The ‘90s gaming showdown defined a generation – a battle royale where Nintendo’s classic charm met SEGA’s rebellious edge, all under the looming shadow of a new contender: Sony’s PlayStation.
From pixelated four-colour sprites to explosive 3D polygons, this was the decade that reshaped gaming forever.
Join BigMacDaddy as he takes us through the highs, the lows, and the outright madness of the 16-bit era and beyond.
Whether you’re a console crusader or just love a good retro tale, this is one throwback worth powering up.
For much of the 80s, Nintendo and SEGA ruled the roost, with Nintendo opening the decade with their wildly popular Famicom and SEGA closing out with the genesis of their fame, the Genesis.
The new decade also brought about much change to pop culture and society, with the advent of the Internet becoming a “household” thing, to skateboarding, to grunge bands encouraging people to look like they dumpster dived for clothes before going to a rock concert.
Things in the gaming sphere would change too, with the integration of 3-D graphics into games, new genres spawning from more power in console systems and the idea that kids didn’t need to sit on the same couch anymore to play games together (conversely, we need more of this glorious feeling back in modern gaming.
The screen-watching, carrying a TV to a different room so that our parents would not hear us, sitting on the floor without pulling a muscle. Missings…).
Much like the decade, home gaming machines were growing into something different than their humble arcade beginnings, becoming more violent and punk, and starting to morph into that thing that mom and dad would hate. (I regard this generation as the most important in all of gaming. So far…)
But some things were still the same when 1990 rolled around. SEGA and Nintendo were still the kings and would continue their feud into the coming years. While the Genesis, the BFG of yesteryear, managed to slay the Nintendragon, there were more: the eggs that this beast laid, were hatching soon…
The Super Nintendragon
While the Genesis had the privilege of being the first genuine 16-bit console in the new generation, it would not be the only one for long.
The Super Famicom, or Super NES, had been in development since 1987, and even announced this in a Japanese newspaper in an attempt to stifle sales of the PC Engine/Turbografx-16 that was releasing that December.
Once again, during development, the collective minds at the organisation emphasised making the sounds and sights of their new monster the focal point:
While 128kb of RAM was allocated for instructions and whatnot, 64kb each was also allocated to the video and audio; the RAM in the video could provide up to 256 colours from a wider palette of over 32,000 (remember the oohs and aahs of the four-colour sprite back in the NES days?).
The sound processor itself was also designed by Ken Kuturagi, a Sony engineer at the time, which nearly got him fired!
And once again, Nintendo understood that their strength lay in the games on the console, whether it was their own giant IPs such as Mario and Legend of Zelda, or the games of third-party developers that they spearheaded, compared to SEGA’s initial reluctance.
The result was that the SNES would come with a packed-in Super Mario World, arguably one of the greatest games in the entire franchise.
The third-party developers would also be a who’s who catalogue of the time:
Capcom, Square, Konami, Taito and more. (The only puzzling part is that Nintendo once again opted to launch with very few available titles, with only F-Zero, Sim City and a few others being around in 1990 when it appeared on shelves.)
When the Super Famicom came to Japanese stores on 21 November 1990, a Wednesday, a frenzy ensued.
The 300,000 units commissioned nationwide sold out within hours, and a panic descended upon gamers hoping to grab the latest 16-bit machine (this led to the Japanese government requesting video game manufacturers to release their consoles on weekends in future!).
There are even reports that members of the Yakuza would mug customers of their SNES to profit from re-selling it (“I got mugged for my SNES by the Yakuza” sounds like a T-shirt I must own).
One thing was clear: the Super Famicom would be a super version of the first Nintendragon that SEGA fought.
An All-Out War
When SEGA saw the zeal at which the Japanese consumer wanted to own the new Nintendo machine, it knew it had to form a solid counterattack before the Super Famicom would cross the pond and become the SNES.
While its Genesis machine was perfectly capable of hanging with the rest, it all came down to convincing a consumer to rather buy their product than the brand- new 16-bit on the shelf.
For this, they used aggressive marketing.
And when I say aggressive marketing, I mean in-your-face loud commercials that directly challenged Nintendo (one of the famous slogans of the time was literally “Genesis does what Nintendon’t”. Look it up).
While they understood the Super Mario and other Nintendo games would completely sway the younger kids, SEGA took aim at the adolescents, the “cool kids”, in a decade where “cool” was all about being edgy and violent.
It targeted an audience of 12 and up, using gore in their games to sell copies, which was something Nintendo still censored heavily up to that point.
A prime example is the first Mortal Kombat game, for which the Genesis port is superior to the SNES version.
The Genesis also had a much larger game library than the SNES at the time of the latter’s launch, and a more powerful CPU.
While Nintendo’s machine was programmed to have “enhancement chips” in its cartridges that acted as coprocessors, this meant that its opponents’ games ran smoother, and there was more to play.
But by far the boldest of all SEGA’s decisions was to lower the price of their console to be cheaper than the new shiny Nintendo (and by forecasting that they would make their money back from people buying games from their larger library).
This stroke of genius meant that despite the fervour the SNES caused in Japan, the Genesis would hold its US market share and out-sell the SNES for four holiday seasons in a row!
But for every stroke of genius, there was the occasional blunder, such as the SEGA CD. Touted as the competition to the Famicom’s CD-based console, the SEGA CD was an add-on to the Genesis.
It failed, though, because of the high price tag (maybe an unsuccessful ploy to get their money back on the cheaper console?) and the fact that it had very few games on launch, which was strangely a Nintendo thing to do.
Ultimately, both giants landed some blows and took some on the chin. It felt like a slugfest to pick up a bloodied crown that Atari knocked off its own head long ago. Just as things seemed to reach the final round, a third opponent entered the battlefield…
Ready, Player Three
Sony seemed to be an astute student of the game when it came to video games.
Having taken notes from both Nintendo and SEGA, it would venture into the rapidly growing video games industry in 1993, when Sony would establish a Japanese contemporary company (sound familiar?).
The new business would develop a home video game console spearheaded by Ken Kutaragi (sound familiar?). It would not only focus on developing a machine with great sound and 3-D graphics but also be aggressively marketed towards adolescents of the nineties for its mature content (sound fam— okay, I’ll stop now).
The 32-bit CPU could clock 33.8 MHZ, with coprocessors rendering the 3D graphics. There were 2 MEGABYTES of main RAM, with an additional 1 MEGABYTE of video RAM.
The GPU could produce 4000 sprites or 180,000 polygons in one second. Seriously, compare these numbers to those of the SNES and Genesis and watch how they dwarf them.
The original PS1 is still seen to this day as an audiophile’s dream.
But just who did this new kid on the block think he was? Did he think he was Doomsday in the middle of the Batman v Superman fight? (As you can see, I have a lot of power fantasies while writing these pieces.)
The bigger question is, how would Nintendo and SEGA respond to the barn burner that was the OG PlayStation’s release?
Tune in next week to find out!
BigMacDaddy may be an MLG legend and the world’s foremost expert on every gaming studio – at least in his dreams.
In reality, he’s a full-time software developer who cherishes family time, with hobbies ranging from a bit of YouTubing and chess to game development and travel.
If you’ve got that same storytelling passion buzzing in your gamer heart, why not share it with us?
At NAG, we’re always excited to showcase more voices from our community, because you’re just as much a part of gaming’s story as the games themselves.
link