Wednesday, February 18, 2015

2015 Reading Challenge Book 028 Console Wars by Blake J Harris

TITLE-Console Wars
AUTHOR-Blake J Harris
FORMAT-E book
FIRST TIME READING-Yes
COST-Free

A friend got the e book version of this book last year. He doesn't like reading books on a computer so he gave the file to me.Having been a teen when the Genesis vs Nintendo war was going on I was pretty interested in reading this book.

The book is mostly told from the head of Sega of America's point of view.He had been working for Mattel when he gets hired to take over Sega's American office. And by doing stuff that made the Sega of Japan offices go nuts,he is able to bring Sega from having at the most 15% of the USA video game market to having 60%. But thanks to various issues with the Japan branch  we get to see why and how Sega went from being ,even if for a short while,the number 1 video game company,to being an also ran.

We do get to see parts of Nintendo's side of this war. And how thanks to them fucking over Sony they ended up indirectly creating the console that caused Nintendo from being a valid home console competitor to being 3rd place in the home console market.

Honestly there are plenty of parts of this book that got boring real quick. I had to stop myself from skipping over quite  a few parts.

The interesting parts are all well written. And even after having done lots of research on this era of video game history there is still bunches of stuff I had never heard about before. Like how Donkey Kong Country pretty much won Nintendo the 16 bit wars. Before it came out they were struggling. Mostly because Sega was marketing themselves as the system the cool kids play. And Nintendo was the console for kids.

Console Wars by Blake J Harris gets a 2.15 outta 5.

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