Nintendo once accounted for 10% of Walmart’s profits — and 5 other things I learned from reading ‘Console Wars’

The biggest retailer in the world’s profits were once so interlinked with Nintendo that it didn’t want anything to do with Sega or any other game-hardware company.

That’s just one of a few dozen interesting tidbits I learned while reading the upcoming book Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle That Defined a Generation. In the 500-plus page tome, author Blake J. Harris guides readers through the various battles of Nintendo and Sega. He conducted more than a hundred interviews and brings a narrative style of storytelling that reveals a number of amazing facts that I either didn’t know or had long forgotten about the dominant gaming corporations of the late 1980s through the 1990s. It all makes for an incredibly gripping read that feels much shorter than its actual length because of how difficult it is to put down. That’s also one of the main reasons that Hollywood announced plans to have Superbad writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg turn the story into a feature film.