? Did Sega win the console wars?
? No, it's Sony and Nintendo that are battling for supremacy now, right?
? Mask of Pain.jpg
The above dialog is from the Netflix anime that's likely to be a dark horse in July, "The Uncle Who Returned from the Other World". As the name suggests, the uncle, as a traveler, 17 years ago because of a car accident had been created to the second world, but even though he has encountered a variety of other worlds to destroy the sky and destroy the tragedy of human life, after the return of the most difficult for him to accept, is that Sega is no longer a host.
A
Why was Sega not making consoles such a painful thing for Uncle?
The hard-to-comprehend new generation of netizens were full of confusion, just hunted, and then discussed and examined in a hundred different ways to make this terrain topical.
The influential Japanese otaku series Neptunia has a female protagonist who is an anthropomorphized version of a Sega console that was stillborn.
There's a light novel called Half-Price Bento Scramble, in which the protagonist's entire family is Sega green, even to the extent that Sega made a somatosensory gaming toilet controlled by nourishing pee, which they had to buy at a high price and put up in the house.
And in the anime High Score Girls, an arcade game-themed romance, the male lead is even more of an ironic Sega chef, so the fact that the second female character's setting is on the PS side of the spectrum is cited as one of the reasons for being the losing dog.
Of course, this kind of stuffy and proud, there are fewer than our gangster Umino Hideaki, in 96 years of Japan's local market is obviously Sony is the sales of big head, but in the EVA animation broadcast in that year, the brave teenagers to play the game console, but also Sega MD.
All of the above, are illustrating a long time ago, that is, now in the microblogging raffle draw ow draw NS Sega, but also once in a while, the Sega, the Sega, the Sega, the Sega, the Sega. The Sega of today, the Sega of the NS, was also once a very important thing. And just like the Maoists in last week's Soviet animation tweet, there's still a part of the old, forgotten ass on every major internet platform that misses the Sega console. And it all started with Nintendo.
II
In 1986, Nintendo was a veritable juggernaut of the world at the time, as well as a great evil that people respected and feared.
On the one hand, there was the infamous royalty system, where third parties had to spend money to order game cassettes from Nintendo, and sell as many as they could when they wanted to sell them, which was equivalent to the cost and risk that the manufacturers had to bear on their own, and selling as many or as few as they wanted, Nintendo was able to make a profit and win.
Like the old man in order to punish SE and other eye to eye, a change from the previous phased marketing strategy, a mouthful of cassette tape release 900,000 sets of "Legend of the Holy Dragon", directly caused by retailers fear of squeezing the inventory panic selling, SE share price fell, hard loss of 1 billion (yen).
Also for this reason, at that time, there was also a very conscientious company EA, high-level evaluation: only fools do games for the Japanese.
Nintendo's deputy director of sales in the United States
On the other hand, Nintendo's treatment of retailers is even more unforgiving.
Similar to Tencent and Ali's ? Two for One?
Retailers were told by Nintendo that they would lose the right to sell Nintendo consoles if they had other brands on the counter, and at the time, Nintendo had an absolute share of around 90%, which led to other brands not being able to squeeze into the environment at all.
Of course this behavior has been met with ? monopolization? Prosecution, but Nintendo used his king segment of the legal department to make legal compensation with ? Nintendo coupons? s form of payment, going so far as to disguise the fact that users bought more FC consoles again.
It's also in this environment that everyone wants Guts to show up and at least put some pressure on the Demon King.
The first time I saw a PCE console, it was Sega's MD that really made the 'console wars'.
It was a time when semiconductor chips were developing at a high rate, and Nintendo was still using the same 8-bit configuration from 5 years ago, supplemented by toothpaste updates to the accessories, and this kind of?
So Sega upgraded the configuration of the old architecture in a big way, flaunting the word '16bit' on the black body of the MD, and the same art team that designed Hatsune Miku created Sonic, Sega's proprietary image, against the standard of Mario, and used it to create a game that perfectly demonstrated the new capabilities.
The colors went from monotone to rich, the picture went from simple to gorgeous, and the music went from pure Mudi to muddy atmosphere, and that was an experience that brought the gorgeous picture arcade home, and it was the "next generation" that made the players of the time hot.
Three
? Cool Boys play Sega, only little kids play Nintendo.?
Sega has never shied away from being aggressive towards old Ren when it comes to promotional strategies and branding.
