Page 6 - The Edge: Issue 5 2020

CONSOLE WARS
a retrospective
by Conrad Brisson
games. They also chose the system’s name specifically to appeal to consumers: the NES was called an “entertainment system” rather than a “game console.” Finally, Nintendo’s promise to offer complete risk absorption convinced retailers that the risk was worth it.
Nintendo’s aggressive marketing managed to generate sales and revive a dying video game industry. Nintendo dominated the US market share by a landslide thanks to its carefully curated video game library, its superior graphics, and its inclusion of other peripherals, including the Robotic Operating Buddy toy in the first run of consoles.
Enter Sega, another Japanese company with some prior gaming experience and only one release in the US at this point: the Master System. It failed to compete with the twoleadingcompaniesNintendoandAtarithankstoitspoor marketing and library, but Sega’s luck would soon change.
The video game market had just about recovered by the late 1980s, thanks to Nintendo. They and Atari together had a monopoly on the US market – that was, until the 16-bit era came along. Sega had a new console, the Genesis, with a competitive game lineup and aggressive cool factor- centered marketing (including their now-iconic mascot Sonic the Hedgehog). Their new entry was met with wild success: in fact, the Genesis outsold Nintendo’s Super NES worldwide by at least one million consoles yearly till the end of its life in 2003.
The battle for superiority between the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One is a consuming conflict in the video game community. Their makers have been competing ever since the PS3 and the Xbox 360 were released. But before PlayStation and Xbox, before Sony and Microsoft, before developers knew exactly what would sell, the console competition was rather different. In the beginning of the consumer video game industry, the early 1980s, the US market was rapidly becoming oversaturated – the success of Atari’s 2600 home computer led to several other companies trying to get in on the console market, and a flood of unlicensed third-party video games contributed to oversaturation. Retailers and consumers stopped buying video games because of their general poor quality; it seemed video games were just a fad.
Nintendo, a Japanese playing card manufacturer
who had developed a few consoles exclusive to Japan and arcade games released to the US, sought to capitalise on the recent wild growth of the US video game market. Despite the 1983 video game crash, Nintendo still believed that the industry had great potential. In order to take advantage of that potential, they released the Nintendo Entertainment System in the United States in 1985.
Distributors and consumers were wary of video games after the crash. So, Nintendo had to show them that their games were different. They devised clever marketing strategies, such as physical toys that worked with certain
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