Being a child of the late ’80s and early ’90s meant that I was part of a digital renaissance, a period of intense creativity, innovation, and, most notably, competition in the world of video games. If you were a gamer back then, you couldn’t escape the heated debates that dominated playgrounds, living rooms, and even the budding gaming communities of the early internet world: the showdown between the SNES and the Genesis. This wasn’t just a few fanboys arguing about their gaming rigs; this was truly one intense moment of marketing, of gaming industry culture, of fan-driven loyalty, that created the moment that I think of as a generational divide.
Even now, I can recall the intensity of the disagreements I had with friends over this Console War. My best friend, Danny, and I were Crossfire kids. I proudly wore the mantle of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System; he not only loved but also defiantly swore by the Sega Genesis. Indeed, even fantasy scenarios we thought up involving hostage situations inevitably ended with, “And then my side wins, because ____,” with that blank filled in by the name of either some as-yet-unreleased marquee title or the controller setup one of us preferred.
In order to fully comprehend the rivalry between the Super Nintendo and the Genesis, we must first travel back to the late 1980s, an era when Sega was just beginning to find its identity. 1988 was a special year for gaming. In this year, we saw the debut of the Genesis/Mega Drive, the plucky, upstart gaming console that was pitted against the seasoned veteran that was the NES. The Mega Drive held its own quite well against the NES, partly because it had something that the NES didn’t (and the Super NES would improve upon in spades): 16-bit architecture.
Sega’s 1989 release of the Genesis/Mega Drive was a landmark moment in the video game industry, a true game-changer that would prove to have many long-lasting ripples. This foray into 16-bit saw Sega getting an early lead in the bit upgrade race of the 1990s; the excitement generated by the Genesis was palpable.
But ever since the National Stadium bathhouse days, Nintendo literally and figuratively held the keys to the Japanese video game kingdom. Nintendo was not about to let a “most valuable player” vibe emanate from the upstart Sega and its outer space named console; the company was readying something it knew in its bones would be great.
The real battleground of the SNES vs. Genesis war was the games themselves. Both systems could boast a number of exclusive games that naturally gave rise to comparisons from those on the other side. Genesis had Sonic the Hedgehog, a dazzlingly fast and smooth platformer starring a new kind of Sega mascot that was intended both to be a cool figure for an older audience and a direct competitor to that plumber named Mario. And cool Sonic was.
Meanwhile, the SNES could flaunt such achievements as Super Mario World, a masterpiece of game design by every account, and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, an unparalleled adventure game with the kind of depth and detail that made its world feel lived-in and full of secrets.
The SNES was superior to the Genesis in several respects. From a strictly technological point of view, the SNES had a much more advanced color palette. Genesis was part of the “Fourth Generation” of consoles, and the SNES was part of the “Fifth Generation.”
In terms of technology, the Genesis wasn’t much more powerful than what had come before, but the SNES was. Games like F-Zero and Super Mario Kart were able to impressively showcase Mode 7, which was a kind of technology that gave a game a fantastic sense of illusion. It looked as if the part of the game closest to you in the foreground was moving much faster than the part of the game in the background.
When it came to straight-up “processing power,” I’m not sure if that spec was in the public conversation in the early ’90s. Maybe it was, and I’m just not aware of it. But by assigning what was clearly a power advantage to the Genesis, the “Eight Megabytes” advocates can make the case that they were on the winning side of history.
Another major point of contention is over the matter of 16-bit controllers. The NES controller, a classic design that was innovative in its time, had evolved into even better hardware with the Super NES. Now the large, awkward rectangular controller of the 1985 NES was a distant memory, replaced by four face buttons and two shoulder buttons… adding up to six (possibly taken from the Neo-Geo hardware?) already great for arcade-like gameplay but also allowing for complex controls that transform into a game’s mechanic.
The way Sega sold its games had a certain a-chuh! that landed precisely with my teenage sense of this-will-get-your-parents’-attention. Older kids and malcontented teens ate up the ugh! ads; the after-school specials; the swell, swell endorsements; and, of course, the truly iconic slogan “Genesis does what Nintendon’t.” The fine-tuned Sega Genesis was definitely pitched to us as an “us”—evidenced by ’90s commercials that always seemed to end with some sycophantic kid staring into a camera lens and saying, “Awesome!” To which I replied, as no doubt did plenty of other teenagers, “Give me the awesome.”
The Console War might have simply been about bragging rights, but one element that certainly fueled the fires was the fight for exclusive games. Not only did these games separate the identities of the Super NES and Genesis, but they also allowed both systems to show off what they could do. The Super NES had a number of hits like Super Mario World, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and the Donkey Kong series that acted as a major foundation for Nintendo’s 16-bit era. On the Sega side, the exclusive-to-Genesis games from Electronic Arts, the 16-bit version of Mortal Kombat with its extra layer of bloody goodness, and the superlative Phantasy Star series allowed the console to shine in its own distinctive way.
As the early ’90s gave way to the middle of the decade, video games started moving into the third dimension. This was a wildly ambitious and uncertain undertaking. No one really knew how 3D graphics might work in games played on home consoles or what the impact of this shift might be on game design. The only thing anyone could say for sure was that the Specular C×S5×G next-gen graphics of PlayStation games looked an awful lot better than the Return to Monkey Island StrongARM versions of PC graphics that marked the outer limit of contemporary gaming in the mid-’90s. This was also happening on a set of powerful new consoles that massively upped the ante on what you could expect from a home gaming experience.
The rivalry between the SNES and the Genesis was about more than which of the two consoles was better. It was a moment that defined the history of video games—establishing them as a medium with an increasingly distinctive voice. And one can still use it as a reference point, I think, for looking at what video games are today and how console hardware and communities built around it have unique power relations. I was 10 during this period, obsessed with my Genesis, and increasingly in awe of my neighbor’s SNES. All of what I think about this moment is, naturally, tied up in what the video games of that time achieve.
