Poll: The first console wars

[Clive Howlitzer]

I owned both and a PC. I guess I am spoiled! In the later years, when PSX came out. I sided with the Nintendo 64 for a very long time before getting a PSX also.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Nintendo, but mostly by virtue that I already had an SNES, and I didn't care about any of that Sega vs Nintendo business.

 

[Roxor]

Neither. I'm a Lifelong PC Gamer.

 

[Signa]

I always said back then that Nintendo was far ahead of Sega in terms of good games, but when both Sega and Nintendo had the "same" game, Sega would get the better version. That opinion hasn't stood the tests of time, but I felt that the Sega Jurassic Park and Aladdin were far better than the SNES games. I also enjoyed Sonic more than Mario back then, because it was cool running that fast. The only game I played back then that broke that rule was Street Fighter II, because you had to hit start to swap between punches and kicks. Sega was not thinking when they designed the controller with the same number of inputs as the NES.

Today, I can't stand games that don't allow save progress, so Sonic 1 and 2 are out over Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island, and I don't think either Jurassic park game were really any good. Aladdin on the Genesis still kicks ass though.

Looking back at the technical aspects now that I can appreciate them more, I'm still kinda blown away at how good the SNES's sound system was. Games like Super Metroid's piano music, and the city market crowd chatter in the lesser known Secret of Evermore showed some great synth effects.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

Nintendo. Base Wars, Captain Skyhawk, Rocket Ranger and very good ports of CABAL and operation WOLF.

 

[Pebkio]

There has only been one true video game war: PC vs Everything Else.

To be honest, this war had been over before it had started, because Nintendo already had the fan-base of all the gamers who were looking for something after the crash. Sega was admirable for getting as far as they did, but they weren't going to have the same numbers as Nintendo.

 

[Artlover]

EDIT: All right, second console wars. I'd forgotten about Atari vs. Coleco, mostly because Atari obliterated Coleco, then itself.

More like 3rd console wars.

The second console wars would actually be Atari vs. Colecovision vs. Intellivision vs. Vectrex vs. Arcadia vs. Astrocade vs. Fairchild. Atari mostly won (2600 from 1977-1992), but Intellivision was a very VERY close second (1979-1991). Pretty much the only two to survive the crash of '83/84 and continued production and sale through out the duration of the following 3rd generation consoles (NES, SMS, A7800)

I think the first console wars would technically be between Magnavox Odyssey and the 100's of different Pong machines.

 

[Kinitawowi]

I can't say I remember the 8-bit Sega and Nintendo consoles being a huge thing in the UK. They were around and people had them, but I don't think there was what you could call a war, mainly because 8-bit meant pc and it was either the Sinclair Spectrum, the Commodore 64 or the Amstrad CPC and their own little war of supremacy.

I've been involved in enough gaming discussions to know that this one really isn't worth having.

A few of my mates had Master Systems and my stepmum had a NES (my hometown was full of arcades, which may explain why consoles didn't kick off in that small corner of north-west Norfolk), but damn near everybody else had ZX Spectrums right up until the early 90s. The Sega vs Nintendo thing didn't really happen over here for years (certainly not on the 8-bits, although the Megadrive shook things up a lot). Spectrum vs Commodore was the fight, but again it's skewed by international perspectives; C64 walked it in America but the Speccy won the UK battle. BBCs were ubiquitous in schools but I never knew anybody with one at home; while Amstrad never really shook that "just migrated from the office" feel (from their old PCW 8512s). Personally, I flogged my Speccy until it died through user error (it didn't have a reset button, of course, meaning the only way to turn it off or reset was to pull the plug - did that a little too zealously one time and blew one of the ROMs), at which point my mum got me an Amstrad CPC 6128 (the one with the disc drive) for Christmas one year.

But no1curr. It's Sega vs Nintendo in the US and everything else can go hang. Gaming completely globally ceased to be a thing between the 1983 Crash and the US launch of the NES. 'MURICA!

 

[Falseprophet]

Although Sega exclusives like Shinobi and Phantasy Star were some of my favourite games, I had to accept reality and recognize the NES library was like 10 times the size (I knew one kid in school who had a Master System).

At the time period maybe since they were still making games, although you might be surprised to learn that the Genesis had a bigger libary, no joke. NES had about 700 titles by the end of its life and the Genesis had about 900 by its end. Obviously the vast majority of these are shit though because that's how it goes with everything. SNES by comparison is about 800.

Unless you mean the Master System, which is completely true as the library for that was pretty small.

Yeah, for the 8-bit era, I meant Master System. Sega was pretty much the only developer making games for it, because Nintendo told all the major 3rd-party devs if they made games for any platform other than the NES, they'd lose access to the NES. Since the NES had the overwhelming majority console market share in the two biggest gaming markets (Japan and North America), most of them played ball.

This changed somewhat by the 16-bit era, so there were a lot more 3rd party devs for the Genesis (e.g. most of the big EA Sports franchises were born on the Genesis, so it became the sports game console), so I'm not surprised the Genesis had a library to rival the SNES in the end.

 

[uzo]

In 'olden days', it was a Dick Smith Wizzard! for me (look it up - peculiar little bugger, repackaged 'Creativision' machine).

In 8-bit and 16-bit days, I was a NES and SNES boy respectively. And now, have a DS (which I have barely used in almost 4 years). Still got my GameBoy too (only 1 'game' though - a Doraemon 'StudyBoy' kanji program to keep up my kanji skillz).

Also had a PS2 and PS3.

But through all of these, I've used PCs almost daily since I was 5 yrs old, starting with an Apple ][c, moving on to an 80386 w/ MSDOS 5.1, then a Compaq Presario 333MhZ beast, then a range of mid-range PCs for the last ten years, last two being a Toshiba laptop with Linux Mint on it (hurrah for minimalism) primarily for work/browsing, and an HP Win7 system primarily for gaming.

So I voted for the master race, because whilst I do go back to consoles for 'console-y' games (Space Marine, Biohazard/ResEvil, GTA, Ryu ga Gotoku/Yakuza), it's inevitably a short stay.