Sega Vs Nintendo

Last week I talked about how Nintendo pulled North America out of the video game crash of 1983 and became a huge part of video gaming worldwide. This week I am going to talk about Nintendo’s first real competition and how that changed the gaming landscape in the 1990s. 

 A Competitor Arises

In the early days of video games there were a ton of different gaming systems and companies trying to make the best, and most popular, gaming system. In 1977, Atari firmly took hold of the market with the Atari 2600. Competitors Coleco and Mattel Electronics really didn’t have much of a chance and their systems were a distant second to the juggernaut that was Atari.

However, Nintendo did not have the luxury of a monopoly on the market for long. Sega was another Japanese-based company that was looking to take the video game world by storm. While Nintendo was doing very well in both Japan and North America, Sega was gaining momentum in other markets like the Europe and Australia.

The Sega Master System was released in 1985 and became hugely popular in Europe and Brazil. Hoping to take advantage of the resurgent games market in North America, Sega released the system there in June of 1986.

While the system never really held a candle to Nintendo’s dominance in the North American market, it led the way for Sega’s more popular system and it’s marquee franchise: Sonic the Hedgehog.

Genesis Does

Sega tried to one-up Nintendo by releasing the Sega Genesis (or Mega Drive) in 1989. The system used 16-bit graphics and the marketing played up Sega’s new mascot (Sonic) as a much edgier and more “grown-up” character than Nintendo’s Mario.  Sega’s marketing efforts definitely tried to play up the strong suits of the system with tag lines like “Genesis does what Nintendon’t”, referring to the 16-bit Genesis versus the 8 bit Nintendo Entertainment System.

The Genesis/Mega Drive was originally released in 1989 but Sonic did not come along until 1991. In the meantime, Sega’s console gained some momentum but mostly in the markets where the Master System had already given Sega a strong foothold. But when the original Sonic game came out in 1991, Sega began to become a competitor to Nintendo in North America.

Sonic the Hedgehog was a platforming game that saw the main protagonist, the blue hedgehog named Sonic, using his speed to take down enemies and stop the evil Dr. Robotnik. The gameplay was perfectly suited to the 2D platforming scene and the speed element made the game unique. Sonic himself had a bit of an edge to him, always having a sly look on his face and even his physical traits were full of “attitude” (the body-long Mohawk of blue spikes and all-too casually folded arms had a lot to do with that).

Sonic’s popularity led Sega’s Genesis to become a big hit in North America, and a legitimate competitor to Nintendo. Later in 1991, Nintendo released the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, fighting the proverbial 16-bit fire of the Genesis with its own 16-bit fire. The SNES caused a lot of problems for Sega, because its main advantage over Nintendo (the 16 bit argument) was rendered moot.

Sega’s Poor Choices

Because of the pressure that Nintendo put on Sega by releasing the SNES, Sega had to make some drastic choices that would eventually doom them in the hardware market. The first of these decisions was to create a CD-based add-on to the Genesis called the Sega CD.

The compact disc (yes kids: that’s what CD stands for) had been gaining a lot of popularity as the next “big thing” in electronics and its use in video games was becoming clear. CDs would allow for more information and full-motion video in gaming. Sega thought that the best way to outdo Nintendo would be to make use of CD technology before Nintendo did.

Thus the Sega CD was born and it just didn’t live up to the idea. While some of the games were very well done, the technology was too young and the full-motion video was unimpressive yet still used as a crutch. The game system required the Genesis to work and didn’t have the effect that Sega wanted so, instead of taking time to create a great new CD-based system, Sega created the 32X.

The 32X was yet another add-on to the Genesis that brought the console war back down to bits. The 32X latched onto the top of the Genesis and allowed players to play both regular Genesis games and special 32X cartridges. These 32X games were, you guessed it, 32 bits. Sega knew that having 16 bits over 8 bits was a strong point before, so logic dictated that 32 bits over 16 bits should yield the same advantage, right?

 Not quite: the games weren’t very well done and the system was released just a few months before the Sega Saturn (Sega’s new standalone console) was released. In fact, in Japan the 32X and the Saturn released about the same time, so the scheduling was seriously off. To make matters worse, the Saturn used CDs, so Sega had gone from cartridges, to CDs, to cartridges and then back to CDs. The company looked like it had no idea what was going on with technology and it doomed the Saturn to failure.

Sega was in trouble and the final nail in the coffin was the Sega Dreamcast. The Dreamcast was a good console with an online element, innovative controllers and fun games, but the past history of Sega led people to disregard it. Sega couldn’t even give the console away, literally. Sega was giving a Dreamcast to anyone who signed up for the online service SegaNet, but that still didn’t work and Sega dropped out of the race as the Playstation, Nintendo 64 and Xbox made up the new generation of consoles for the war.

Sega became a software manufacturer and now many Sega staples (like Sonic) appear in games on Nintendo devices. In fact, Sonic and Mario have teamed up in several titles, like the Mario and Sonic at the Olympics game series.

But What About Nintendo?

While all of this was happening, Nintendo was sitting pretty on the success of the SNES, laughing at Sega’s futile attempts at a CD-based game system, right? Not quite: Nintendo saw that CDs were becoming very popular and decided to hire another company to make a CD-based add-on for the SNES; a company named Sony.

Sony began to develop a CD-based add-on for the SNES but Nintendo dropped the partnership and decided to try it with Phillips. Sony didn’t like being dumped like this, so the project became Sony’s own standalone gaming system, called the PlayStation.

Meanwhile, Nintendo never did get the attachment out and Phillips made its own CD-based system called the Phillips CD-I. This system, however, didn’t do nearly as well as the PlayStation would. Nintendo decided to refocus its efforts on the next console (the Nintendo 64), but still had a console waiting in the wings.

The Virtual Boy was rushed out prematurely to give Nintendo time to develop the N64 and this proved to be a huge mistake. The console was said to be a virtual reality experience, putting players inside the game; instead it was a shallow 3D-based experience that only had two colors: red and black.  The system was discontinued less than a year after being released and remains one of, if not the, biggest failures in Nintendo’s history.

Yeah, because that's real comfortable...

So because of the rising pressure from Sony, a monster that Nintendo had created because of Sega (funny isn’t it?) and the utter failure of the Virtual Boy, Nintendo released the Nintendo 64 and it was very well received by the public. At this point, Sega was all but out of the race (only waiting on the Dreamcast to fail) and Sony and Nintendo were the only two who were really vying for power.

Lasting Impact

The console war of the 1990s (basically Sega vs. Nintendo) had a huge impact on the industry because it inadvertently brought Sony into the conflict, took Sega out of it and paved the way for Microsoft to throw its name into the hat in 2001 with the Xbox, seeing as Sony (an already-large company) was able to successfully throw itself into the gaming market.

Sega’s poor choices, Nintendo’s CD-based add-on problems, the horror that was the Virtual Boy and many other smaller attempts at taking over video games (like the 3DO and the CD-I) were the low points of gaming in the 90s but the inclusion of the PlayStation into gaming, the great gaming that came from the Sega Genesis (before the add-ons) and Nintendo’s growth because of competition were the high points of 1990s gaming.

Competition usually brings out the best in people and it does the exact same for companies. Because Sega gave Nintendo a real run for their money in the 90s, gamers got better games and systems from Nintendo. While competition sometimes leads to rushed and bad products (like the Sega add-ons and the Virtual Boy) in the end it still leads the industry into the future.

Check back next week for even more gaming history as I delve into the other projects from the 90s that failed to take off including the 3DO, CD-I and more.

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