There was a time when picking a video game console was a personality, a friend group and a playground argument all at once. It was called the console wars, and it was glorious.
The challenger arrives
By the late 1980s, Nintendo was the dominant force in home video games. Sega, which had the Genesis (known as the Mega Drive outside North America), set out to challenge it, and it did so with attitude. The famous slogan, “Genesis does what Nintendon’t,” was a direct jab at the market leader, and it was the kind of advertising that made kids feel like they were in on a joke.
Enter the hedgehog
Sega needed a mascot to rival Mario, and in 1991 it launched Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic was fast, cool and a little cocky, a character built to be the anti-Mario. The game’s speed was a selling point, and its blue blur became one of the most recognizable characters in gaming.
The playground divides
Nintendo answered with the Super Nintendo, released in North America in 1991, and the two companies fought it out in ads, magazines and lunchrooms. Kids picked sides. Some of us still have strong opinions about the sound chip, which says something about how seriously we took this.
How it ended
The war didn’t have a clean winner. Sega’s later hardware struggled, and after the Dreamcast it left the console business in 2001 and became a software publisher, which means you can now play Sonic on a Nintendo system without anyone getting in a fight. The rivalry did something important, though: it pushed both companies to be bolder and more creative, and it gave us a decade of great games. Honestly, it was the best fight of our childhoods, and nobody got hurt.