[Classic] Nintendo vs. Seaga: Anyone else miss those days?

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To be fair, I'm a bit older than a lot of you so rather than growing up with the SNES, I grew up with Spectrums, BBC Micros and C64s. I don't remember ever knowing anyone with an NES and only a couple of people had Master Systems and at the time, the games were pretty dull compared to playing Elite on the BBC or any of the hundreds of mental Spectrum games.

THIS. My brother had an Amiga and a C64 and I loved the hell out of them. Monty on the Run, Attack of the Mutant Camels, Crystal Castles, Wizball, Lemmings... It wasn't until we moved from Germany to the US that I'd even heard of Nintendo or Sega. My first console was actually the N64. Despite having spent a few years listening to the GENESIS DOES WHAT NINTENDON'T stuff on the playground I didn't really see the fuss about being partisan about systems.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

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They were helped by the fact that their products were pretty expensive and their target market didn't have the funds to get both consoles (How many kids bought their own SNES and how many kids' parents would buy them more than one console? I'm guessing not many on both counts) and the whole marketing strategy revolved around persuading those kids they'd made the right decision, playing on the innate dislike kids have of being on the losing team.

Bingo. What's weird is that I still saw the factional thing going on even though the majority of kids I knew were rich sods whose parents would buy them a new game for every day they managed to not shit their pants at school. The marketing worked so well that even the kids who were fortunate enough to own both products were still adamantly defensive about their preferred piece of consumer electronics.

Until Sony came along, the notion of consoles being for kids while PCs/microcomputers were where the big boys got their game on was completely (and unsurprisingly) commonplace. Sure, a lot of their marketing reeked of old men in suits desperately trying to figure out what teenagers were into, but it worked. Unfortunately they did bring about the era of HAHA YOU LIKE MARIO? YOU BIG GAY PERSON WITH DICKS IN YOUR MOUTH HURRRRR THIS GAME IS LACKING IN BLOOD AND GRUE.

There's nowhere I can't reach.