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A review by mattgoldberg
Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation by Blake J. Harris
1.0
This book was fucking awful. I would have stopped reading it midway, but I had to finish because I had agreed to interview the author, an author who had contacted me personally before I was even sent a review copy (he e-mailed me regarding a news article I wrote about a film adaptation of the book). There was no getting out of it, and I desperately wanted to get out of it.
I love behind-the-scenes stories, but Harris illuminates them horribly. In broad terms, it's about underdog Sega finding a way to level the playing field with Nintendo, but Harris writes characters so poorly. The manufactured dialogue is cringeworthy at times, and the bad writing extends to awful metaphors, confusing analogies, and segways that are laughable at best. When introducing Olaf Olaffson, Harris writes the "scene" as Olaffson looking back on his life as a way of conveying the man's background. Rather than just being straight with us, Harris feels the need to shoehorn it into a corny drama as if we're looking at a flashback.
But the larger sin is forgetting what makes the video games worthwhile. I never once felt like these people were passionate about gaming or gamers; they were passionate about consumers, and it adds up to a story where the real champion is marketing. Sega didn't build a better product; it built a better marketing campaign. And if that's the story, Harris could have easily made his book about any competing businesses. The appeal of the book is that it promises nostalgia combined with illumination, but it delivers neither.
I hate to be so negative about the book because I spoke with Harris, and he's a nice guy. He had intelligent answers to my questions, and I look forward to publishing the interview when I find the time (I have to transcribe a 25-minute interview). But reading Console Wars, I was constantly thinking about all of the other books I'd rather be reading.
I love behind-the-scenes stories, but Harris illuminates them horribly. In broad terms, it's about underdog Sega finding a way to level the playing field with Nintendo, but Harris writes characters so poorly. The manufactured dialogue is cringeworthy at times, and the bad writing extends to awful metaphors, confusing analogies, and segways that are laughable at best. When introducing Olaf Olaffson, Harris writes the "scene" as Olaffson looking back on his life as a way of conveying the man's background. Rather than just being straight with us, Harris feels the need to shoehorn it into a corny drama as if we're looking at a flashback.
But the larger sin is forgetting what makes the video games worthwhile. I never once felt like these people were passionate about gaming or gamers; they were passionate about consumers, and it adds up to a story where the real champion is marketing. Sega didn't build a better product; it built a better marketing campaign. And if that's the story, Harris could have easily made his book about any competing businesses. The appeal of the book is that it promises nostalgia combined with illumination, but it delivers neither.
I hate to be so negative about the book because I spoke with Harris, and he's a nice guy. He had intelligent answers to my questions, and I look forward to publishing the interview when I find the time (I have to transcribe a 25-minute interview). But reading Console Wars, I was constantly thinking about all of the other books I'd rather be reading.