Console Wars

Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation (2014), a work of nonfiction by American technological historian Blake J. Harris, focuses on the intense competition between the two early giants of the video game industry, Sega and Nintendo, during the 1990s. The book examines, in particular, the career of Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske, who revived and united the divided and nearly bankrupt firm to become the creator of the Sega Genesis console. The Genesis console eventually dominated video game sales in Japan and the United States. The book has been adapted into a television series dramatizing the early evolution of the industry.

Console Wars opens a few years after Tom Kalinske leaves his position as the CEO of toy retail giant Mattel. While on vacation in Hawaii with his wife and children, Hayao Nakayama, an old business partner contacts him. Nakayama introduces Kalinske to the still-fledgling company Sega, a venture with no clear financial prospects. Though he has little experience in video games and is initially hesitant to consider working at Sega, he accepts Nakayama’s offer to fly him out to Japan. Once there, Nakayama shows him Sega’s latest product line, including its main console, the Genesis, and its first handheld system, the Game Gear. When Kalinske notices some people in public playing handheld consoles, he starts to understand Sega’s unique potential and accepts the job.

On Kalinske’s first day as CEO of Sega of America, he discovers that the company is in shambles. The CEO who served before him, Michael Katz, left the firm in peril by repeatedly funding video games that had minimal popularity. Moreover, because Nintendo already had a near-monopoly on the industry, Sega was unable to get contracts for many third-party games. Sega suffered from a negative company culture, where employees wasted time blaming each other for their problems. Kalinske decided to implement a new leadership style to save the company. This included managing the Genesis’s entire marketing team himself. He canceled the Genesis’s bundle with a game called Altered Beast, replacing it with Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic’s consistent success over the subsequent three decades resulted from this decision. Sega of Japan at first resisted these plans, but Nakayama helped Kalinske negotiate with them until they gave him the thumbs up.



After a wildly successful demonstration of Sonic the Hedgehog at the 1991 Summer Consumer Electronics Show, Genesis sales exceeded sales of Nintendo’s SNES console, breaking Nintendo’s six-year reign at #1 on the bestselling consoles list. Kalinske’s rebranding of Sega pitched the company as sleeker and more mature than Nintendo. It did not censor games as Nintendo did; rather, it introduced the first video game ratings system. Today, this system, called the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, is the authoritative source of video game ratings.

Yet, Sega’s streak of successes could not last forever. After working with Sony to purchase an unfinished Nintendo console to finish the technology under Sega, Kalinske’s staff in Japan vetoed his plans. Sony finished this console, the “Play Station,” by itself, and the release was hugely successful. Sega Japan then hastily built its own inferior product, the Sega Saturn, and ended production of the Genesis (ignoring Kalinske’s protests). Widely deemed a failure, the project was symbolic of Sega of Japan’s declaration of independence from Kalinske and his Sega of America team. The book closes in 1999, after the release of Nintendo’s console, the N64. With the Saturn obsolete, Kalinske and some other executives at Sega took their exit. Sega entered the 21st century as a third-party developer making games for its former rivals, including the newest industry front-runner, Microsoft.