Three things became clear in 1994. First, Arkansas refused to bring anything but shame and disgrace upon the rest of the country by allowing Carl, my editor, to remain in high school. Second, Sega wasn’t going anywhere–five years of stomping all over Nintendo of America’s turf clearly wasn’t enough for them, they were having too much fun to leave, and Nintendo had yet to come up with a way to evict them. Third, Nintendo was tired of all their crap, and after five years of Sega making Nintendo play the ‘stop hitting yourself’ game, it was time to channel some Dee Snyder. Nintendo, by God, was not going to take it anymore pay a lot for this muffler!

(You want shame and disgrace Michael? Cuz now it’s on! –carl)

Nobody loves their competition (that would be weird), but Nintendo had well over a century under their corporate belts by this time so they didn’t feel particularly threatened. Still, Sega spent much of its time and marketing dollars violating the gaming ad equivalent of the Geneva Convention. Instead of showing what their product could do, Sega was obsessed instead with showing what Nintendo’s couldn’t. ‘Genesis Does What Ninten-don’t’ and all that. This proved a solid tactic, since Sega was free to compare their 16-bit titles to Nintendo’s 8-bit games up until Nintendo launched the Super NES and put things on a more even footing. Or maybe that’s a less-than even footing, since even a cursory evaluation of hardware capabilities indicated a distinct tactical deficiency on Sega’s end.

Nintendo’s hardware blew Sega’s away in every area you could point to: larger color palette, greater number of on-screen colors, more sound channels, built-in hardware scaling and rotation–Nintendo owned Sega on every front except one: microprocessor speed. Nintendo’s CPU ran slower than Sega’s, and while the comparison isn’t as cut-and-dried as it might look, the fact remained Sega could point to their clock speed, then at Nintendo’s, and claim their own as the bigger swinging dick. They even coined a special term for it: “blast processing”. It went a little something like this:

Man, does that bring back school playground fight memories to anyone else? Anyway there was one teeny-tiny, itty-bitty minor flaw with Sega’s argument: it was complete bullshit. “Blast Processing” wasn’t some hardware innovation or technological marvel created in a secret Sega bunker by their secret team of Sega Ninja Engineering Wizards, it was a concise way of saying “Our CPU runs faster.” When faced with side-to-side competition from Nintendo’s gaming arsenal, Sega fell back on the only real hardware advantage they had left, and their marketing department turned that weakness into a strength.

By 1994 Nintendo of America was done with Sega of America’s efforts to brand Nintendo as the Sopwith Camel to Sega’s F-16. Nintendo was far too Japanese of a company to start hurling insults and calling Sega liars, but that didn’t mean they weren’t willing to spend a metric shit-ton of money to set the record straight. Nintendo bought up space in every major gaming publication of the day to run this two-page behemoth:

The best part about this? If you aren’t paying attention, you don’t realize it’s an ad. Nintendo doctored this sucker up with sidebars, headers, pull quotes, screenshots, side-by-sides, and a custom title graphic to trick you, the unwary reader, into thinking this was a legit feature. If you look closely, you can see at the top and bottom of both pages where they were careful to identify it as an ad, but no casual reader is going to notice that right away. If you didn’t know this was an ad, even the most ardent Sega fan might read to the end of it and expose themselves to a complete, well-reasoned take-down of the console.

Really, take a few minutes and read the whole thing. Notice everything in it adheres to Nintendo’s policy of not attacking Sega directly. At no point do they blatantly call Sega a bunch of liars (just their marketing department, and even that is tactfully done), but rather it’s all about what Nintendo can do that Sega can’t. It even sounds like an even-handed, just-the-facts-ma’am editorial, with Nintendo addressing the two-year gap between Sega’s 16-bit machine and their own, the difference in clock speed, and everything else Sega shot at them since 1989.

This also cost Nintendo an arm and a leg. Ad space costs are calculated based on circulation numbers: the more pages you want to buy, and the more average readers a magazine has, the more money the mag can charge to run those ads. There’s no way to know exactly what Nintendo paid for this, but it ran in at least three different magazines (EGM, GamePro, and Game Players are where I saw it, if you know of others, let us know in the comments!). In addition to this, it ran more than once in both EGM and GamePro, and of course Nintendo had to pay their ad guys to create the thing in the first place.

Bottom line: don’t mess with Nintendo or they’ll perform a take-down of your ass so logical even Benedict Cumberbatch couldn’t find fault with it. Regardless of whether Nintendo’s calm and collected reasoning actually changed anybody’s mind, you’ve got to admire the lengths they went to in order to let Sega know they weren’t giving up any time soon going to pay a lot for this muffler!

(I’m doing this until it’s no longer funny. And it will never not be funny. –carl)

Damn it, Carl!

Michael Crisman

In 1979, Michael Crisman was mauled by a radioactive Gorgar pinball machine. After the wounds healed, doctors discovered his DNA had been re-coded. No longer fully human, Michael requires regular infusions of video games in order to continue living among you. If you see him, he can see you. Make no sudden moves, but instead bribe him with old issues of computer and video game magazines or a mint-in-box copy of Dragon Warrior IV.


If he made you laugh, drop a tip in his jar at http://paypal.me/modernzorker


(If he didn't make you laugh, donate to cure his compulsion to bang keyboards by sending an absurdly huge amount of money to his tip jar instead. That'll show him!)