Lincoln’s squad includes Howard Phillips, Nintendo’s “Game Master” and counterpart to Nilsen Randy Peretzman, who polices Nintendo’s relationships with retailers and Peter Main, whose accountant-like appearance conceals bust-you-in-the-mouth business will.

His impossible mission: Roll the Sega Genesis to the top of a marketing mountain that’s 95 percent owned by Mario and company. Kalinske ends up battling his own supervisor (the fulminating Hayao Nakayama, always off-camera) as much as his Nintendo counterpart (Howard Lincoln). Sega’s band of kid-whisperers (Al Nilsen), back-office muscle (Paul Rioux, Bill White), and smooth-talking pitch artists (Ellen Beth van Buskirk, Jeff Goodby) is led by Tom Kalinske, who worked miracles in marketing Barbie and Hot Wheels. It’s no surprise that Harris has also tried to get this story adapted into a series, because it’s a rollicking, real-life underdog comedy, like the slobs-vs.-snobs flicks that had their heyday when this marketing battle was at its peak.Īs the story begins, Sega of America is trying to find some vector into an American video games market dominated by Nintendo. Harris’ film adaptation of his 2014 book of the same title, about the 16-bit era of video gaming, when Sega took on Nintendo in a rapidly changing, competitive marketplace. You just have to have worked a job where someone said at some point, “You know, this place would make a great TV show.”Ĭonsole Wars, which premieres on Sept. You don’t have to have made, marketed, or even played a video game between 19 to find Console Wars and its gaming-industry luminaries affecting and supremely relatable. That’s why Console Wars should resonate with so many people. The youngest kids who played the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo are now in their 30s, and they’ve all probably had at least one job like that. Without revealing exactly how it ends, it winds up the way you’d want it to if the film was about your favorite workplace, with your best friends talking about the great old days. But CBS All Access’ lively gaming documentary Console Wars has enough of an emotional payoff that it could still be spoiled.

We know how the 1990s Console Wars between Sega and Nintendo ended: Sega lost.

Console Wars by Blake J. Harris