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    Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation
    Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation
    Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation
    Audiobook20 hours

    Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation

    Written by Blake J. Harris

    Narrated by Fred Berman

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Following the success of The Accidental Billionaires and Moneyball comes Console Wars—a mesmerizing, behind-the-scenes business thriller that chronicles how Sega, a small, scrappy gaming company led by an unlikely visionary and a team of rebels, took on the juggernaut Nintendo and revolutionized the video game industry.

    In 1990, Nintendo had a virtual monopoly on the video game industry. Sega, on the other hand, was just a faltering arcade company with big aspirations and even bigger personalities. But that would all change with the arrival of Tom Kalinske, a man who knew nothing about videogames and everything about fighting uphill battles. His unconventional tactics, combined with the blood, sweat and bold ideas of his renegade employees, transformed Sega and eventually led to a ruthless David-and-Goliath showdown with rival Nintendo.

    The battle was vicious, relentless, and highly profitable, eventually sparking a global corporate war that would be fought on several fronts: from living rooms and schoolyards to boardrooms and Congress. It was a once-in-a-lifetime, no-holds-barred conflict that pitted brother against brother, kid against adult, Sonic against Mario, and the US against Japan.

    Based on over two hundred interviews with former Sega and Nintendo employees, Console Wars is the underdog tale of how Kalinske miraculously turned an industry punchline into a market leader. It’s the story of how a humble family man, with an extraordinary imagination and a gift for turning problems into competitive advantages, inspired a team of underdogs to slay a giant and, as a result, birth a $60 billion dollar industry.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateMay 13, 2014
    ISBN9780062309129
    Author

    Blake J. Harris

    Blake J. Harris is the bestselling author of History of the Future and Console Wars, which is now a CBS All Access feature film by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg. He has written for ESPN, IGN, Fast Company, The Huffington Post, /Film and The AV Club. He is also a regular guest on Paul Scheer’s How Did This Get Made? podcast, where every week he interviews some the biggest names responsible for some of the worst movies ever made. Harris lives in New York with his wife.

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    Reviews for Console Wars

    4/5

    156 ratings15 reviews

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    • 3/5
      The name of the book IS NOT the book!

      This book is 95% about Sega and Tom Kalinske history in that company, trying to disrupt Nintendo. The book is too long with so many chapters and made up cheesy dialogs. I understand the author was trying to make it interesting with the dialogs, but it comes to a point where you don’t know if it’s fiction or reality. That contradicts ALL the research job and interviews made for this book. I don’t like how even the author leans on Sega or forget about more important highlights from Nintendo, like ignoring the Nintendo PlayStation project, the importance of Star Fox and how it pioneered 3D graphics, the bad placement of the discussion on Mode 7, and so on… This book is barely about Nintendo. If you are a Sega fan you will love it, if not, beware.

      On the other side, cheers to the team back this audiobook! They did an excellent job and helped with impersonating different voices for the different characters.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      the start was really good but feel like it was missing something after awhile but then again that is real life...
    • 5/5
      A fascinating in-depth look at the 16-bit Console Wars era.

      Despite the title, this book only explores a small sliver of the so-called Console Wars. This is not about Xbox vs. PlayStation, this is about a 6-years slice in the 1990's when underdog Sega and the Genesis battled and (briefly) dethroned Nintendo and the SNES during the 16-bit era of console gaming, aka "the Tom Kalinske years".

      It's obvious that the author is a huge fan of Kalinske, and based on this portrayal and the man's business track record, it's hard not to be. I'm a fan too now. This is not a gaming book or a game design book, it's a "gaming in the 90's" business book. The stories are fun and the insider look into what went on behind the scenes makes for great entertainment, combining a healthy mix of video game nostalgia, business acumen, and fun marketing sass. It's also an interesting window into the USA vs Japan business mentality and the world of technology just before the Internet era.

