During this time frame (1986-1994), the console wars were
beginning full swing. What do you feel the companies did right with their new
consoles and what do you believe they did wrong?
For this written opinion piece, I will be discussing what
Nintendo and Sega did right with the Super NES and Genesis consoles,
respectively. I will also discuss what I believe they did wrong with each of
these systems.
For the release of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Super NES) console, Nintendo made a
very smart decision to include the game Super
Mario World with the system. Super
Mario Bros. 3 had already been a wild success for the original NES, having
sold more than 17 million copies, so including Super Mario World with the Super NES was a great way to keep that
momentum going into the new system. However, Nintendo also got into a very bad
habit of relying on a small amount of games to propel sales of the Super NES.
Rather than creating a variety of games throughout the year, Nintendo would
wait until the new game from Shigeru Miyamoto, their star game designer, was
ready. Those games, like The Legend of
Zelda: Link to the Past and Super
Mario World 2, always performed well, but were few and far between. If one
of his games had failed in the market, Nintendo would have suffered
significantly.
As far as Sega is concerned, one of the best moves they made
with the Genesis system was releasing well ahead of when Nintendo was ready to
release the Super NES, giving Sega a large market advantage at the time. When
sales weren’t as high as they liked, Sega also made a very smart move in the
United States by lowering the price and packaging the game Sonic The Hedgehog with the system, replacing Altered Beast. This helped Sega establish a mascot character that
could compete with Nintendo’s Mario. Sega also took the opposite stance from
Nintendo regarding game release schedules. Sega was working to create several
games, like ToeJam & Earl and Streets of Rage, and release them
throughout the year, so they didn’t have to rely on one or two games to be
wildly successful. Unfortunately, Sega decided to innovate on the hardware
side, rather than maintain a focus on producing great games for the Genesis.
The 32X and Sega CD add-ons for the Genesis system were never successful, and
wound up placing Sega on a slow downward spiral that they were never able to
pull out of.