It's not surprising that, because of a series of moves by Old Ren, Sega MD didn't have strong third-party game support at the beginning, and could only port games from its own arcade. And as the king of the arcade space at the time, Sega itself had a core group of much older fans who prided themselves on having a deeper understanding of gaming, and bought their consoles on the promise of 'playing arcades at home'.
So since arcades were generally considered to be a hangout for delinquents at the time, Sega had to be good to their base, and their Japanese commercials, such as the Sega Sanshiro series, used a series of extremely erotic Showa behaviors to embed rootedness and hardcoreness into their image DNA.
And that, like the phrase "the ninth art of gaming", greatly satisfied the pride and self-esteem of some gamers at the time.
Meanwhile in the US battlegrounds, the marketing department that read the book The Pepsi Challenge took bumper sticker marketing to the extreme.
The formula for their series of TV ads tended to be Decay Boy playing Nintendo and Cool Boy playing Sega, with the two contrasting in a cut to high-speed scrolling game footage, and ending with a magical ?SEGA!!!? as the ending.
The most unethical of them all is probably the Sega handheld 'Gear Game'.
In the ad, the fat guy playing the Nintendo Game Boy manually knocks himself out in order to turn the black and white screen into a color screen, and then next to that the words turn around and say, "We have a console that we call "GG" for short, and it was born with a color screen.
After that, it's all about marketing, implanting youth movies, inviting popular idols to stand on the stage, and everything Sega does is to find ways to tie their brand to "Cool Boy".
It was even reported that Sonic's popularity in North America surpassed that of Mickey Mouse during this publicity campaign, but of course the more people watched, the more Sega and Nintendo fought, and the more fun the game became.
It is important to realize that Nintendo's red and white machines are called "home computers" in Japan, and in the United States, in order to get rid of people's bad impression of Atari is even simply called "home entertainment system", at first glance, the temperament is very ? State-owned enterprises? It's a very conservative one.
In contrast, Sega's MD was called "Super Mega Engine" in Japan, and "Genesis" in the US, a name that, while middle-aged, really represents Sega's vigor and charm.
And as the mid-career lineup of games filled out with more and more quality games, Sega was able to live up to the rebelliousness in his self-description.
Ported from the arcade platform, there was the first 3D game VR Racing for home console platforms, and later there were fighters; natively developed, there was at the time enough action to compete with Capcom arcade "Iron Fist of Fury"; third-party, there was the rise of EA's contribution to the gun-car-ball game; and even more big-name "Moonwalk", a video game designed by the king of the world, Michael Jackson, himself.
Of course the most important thing here is the IP that directly contributed to the birth of the game rating system: Mortal Kombat.
As we all know, Mortal Kombat has been known for its dismemberment graphics and splattered ketchup since its inception, and it was almost at the same time that American parents and barristers began to associate violence with video games.
In the face of this, Sega MD, the self-proclaimed toy of youth, took it on the chin and didn't cut a single slice, while Nintendo took it upon themselves to harmonize all adult content by neutering the execution mechanic, citing social responsibility.
When Nintendo and Sega representatives sat down together in court, the former thought they had bypassed the entire controversy, but they didn't want a traitor to jump ship to Sega, and they were turned against each other:
? May I ask, Mr. Judge, what Nintendo was trying to do with this steam gun?
The judge didn't understand the game, but knew that guns were an extremely sensitive issue in North America, so even if Ren explained it, he couldn't get away from the suspicion of peddling violence, and was forced to fall back on the famous scene of "games for children only", which was directly assisted by Sega in installing the approval.
Sega's founder Hayao Nakayama once said, "I live to make Nintendo uncomfortable," and his American colleague's achievement of defeating the strongest legal department at the moment has undoubtedly won Sega a beautiful battle.
Four
So to summarize, Sega wasn't just about consoles at the time, it was the collective identity of hardcore arcade veterans in Japan, and in the US it was treated as one of the top three youth brands alongside Nike and Reeves.
It may have been a boast, but his hardcore games were worthy of that ethos, and he was also the brave, fresh, energetic challenger who revolutionized the industry after the market was unified, making his rivals look at and change themselves.
And then Sega was on top, nibbling half of the US market from the old guard, and even more recognizable than the old guard for a time in Europe and Brazil.
But soon none of that will matter.
Because by 1994, Sony had arrived: no one could make a console that sold better than the PS1 in that era, not even God.
And finally Sega left? The console wars? was also filled with love, cruelty, and pathos, but those, well, are another story.