A new movie about the console wars between SEGA and Nintendo called Console Wars will be premiering at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival in Austin, Texas this March. Seth Rogen is the Executive Producer and the directors are Jonah Tulis and Blake J. Harris, who wrote the original novel. Once the film is released, CBS All Access will have streaming rights and is also producing a series based on the book.
The story follows Tom Kalinske, the former CEO of video game company SEGA of America, and through a series of interviews, discusses the history of the competition between SEGA and Nintendo during the 1990s as well as the conflict that took place.
The Console Wars movie is coming in March 2020, and it will include many interviews with developers and executives from Sega and Nintendo to highlight the significance and history of the console war between both companies and the impact it had on the two franchises. Both companies had a prolific back and forth in the early days of consoles, with one pushing the other to innovate.
Nintendo dominated the game industry in the 80s, while SEGA was just an arcade company. SEGA began producing video game consoles with the SG-1000 (commonly known as the Master System) but struggled to compete with the NES. In 1988, SEGA released a 16-bit console, the SEGA Genesis, to compete with Nintendo's 8-bit console but Nintendo created the SNES in response. SEGA then created Sonic the Hedgehog to compete against the Super Mario Bros. series. Eventually, SEGA lowered the cost of the Genesis and bundled it with Sonic, which helped the Genesis compete with and at times outsell the SNES.
SEGA also launched the Game Gear, a handheld version of the Master System, to compete against Nintendo's Game Boy. The Game Gear had a full color screen which helped it compete against the black and white Game Boy screen.
SEGA had commercial failures with the SEGA Saturn and Dreamcast consoles that failed to compete against the Nintendo 64. In 2001, SEGA stopped producing consoles and switched to just being a game developer. Now many of its games are distributed on Nintendo Consoles. There are even games where Mario and Sonic compete such as the Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games franchise and the Super Smash Brothers games.