THE 16-BIT WAR NINTENDO vs SEGA
Everyone with even the slightest knowledge of the history of videogames knows about the great console war. By now it’s pretty much accepted folklore that Sega, the plucky upstart with its exciting new mascot and lax stance on bitmapped bloodshed, strolled up to the arrogant giant Nintendo and gave it a big old smack in the mouth, loosening the Mario maker’s monopolistic grip on the console market forever. But that’s just the surface story. Few accounts of the period venture beyond North America, despite the fact that gaming in the late Eighties and early Nineties was far from a global business – the major markets around the world each had their own distinct regional character and preferences. By examining how the well-known American story compares to how the combatants fared in Europe, and particularly the UK, we can get a better picture of how some of each company’s actions were driven by rigid corporate cultures, and how willing each was to be flexible in reacting to its circumstances.
Of course, there’s a reason that people focus on the North American market – as well as being the largest territory, it’s also the most representative of the global average. This story starts with an event just as heavily ingrained in the videogaming mythos as the console war itself – Nintendo’s revival of the North American console market, beginning with the 1985 launch of the NES in New York. Nintendo had shrewdly altered the Famicom for the needs of the market, creating a console that didn’t look like previous ones, and bundling a toy robot so as to soothe retailers that were still reluctant to stock videogames. It’s something that Tom Kalinske remembers well, as he was then at Mattel, which had recently been burned by the Intellivision’s collapse during the disastrous 1983 market crash. “All of us who were watching this thought, ‘Are you guys crazy? We just collapsed, how can you start getting into this business?’ But we were all wrong, and they were right.” The system succeeded in several more US test markets during 1986, and eventually went fully national that same year. With popular games including Super Mario Bros, The Legend Of Zelda and Metroid, nothing seemed to be able to slow the system down. “We did this commercial where we pulled back from a group of kids chanting ‘Mario, Mario’ and as you pulled back to the view from space, they’re collected in a group that forms Mario’s face,” says Don Coyner, who joined Nintendo during its late Eighties ascendancy. “That was a fun shoot. Technology has changed so much, that was a new technique – to be able to clone kids. There were only maybe a hundred kids or something, so we had to turn them into thousands.” That Super Mario Bros 3 advert was a fitting visual metaphor for Nintendo’s position in the console marketplace, as it dominated both the USA and Japan.
When Nintendo was building its juggernaut, Sega didn’t even have a consumer division in