      The book dives into an incredible (and sometimes excruciating) level of detail, and is a testament to a staggering amount of research performed and interviews conducted. The result is quite satisfying, if you're in the mood for this much depth (YMMV). I actually started reading this book a few years ago and then set it aside when some chapters dove way too deep into the "Nintendo-owned Seattle Mariners" baseball stuff. I'm just not into baseball at all. Then I got distracted by other books (including 'The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality' by the same author). I recently picked it up again to read through the back half and I just couldn't put it down again.

      Despite its massive size and the multi-year break I took in the middle, I didn't want the book to end. I wanted to keep diving into the PlayStation years, the introduction of the Xbox, and all other relevant stories. But given that Kalinske had exited the industry by then, it just wouldn't be the same. I wish the author had acknowledged the impact that PC gaming did or didn't have on Sega and Nintendo during these years. This is when Doom and id software took the gaming world by storm after all, but the focus just remained on console gaming. Fortunately there's other books for that, like 'Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture'.

      Highly recommended book, even if you're not a console kid (I was always more of a PC gamer). The audiobook version is also very entertaining. The reading by Fred Berman is passionate and exciting. It's a performance by a true storyteller, not just a narrator. This was a fun journey. Oh, and don't forget to watch the documentary by the same name on Paramount+, with Blake J. Harris as executive producer.
    • 4/5
      Since I grew up in this generation it caught my attention. It is cool to see some of the details of the rivalry between Nintendo and Sega. How they get into some of the specifics of advertising and marketing of products is awesome and nostalgic. It can get a bit confusing at time since they jump from Nintendo's story to Sega's. Also the amount of people that have dialogue can make it a bit confusing. Overall a great book.
    • 4/5
      Really liked the way the book was read. It added a lot to the story. As an avid video gamer this was very interesting.
    • 3/5
      Some of the imagined dialogue is pretty cheesy, but the pacing is pretty compelling- if you aren't looking for a serious gaming history book then this one is pretty fun, especially if you have nostalgia for that era of gaming.
    • 4/5
      Pretty good read. The story mostly focused on the 16-bit war between Sega and Nintendo. Mostly told from Sega of America’s point of view. It’s a very telling story where I learned new things but also felt nostalgic as I came across certain events in history that I remember living through. Worth picking up for any old school video game fan who lived through the 90’s.
    • 5/5
      Excellent look inside a narrative that oftentimes seems to have been reversed, showing that Nintendo didn’t actually play as nice as they appeared to and how Sega competitively changed the scope of home video games forever. An extremely insightful and interesting read (or listen) even for those who aren’t super invested in video games or the history behind them but rather business dealings and pioneering of home entertainment.
    • 2/5
      There's two important points to make about this book:.

      1. Harris is a good writer. His research and narrative work effortlessly guide you through six or so years of epic change.
      2. Consoles just have no soul. Harris and his principal sources seem to never question how ultimately the console industry boils down to marketing brinksmanship and how hollow that makes the entire endeavour.

      Maybe this isn't really Harris' fault, but the world of 80's-90's consoles (and probably still today) is so hopelessly full of corporate hagiography that we're led to believe everyone previously fabulously rich executive is a genius in this emerging world of video games. Tom Kalinske, Sega of America's president and Harris' messiah in a suit, is treated like a trailblazer for what--thirty years later--really just amounts to edgelord marketing. It's a weird lens on the industry that seems to gloss over how commodified and exploitative these same suits made their arena.

      There are no creatives here. This isn't Masters of Doom or any other history of the creative rise of video games, but rather the celebration of corporate gaming. Even Sega's rise is ultimately depressing in that context. Console Wars is a great history... it's just that it's a documentation of the most banal process of extracting wealth from games rather than any form of creativity beyond ad-wizardry.
    • 3/5
      I usually can't stand novelized non-fiction book, with dialogue and the like. So I was disappointed to discover it was this kind of book. And the "scenes" early on were so cheesy. I almost gave up, but then the author sort of calmed down and managed to deliver a fairly compelling read, albeit I have no idea how close to the facts it actually is, especially since I listened to the audiobook so have no idea how well things were documented. The narrator of which by the way, Fred Berman, is flat out brilliant, and was a factor in sticking with the book. He managed to very subtly (unlike many narrators) change his voice so that you knew which character was speaking even before the book said so.

