https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSwMzLNmpCc
Back in the ’70s, Atari introduced video games to people’s homes. Then in the ’80s, it was replaced by Intellivision and ColecoVision. However, they were turned into ancient artifacts by Nintendo in the ’90s.
Nintendo thought the market was theirs and only theirs. That was until Sega joined the scene. Once they did, there was a console war between the two. The documentary Console Wars, which is streaming on CBS All Access now, talks all about their battle to become #1.
If you were a kid of the ’90s, then chances are you asked your parents for a Nintendo console. If you already had one, then you wanted the Super Mario games to go with it. There was always a game you needed, and you had to have it. They were making money like it was growing on trees.
Sony in Japan realized this was a growing business, so they decided to get into the game with their own game. They hired Americans to help develop Sega, and come up with a way to compete with Nintendo. They had a lot of different strategies, and one of them was Sonic the Hedgehog.
The fast blue creature was quickly Donkey Konging Mario Bros into second place. How would Nintendo take back their title? How far are they willing to go? They both released Mortal Kombat, and only one of them got in trouble for the violence. What was the difference? Did having 256 colors really make a difference? The mistake Sony made that cost them billions. These are just a few of the things that we find out in CBS All Access’ first full-length documentary.
The doc, who was Official Selection of the 2020 SXSW Film Festival, includes interviews with the people who worked at both companies, file footage, and stories you have to hear to believe. While I am not a video game girl (much to the disappointment of my father), I thouroughly enjoyed it. I learned things about the video game wars that I never knew I wanted to know. The competition between the two is even more intense than Tetris when it speeds up.
Hopefully, the doc’s producers and directors, Jonah Tulis and Blake J. Harris, will give us the sequel about how Xbox and Playstation made both of those games obsolete and fought to become #1 in the new millennium.
