Console Wars

I started reading it last week and agree that it is a good read.

This review from Amazon was helpful:

If you're looking for a book that focuses more on the marketing war between the Genesis and Super Nintendo in the US , you'll love this book. If you're looking for details on the hardware used in this warfare, you will be a bit disappointed.

Writing Style
==========
There is a disclaimer at the beginning of the book about the artistic license taken in that descriptions and settings may have been "altered, reconstructed, or imagined". That helps make this book flow smoothly and gives it a fun screenplay feel as well as narrative bookends. So it's neither historic fiction nor non-fiction. It's somewhere in the middle, like how the Sega 32X is neither a Genesis nor a Sega Saturn.

Coverage Dates
=============
This book starts after the Genesis has launched in the US and before the Super Nintendo launch. Sadly, the book ends before the 3-way console war between Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64, and Playstation.

Geographic Range
===============
This book is primarily focused on the console wars in the US. Details on the console wars in the Japan market are sparse and missing. For example, the author ponders (or has Sega characters/employees ponder) why Sega's marketshare in Japan was lower than in the US, forgetting to account for NEC's PC-Engine larger market position there.

Hardware Details
===============
If you're looking for technical details of hardware, you will find some but not a whole lot. I don't think this is necessarily being nit picky. As a reader of video game magazines during the "console wars", it was about games AND hardware. Pages and pages of magazines discussed the megabit size of games, color palettes, choppy sprites, etc. Even hardware details related to the central story of marketing are bit sparse in this book :

- A missed opportunity to mention how fragmented Genesis hardware was in the end (several games required both the Sega CD and the 32X)
- No mentions on the hardware revisions such as the top-loading NES, Genesis II, or Gameboy Pocket
- No mention of the Super Gameboy cartridge which added limited color palettes to the aging Gameboy library

Marketing Details
===============
If you're looking for pure marketing details though, this book is bursting with them. There are interesting stories scattered in the book such as :

- The character designs of Sonic and Tales
- The development of that "Sega!" scream
- The development of many Nintendo and Sega ad campaigns
- There are also far too many repetitions of Peter Main's phrase, "The name of the game is the game." It sounds simplistic hearing it one time. But four times in the book? Imagining Sonic tapping his foot every time this is repeated helped me through this.