Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation (2014) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation (2014) [video]

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34 pointsbane10 comments

Fun talk and really great book. Telling the story from Sega NA's perspective changes it from a history book filled with facts to a underdog story where you can watch as Sega rises to overcome the giant only to come crashing back down. Out of the books I read in the last three years it was in my list of top five and I hope the film comes out just as good.

The movie is in post-production so I was hoping that there would be some questions and discussions about that in the talk, but alas there was not.

The comment about the console wars being similar to Game of Thrones was interesting. Nintendo the reigning king that gets to write the rules however they want and meanwhile you have Sega and Sony both trying to get leftover scraps while at the same time when the stars aligned they each were happy to try to dethrone the king.

Console Wars is a very polarizing book. I basically despise it, it was profoundly disappointing especially since a pre-release excerpt I read was pretty good but totally non-representative.

The book has several problems that made it fail for me. First, it's mostly written as a series of dramatized scenes with dialogue that's both phony and cheesy. Second, it's mainly a book about marketing rather than any of the many things of that period that I'd find interesting. That's just glossed over. Sure, there's a few great stories you can tell about that. (The stunt they pulled to get Sega into Walmart was hilarious). But then it's padded with chapter upon chapter of marketing campaigns or sales junkets that were not interesting or important in any way. Or human interest stories of people who aren't all that relevant to the story.

That leads us to the third problem; the book is just way too long for what it is, due to the writing style and the bad choice of material. Finally, it's a a completely one sided story. The heroes are the dashing and brilliant Sega America marketing people and salesmen, who are undermined by the Japanese bureaucrats and engineers and by the unfair competition from Nintendo. It's as if the only sources for the book were from Sega America.

So buyer beware.

I enjoyed the book and think there's a subversive thread in it that your comments allude to. If you accept the story as an underdog success tale you might be frustrated. If on the other hand you read it as a cautionary tale about what happens when all you have is buzz and marketing runs your company, I think you might enjoy it more.

The book purports to tell the story of how the Sega Genesis came out of nowhere to win massive market share in the gaming industry, but as you said the actual story consists of a long string of marketing junkets related anecdotally by the marketers in attendance.

Discussion of software engineering and hardware design is scant. Meanwhile there's an entire chapter dedicated to play-by-play of a weekend retreat Sega hosted for video game distributors.

There's a few takeaways from this:

1. Distribution (marketing, sales, partnerships) is sometimes the whole story.

The Genesis story basically boiled down to "they made a fun game with a cute mascot and then hired the right ad agency to flog it nationwide at massive cost". As "makers" hanging out on HN that's an offensive reading of history but the author talked to the principals and that's the story they told.

2. If all you have is distribution, any gains you find will be unsustainable.

I found the last chapters of the book a downer. The Sega America folks were tasked with marketing a confusing lineup of products, couldn't get consumers excited about them, so they all jumped ship one by one. At the end of the day they were just a bunch of marketers and that could only take them so far.

While the book's decision to tell the story of the Genesis through its marketing seems to belittle the work of the actual product people back in Japan, it's gentle telling of Sega America's collapse post-Genesis shows the limitations of a marketing-only approach.

3. While the book appears to lionize the "underdog" Sega America team, in the end it's the Nintendo folks who come across most impressively. The chapters where the authors cuts back to what Nintendo was up to at the time show a company with actual substance, identity, and a point of view. While the "heroes" of the book run around from marketing strategy to marketing strategy, the "villains" quietly and confidently go about the business of making great products, manipulating distribution in a heavy handed yet open way, and marketing their products in simple, relatable marketing.

In the end, though the book appears to promote a "marketing is all that matters" approach to business it really argues that lasting success come from companies that are product driven.

That's an interesting and much more palatable reading! I don't think it's the one the author intended though :-) If the actual thesis is that just marketing is insufficient, the imbalance in what the book covers (90% marketing, 10% product) is even harder to swallow. If these marketing stunts don't matter, why are they being covered almost exclusively in favor of the stuff that does matter?

You're probably right about the authors intent, but that's a reason I liked the book. It was well enough reported to support more than one interpretation!

I have read several of the books that talk about what happened during the 80's and 90's in the video game era.

1) I also really wanted to hear more about the technology side. But it is clear after reading the books that almost all technology for Sony, Sega, and Nintendo was done in Japan. This meant that any story about what happened here in the U.S. can't be about the tech, but is much more about the marketing. Perhaps there is a wonderful book in Japan filled with interviews and stories that just needs to be translated, but I don't know of it.

2) Your right, the primary sources for the book were from Sega America. In the talk linked here the author makes it clear that he wasn't allowed much of any interview time with people from Nintendo, but maybe this isn't a bad thing. Nintendo was honestly a boring story. They do the same thing year after year, putting out good games for decent value. Sure they have a few wacky left field things (like owning a chucky-cheese at one point), but their main story isn't anything that crazy.

This is what I mean by it was an entertaining story to read. If you were to write a novel about consoles in the US during this particular time period you have to talk about the marketing and using the perspective of Sega to drive the narrative gives the audience a maddening rise and fall that is entertaining. Everyone has had that time everything went right or everything went wrong and everyone likes to talk about what they should have done and how they could have been great etc. It is a polarizing book, but if you don't expect it to be all the tech it is a decent story.

I found http://www.amazon.com/Console-Wars-Nintendo-Defined-Generati... to be a pretty interesting read about this entire history.

James Rolfe/AVGN has an entertaining take on this. Possibly NSFW.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_MOqHyCUEc

From this video i get the impression that Genesis and Playstation was an American product, while the SNES was a Japanese product. This in terms of who handled the marketing etc.

This is an interesting subject matter but he's a poor speaker. If his book is anything like this speech I'm sure it's long-winded and boring.

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