Review: Console Wars – HBO GO

Honestly, I do not know whether Review is the right word for the way I am going to express my opinion about Console Wars.

These days there is a whole movement to say that console bickering is wrong, and obviously there are absurd cases of people who use the opportunity to go from healthy competition to insulting and threatening people for no reason.

However, as the excellent documentary Console Wars shows, our industry was born, grew and saw a division of what would have been Nintendo’s monopoly thanks to that. The console war is an aggressive marketing strategy that is tremendously effective at recruiting and establishing a fanbase that, even with the emergence of fanatics in modern times, is overwhelmingly healthy.

A large part of the Console War mentality is nothing more than trying to cover a market that your opponents do not cover. In its early life Nintendo kept an aggressive regime in which only it could reign supreme, with a 95% share of the market. Only with tactics as aggressive or more so did Sega manage first to establish a base, and later to overtake the big N. Today we have three big monsters in the market, a new generation being born for two of the three biggest consoles, and anyone who intends to compete with this oligopoly will need bigger weapons than just capital.

The documentary also serves as a tremendous reminder of how much games changed and shaped American society, and we only suffered an “aftershock” of it all. We had our own problems, such as the dollar exchange rate and vultures selling devices at the price of gold, but American society directly influenced the course the big companies took in developing hardware and software. Yes, it was an effect for both sides.

I honestly do not want to get into the specific subjects covered in the documentary, because the feeling, especially for folks in their 30s like me, is of watching a great stage play that I never knew existed, but that I took part in simply by being dressed up and acting accordingly.

Recommended for any gaming fan, and for anyone who wants to understand how the most profitable entertainment market in modern history was born.