If you’re anything like me (a millennial or even a young Gen Xer), when you were growing up, you wasted far, far too many hours on Nintendo. But what a fun squandering of time it was! What could have been more enjoyable for a 7-12-year-old boy than to while away an afternoon playing Street Fighter, WWF Superstars, or Super Mario Bros.? Once Nintendo came out with the portable, pocket-sized Game Boy and I could play Super Mario Land and Super Mario Land 2 wherever I wanted, my chance of accomplishing anything significant by the age of 13 had vanished.
Only one thing could stand between me and my Game Boy, and that thing turned out to be another hand-held gaming device: the Sega Game Gear, which boasted a range of titles, including Sonic the Hedgehog, Castlevania, Mortal Kombat, and NBA Jam, possibly even more entertaining than Nintendo’s. When the Game Gear was introduced in 1991 as part of the upstart Sega Genesis line of video game devices, it threatened to upend not only my love affair with Nintendo but the entire video game industry.
Blake J. Harris’s and Jonah Tulis’s documentary Console Wars, which premiered at this year’s SXSW Film Festival and is now available for streaming on CBS All Access, takes us back to those heady times in the history of gaming, when Nintendo bestrode the video game world like a colossus before Sega came along and nearly toppled it. Before we get to that, however, Console Wars takes us back to the dawn of video games themselves, with titles such as Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, reminding us how enthralling they were. For a generation that had grown up passively watching people on the TV screen, being able to control characters on the screen yourself was nothing short of sensational. The captivating appeal of video games grew so worrisome that by the early 1980s, Tom Brokaw was reporting on the country’s national video game “addiction.” “I found something a lot more scarier than cocaine,” Robin Williams joked. “It’s called Nintendo.”
Then, in 1983, Nintendo came along with even more sophisticated games: Instead of stick figures, they had “people, animals, wizards, spells” spread out over “different worlds,” with improved graphics and more stylish uses of color. Nintendo would quickly become a juggernaut, especially after the release of its first blockbuster hit, Mario Bros., which grossed over $1.7 billion in sales in its first three years. Harris and Tulis do a good job here at portraying the extent of Nintendo’s grip on the gaming imagination, using not just interviews and news stories but home videos of children screaming with joy upon receiving Nintendos for Christmas or Hanukkah. They also make good use of numbers, showing how, at the peak of its popularity in the late 1980s, Nintendo possessed an astounding 95% of the video game market. At the time, the thought of even challenging Nintendo would have sounded as absurd as someone today announcing a plan to develop a search engine to rival Google.
But challenged Nintendo was. The challenger came in the form of a little-known Tokyo-based video game developer called Sega.
The intrepid Japanese company recruited Shinobu Toyoda, a former Mitsubishi executive who had stayed in the United States after the end of his tenure with the company, and Tom Kalinske, a Mattel executive who had helped develop Flintstone’s children’s vitamins, He-Man action figures, and Barbie dolls, to help it launch its new video game company in the U.S. Working out of a Comfort Inn in San Francisco, Toyoda, Kalinske, and their co-workers took upon themselves the near-impossible task of creating from scratch a company that could take on Nintendo.
Harris and Tulis excel at telling this story in large part because of their inventive visual style. They felicitously match the medium to the message, utilizing various forms of comic book- and video game-style graphics to illustrate the tale of Nintendo’s and Sega’s war. They also seamlessly interweave clips from the classic Nintendo and Sega video games into the film’s interviews and news stories, immersing us, at least partially, into the mesmerizing interactive realm within which the real-world battle was taking place. The result is an illuminating look into the people and events that created some of our favorite childhood pastimes. But it is also something more than that. More than a modern-day variation of the archetypal David vs. Goliath story, it is story about the American dream and the way the spirit of entrepreneurship so infuses those who come here from elsewhere that they are inspired to create and innovate in the same way that those fortunate enough to have been born here have always been inspired.
Console Wars happens to be a rather timely documentary, as well. It’s nice to be able to get caught up in a hotly contested fight the stakes of which are not ultimately very high. Like good live sports, Console Wars provides a welcome respite from the relentless political turmoil of this election cycle and the turmoil of the coronavirus pandemic. What a relief to be able to watch a fiercely waged battle in which who will come out on top in a video game war is all that’s on the line. And what pleasure to be taken back, even for 91 brief minutes, to those fun ‘90s afternoons when our biggest problems were, “Why did Michael Jordan go to play baseball?” and, “Will NBC be able to keep the cast of Seinfeld together for one more season?”
Daniel Ross Goodman is a writer from western Massachusetts and a Ph.D. candidate at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. He is the author of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema and the novel A Single Life.
