REVIEW: Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation (nonfiction book) by Blake J. Harris

Console Wars is nonfiction. I bought my copy new.

Review:

In this creative nonfiction book, Harris follows the rise of Sega in the 1990s against Nintendo's console gaming monopoly, with some mentions of Sony along the way. 

It might be more accurate to say, however, that this follows the rise of Tom Kalinske's Sega of America. One of my issues with this book was that it repeatedly presented Sega of Japan as making bone-headed business decisions that occasionally hamstrung the entire company, apparently simply because employees at Sega of Japan were jealous of Hayao Nakayama's level of trust in Tom Kalinske. Even Nintendo and Sony got more detailed and balanced coverage here than Sega of Japan, which remained a mystery until the end. 

While reading this, I realized that I was far more interested in stories about video games and consoles than I was in the actual business side of the video game industry. Unfortunately, the business side of things was Harris' primary focus. No matter how many times "the name of the game is the game" was repeated, to Harris, the name of the game actually seemed to be marketing. Yes, Sonic became an iconic character on par with Mario, but with the way Harris told it, it was marketing more than anything that saved Sega (of America).

Meanwhile, I wanted to hear about the games and consoles. There were a bunch of times, while reading this, when I considered DNFing, only to be drawn back by a random mention of the development of this or that game character, or even the disaster that was the live action Mario movie. That said, all of these Sega, Nintendo, and Sony employees weren't nearly as interesting as Harris seemed to think they were, and Harris' decision to write Console Wars as creative nonfiction meant that the book, on the whole, was much longer than it really needed to be.

The number of people Harris mentioned who were involved in the video game industry but were uninterested in video games as anything other than potential money makers probably shouldn't have surprised me, but it did. And kind of disgusted me, which was probably not the emotion Harris intended to evoke.