposes its still interesting.
But mostly, if you are like me, and lived through that era, video games was probably a big part of your life too, and you too maybe can relieve some of your youth through this book.
Highly recommended.