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by PostOnce
1865 days ago
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Blake Harris's "Console Wars" documentary... I was hyped going into it and it opened strong, but then it devolves into being a bunch of clips of Tom Kalinske & friends talking smack about a dead Japanese guy (head of Sega Japan) with no one to speak on the dead guy's behalf. It felt super dishonest and one-sided, less a documentary than a PR piece to rehabilitate Kalinske's reputation, to the detriment of everyone at Sega Japan. It only covers the good things SOA did and only the bad things SOJ supposedly did, and none of the opposite. |
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He, along with Sega co-founder David Rosen, were interviewed in the excellent 2014 book Sega Mega Drive/Genesis: Collected Works, and their accounts don't really go along with Kalinske's. Rosen flat out rejects the (absurd) idea that the Japanese parent company was trying to sabotage Kalinske (a claim Kalinske has made many times in recent years). Rosen says Kalinske just had a hard time understanding why the Japanese side had to make the decisions they did.
As someone who is currently writing a book tangentially related to the Japanese history of Sega (plug: https://rasterscroll.com/product/legends/ ), I feel the need to say that Console Wars (however entertaining it might be) is not very accurate.
For one, it omits what I consider to be one of the biggest factors in Sega's decision-making from 1993 on--the massive drop in revenue that occurred in the U.S. and European markets. I've written about this recently with some interesting data on export revenues:
https://mdshock.com/2021/04/14/segas-financial-troubles-an-a...