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I remember as a child all of my friends owning different consoles, so I got to try them all out before making any of my report card reward demand list or Christmas wishes. Being an upstart PC gamer with our TI-99a, my Aunt’s Commodore 64, and later our IBM ps/2, consoles always took a backseat to systems that I could program on myself. The nextdoor neighbors had an NES, so I got one of those first in order to share games. I was never really impressed with the Sega Master System or the Turbografix-16. But then the Genesis came out, and after that the SNES, and I knew that in order to experience it all, I had to have them both.
Nintendo had a lot of power early on, not only because they were there first, but also because they understood the need for quality control security measures, especially since Atari really suffered at the hands of over-saturation and piracy of its software. They also understood the power behind names people know, such as Donkey Kong, and Mario. They had several first party mascot characters that could easily carry the hardware for a long time. Sega really lacked this for the longest time. Then came Sonic.
Sonic was the first "real" uppercut to Nintendo’s massive hold on the market. Sega just simply seemed to appeal more to the “adult” audience than just to littler kids. While Nintendo was spending time on educational software and family oriented advertising, Sega really went for the throat. Not only did they aggressively attack competition in ads, “Genesis does, Nintendon’t”, but their games seemed to be a lot more adult in content. While Nintendo relatively censoring the more violent content, Sega was promoting it. It was however almost impossible to thwart Nintendo’s massive advertising campaigns.
Towards the end though, Sega seemed to start to get a little too aggressive, especially with hardware. Once they started pumping out peripherals you could sort of see that it was more of a gasping for air than a simple race for technology. If they would have held out a little longer and adhered to a similar patience that Nintendo was showing, they may have held a longer foothold in the console industry (which you saw crumble for them later on) than they did. In the end (much later of course), Sega had to drop direct competition and simply become a software company.
References:
Bernard. (2011, March 19) The Console War of the 80’s and 90’s. GamerIndepth. Retrieved April 14, 2011, From: http://gamerindepth.net/?p=2085