      It was a decent look at an interesting era in gaming, the era that I grew up in, and also illustrates how fine a line it can be in business between success and failure.
    • 1/5
      The story presented from the perspective of the marketing and sales department. If you're really into those then maybe you'll find it interesting and you might even appreciate the film like dramatisations of events. If you're interested in the history of the consoles or games there is nothing for you here. All the author cares about is marketing campaigns and trying his hand at writing fiction, which I assume a lot of these dramatisations are. That and figuratively fellating the marketing executives.

      It's like writing the story of rivalry between two car brands by comparing their TV commercials.
    • 4/5
      THIS BOOK. I want to find my older brothers Sega and Nintendo systems and games and have a decent crack at them. Console Wars is such a great read. I grew up during this era, but I had no idea what was going on. All I know for certain now is my brother was spoiled, he had both systems (as well as all the others I think minus the portables) and so many games and he did not like for me to play on them often. Spoiled. That didn’t stop me from playing them when he wasn’t at home though :X.

      Console Wars tells the great story of how Sega went head to head with Nintendo in the early 1990s. Nintendo was dominating the video game industry and Sega was some little company trying to get in the game in Japan and America. Tom Kalinske made that dream a reality, he is the reason people know of Sega and Sonic in America. The book goes into great deal of who the main players area and the events that built both Sega and Nintendo and the eventual downfall of Sega. It flows wells, there is a warning about the conversations being fabricated but based on what people remember and with the point of getting the main true points across. You know going in what the ending is going to be, but I kept somehow hoping that there was some way Sega and Tom turned it around and were still in the industry in a different sense, but ya just read it. I really hope Blake Harris does a Xbox vs Playstation book!
    • 4/5
      The second generation of video games happened while I was in college and was relying on my own money to buy consoles and games. With the small brain of college student I was swayed by the marketing and hype on which system to buy and which games to buy. Sega or Nintendo?Harris tells the story largely through the eyes of Tom Kalinske. Sega, the underdog, transformed its fortunes when it hired this American businessman to run US operations. Kalinske was a former president of Mattel, and was responsible for reviving Barbie and created the He-Man franchise.It was Kalinske who was in charge of Sega when it rolled out the Genesis system, Sonic the Hedgehog and those commercials that ended with the "Sega" scream. Mr. Harris presents the novel as more of novelization. He puts forth in the prologue that he has “altered, reconstructed or imagined” the scenes and “re-created” the dialogue. It feels artificial most of the time. As someone who lived on the consumer side I found it fascinating to find out what was happening on the corporate side.
    • 4/5
      To tell the truth, this book left me cold. Not because it was badly written, far from it, but because as a long-time PC gamer, I regard consoles as toys, and nothing I read in this book did anything to alter that viewpoint. Basically it is the story of How Tom Kalinske took Sega of America from a struggling arcade game company to a giant that briefly toppled Nintendo from its seemingly unassailable position at the top of the home console tree, through a mixture of catchy slogans, edgy advertising and Sonic the Hedgehog, and then saw it all slip away due to intransigence by the Japanese parent company and a dual onslaught from Nintendo and Sony. The book is fast-moving, quirky, strongly oriented to the personalities rather than the technology, all around a good read if like me, you love games and gaming. However, the utter childishness of some of the activities by supposedly grown adults to bring down or denigrate their competitors is not edifying, and you can never really forget that this is basically dealing with children's toys. Unfortunately the book's rather abrupt ending is a minus, its a pity Harris didnt include an epilogue detailing the story since, when Sony and Microsoft have reduced Nintendo itself to a second-rate player in the console industry, which would have put the end of Sega into some sort of perspective. A great read, but it not going to change the opinion I and other hard-core PC gamers hold about consoles.
    • 1/5
      Awful disappointing, disappointingly awful. As a video game fan, I was astounded that author Blake Harris could make a hobby that I enjoy so much into boring drivel, but he did it in spades.