After 4 years of Sega treating Nintendo like a punching bag, The Big N punched back!
(Chapter Markers and more below…)
Episode information
GTV 181 “The Empire Strikes Back Would Have Been a Cool Title, But it was Already Taken"
Season 9 Episode 21
Original Airdate: November 13, 2024
Produced October 21-November 11, 2024
Recorded at Butsudan Studios and edited on my 14” MacBook M1 Pro! Edited and produced with Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, all paid for with Gainful Employment™ while riding the train to work and home, back and forth, day after day, and lunch breaks too!
0:00 GTV ID: Over 60,000 Subscribers Where Available!!!
0:04 Prologue: Change and Disruption
0:50 Act 1: It’s a Jungle Out There
7:56 CM 1: Out of Hibernation (U.S., 1994)
8:28 Act 2 Rare Opportunities
14:52 CM 2: The Beast is Back! (U.S., 1994)
15:10 Act 3: Making a New Country
22:59 CM 3: Donkey Kong 2001 (Japan, 2001)
23:17 Act 4: Donkey Punch
31:39 CM 4: Donkey Kong Land (U.S., 1995)
31:56 Act 5: Monkey Business
44:32 CM 5: The Legend of the Crystal Coconut (U.S., 1999)
45:00 Epilogue: Thank Sega
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Video clips furnished by: Vampire Robot, RGTV, Time Extension, Bad Influence, Raven XP, Groove Raider, Digital Neo Human, Videogame Epherema, Nenriki, SGI Archaves, KATU News, C-Span and of course Nintendo!
Partial Transcript:
The 1990s are remembered as one of the greatest eras of gaming, though it was also seen as a time of change and disruption, as Sega, and later Sony, overturned the apple cart, breaking up the dominance that Nintendo had in the 1980s. It wasn’t a one sided fight, though it oftentimes looked that way. But in 1994, the “Big N” finally stood up for the first time, and showed that they could hang with the “cool kids.”
In your neighborhood you had your Nintendo households and you had your Sega Households. But there just always were slightly more Sega homes out there.
For Nintendo fans, being #2 meant a living with a constant stream of Sega advertising, which often mocked Nintendo and its fanbase, for being lame and childish. Every time Sega created something cool, like games with Full Motion Video, or got the better version of a game, like Mortal Kombat with red blood, it hurt!!
It was hard to defend the legacy of the last decade in the face of Blast Processing and the Sega Scream!
And while the market was almost evenly split, 60/40 was a far cry from the heights of the 8-Bit days.
Life on the Nintendo side wasn’t bad, far from it! Some of the best remembered games were on the Super NES: A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, F-Zero! Not to mention that the older 8-Bit NES still had some life and the GameBoy had more games on the go than anyone.
The public image of Nintendo, however, left much to be desired. Nintendo advertising wasn’t bad per se. Commercials focused on what mattered most - the games!
But they were very bland and hardly memorable. Sega had rewritten the rules and therefore ran the show. Every time Sega tweaked Nintendo, the Big N just stood there and took it!
Turning the other cheek created a catch-22 where if Nintendo had gone into the mud and slung some back, it would bring them down to Sega’s level… and just maybe, admit that Nintendo was losing to Sega all this time.
There really wasn’t much Nintendo could do, but take the high road and keep releasing games.