the end of videogame history
I remember the Videogame Wars like they were yesterday. After the American videogame crash of the early 1980s, Nintendo dared to enter the nonexistent market and won big, establishing total dominance with the famous Nintendo Entertainment System. From 1985 to 1990, the NES was the system to own. In 1990, Sega debuted its vastly more powerful Genesis console and stole a significant chunk of the market away from Nintendo. The Great Videogame War officially began in 1991, with the release of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo’s direct competition to the Sega Genesis.
The marketing on both sides was vicious, and Sega, which knew the Genesis was technically inferior to the SNES, often resorted to naked antagonism. That second clip is particularly ironic. One of the primary Sega titles in it is Eco the Dolphin, which was a mediocre game wrapped around Sega’s “blast processing” gimmick, whereas the Nintendo title being mocked is Super Mario Kart, widely considered to be one of the best (if not the best) racing games ever made. Advertisements of the this nature were everywhere for a few years. They served only to rot the minds of impressionable young gamers (me and my friends) and polarize the market into Sega People and Nintendo People. To be with Sega was to be against Nintendo, and vice versa, unless you were some wealthy brat with negligent parents who could somehow get both.
Nintendo won the war, enthralling gamers with a now legendary collection of marquee games while Sega desperately tried to compete on the hardware front with disasters like the Sega CD and Sega Saturn. Sega’s hardware division burned out and the company devoted its time solely to software. The SNES gave way to the Nintendo 64, which competed with Sony’s Playstation and lost a huge portion of its base to Sony’s darker titles. The direct win-lose competition between the gaming powerhouses, however, didn’t transfer. The market had diversified and matured. The Playstation and Nintendo 64 evolved into the Playstation 2 and Nintendo Gamecube, while a third player, Microsoft’s Xbox, joined the market. Microsoft dismissed Nintendo’s small but dedicated segment of the market and threw itself into direct competition with Sony. This configuration holds into the current generation of game consoles. The Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 vie mercilessly for your living room and internet connection, while Nintendo’s Wii quietly regains market share with its less powerful but more unique hardware.
If you read the discussion forums at the various popular gaming sites, you might think that the War is still on. PS3 and Xbox 360 boosters verbally murder each other, while proponents of the Wii tirelessly point out that their system values gameplay over circuit boards. The fact of the matter, however, is that these rivalries don’t actually exist.
Nintendo’s console is so different from Sony’s and Microsoft’s that it is no longer in direct competition with these alleged “rivals”. Its game franchises are so strong that it will never have to worry as long as it doesn’t let the quality slip. As for Sony and Microsoft, the competition is illusory, a self-created conflict generated by consumers who have spent multiple hundreds of dollars on one system over the other. It’s buyer’s remorse on the scale of community. In the 1990s, if you bought a Super Nintendo, it meant that you would never be able to play Sonic the Hedgehog. If you bought a Sega, it meant that Mario and Zelda were off limits. Exclusivity was the rule of the day.
That day is now long passed. In fact, the production of a good game is now so expensive that companies are practically forced to eschew console exclusivity in favor maximizing revenue. You can get Guitar Hero for both the Playstation and the Xbox (and soon the Wii). The same good and terrible games are available for both of the more technologically powerful platforms. You can experience the excellent The Darkness or suffer through the pain of Spider-Man 3 with either Microsoft or Sony as your Sherpa. Nintendo continues to make strange but lucrative entries into what may be a new market. Console tribalism is entirely unnecessary, both for the companies and for the consumers. The War is over.
I’ve touched on these topics before, so you may want to check out this and this.
To an extent, your points are excellent – but I disagree that video game tribalism (nice phrase, by the way) is gone. While most of the muddling, mid-level, fairly successful titles will be released across multiple platforms, the really big blockbuster titles often will not. There are a lot fewer franchises now than there used to be, but companies are inventing new ones that will come to define the next generation of gamers (Halo, God of War, anyone?)
The new dichotomy, if I see it yet, is that the XBox and the PS3 are sharply marketed towards different nationalities. The XBox doesn’t sell well in Japan, and has a large glut of American- and English-language producing companies making its products (like the Medal of Honor series, Halo, Far Cry, etc.) The PS3, while certainly marketing titles of a similar nature, has a catalogue that will probably grow to include most of the major developers it retained in the past, and that were very popular with Japanese audiences (Square Enix, Bandai, etc.) Games like Dragon Quest sell OK in the U.S., in Japan, they break records. And right now, they are only available on the PS3.
It will take some time before these distinctions really sink in. The Wii has done a fabulous job of completely ignoring both worlds by being universal – its games are often simple, entertaining, and accessible to anyone (plus, Nintendo does have an almost unlimited access to nostalgic video game characters from our youth). The Wii will probably find a strong fan base faster and more prominently than either the XBox or PS3.