The art and legacy of the ’90s console war

You were either with Super Nintendo or with Sega Genesis. No middle ground existed (although the PC gaming was still carrying on strong).

All respect to the Turbo Grafx-16 (and no respect to the CD-i), but the fourth generation of home video game consoles was a two-horse race. The Big N followed up the Nintendo Entertainment System, the machine that revived the industry following the infamous crash of 1983, by adding the word “Super” to everything, and Sega rose from Master System-based desolation with the appropriately named Genesis. A rivalry between the two machines in the West — particularly the United States — created a direct competition series of ad campaigns that would define a generation of child gamers through tribalism and exclusives. And as much as adults bought the systems then and still argue over them now, the Console War as we knew it was most certainly a marketing push that skewed young.