It established the use of aggressive marketing and advertising tactics by each company to try to gain control of the marketplace, and ended around 1995 when a new player, Sony, entered and disrupted the console space.

[13] Sega redesigned the SG-1000 twice to try to build a system to challenge Nintendo's dominance; the SG-1000 Mark II remained compatible with the SG-1000 but failed to gain any further sales.

[19] Following a similar path they had done for the Mark III, Sega used their arcade game technology, now using 16-bit processor boards, and adapted those into a home console, released in Japan in October 1988 as the Mega Drive.

While the system was positively received by gaming magazines like Famitsu, it was overshadowed by the release a week prior of Super Mario Bros. 3 for the Famicom.

Sega was dissatisfied with Tonka's handling of the Master System and so sought a new partner through the Atari Corporation led by Jack Tramiel.

[21] In October 1989, the company named former Atari Entertainment Electronics Division president Michael Katz as CEO of Sega of America to implement a marketing strategy for a nation-wide push of the Genesis with a target of one million consoles.

"[21] Katz also observed that Nintendo still held most of the rights to arcade game ports for the NES, so the second part of his strategy was to work with the Japanese headquarters of Sega to pay celebrities for their naming rights for games like Pat Riley Basketball, Arnold Palmer Golf, Joe Montana Football, and Michael Jackson's Moonwalker.

Electronic Arts used their reverse engineering knowledge as part of their negotiations with Sega to secure a freer licensing contract to develop openly on the Genesis, which proved beneficial for both companies.

[22] Company artist Naoto Ohshima came up with the concept of Sonic the Hedgehog, a fast anthropomorphic character with an "attitude" that would appeal to teenagers and incorporating the blue color of Sega's logo, and Yuji Naka helped to develop the game Sonic the Hedgehog to showcase the character as well as the graphics and processing speed of the Genesis.

[24] Under Kalinske, Sega also revamped their advertising approach, aiming for more of a young adult audience, as Nintendo still was positioning the SNES as a child-friendly console.

[24] These changes, all predating the SNES's planned North American release in September 1991, gave Sega its first gain on Nintendo in the U.S. market.

The company shifted their advertising in North America to focus on more of the advanced features of the SNES that were not present in the Genesis, such as its Mode 7 to create simulated 3D perspective effects.

These developers included Acclaim, Konami, Tecmo, Taito, and Capcom, the latter of which arranged to have a special licensing mechanism with Sega that allowed them to publish select titles exclusively for the Genesis.

[28] The popularity of the home console version of Mortal Kombat, coupled with other moral panics in the early 1990s, led to concerns from parents, activists and lawmakers in the United States, leading up to the 1993 congressional hearings on video games first held in December.

Led by Senators Joe Lieberman and Herb Kohl, the Senate Committees on Governmental Affairs and the Judiciary brought several of the video game industry leaders, including Howard Lincoln, vice president of Nintendo of America, and Bill White, vice president of Sega of America, to discuss the way they marketed games like Mortal Kombat and Night Trap on consoles to children.

[28] With neither Lincoln nor White giving much play, Lieberman concluded the first hearing with a warning that the industry needs to come together with some means to regulate video games or else Congress would pass laws to do this for them.

The PlayStation moved away from cartridges and took advantage of nascent CD-ROM technology for game distribution, allowing much more data to be stored on each disc and reducing the costs for reproduction.

At the first E3 in May 1995, Sega's Kalinske premiered the North American version of the Saturn, announced its various features and its selling price of $399, and said that while it would officially launch that same day, they had already sent a number of systems to selected vendors for sale.

[34] As a result of this strategy by Sony, future E3s became a battleground for other console wars, with journalists judging the various hardware manufacturers' presentations to determine which one had the most successful pitches.

[36] When the PlayStation officially launched in the United States in September 1995, its sales over the first two days exceeded what the Saturn had sold over the prior five months.

[38] While this gave them powerful capabilities such as 3D graphics to keep up and surpass those on the Saturn and PlayStation, it was still a cartridge-based system limiting how much information could be stored for each game.

This decision ultimately cost them Square Soft who moved their popular Final Fantasy series over to the PlayStation line to take advantage of the larger space on optical media.

While Nintendo also has remained a significant competitor to both companies, its development and marketing strategy using the "blue ocean" approach is considered fundamentally different from Sony or Microsoft that it is usually not regarded as major participant in the console war.

[51] The Xbox 360 also suffered from the "Red Ring of Death", a hardware fault on a large fraction of retail models that cost Microsoft over $1.1 billion in repairs over the console's lifetime.

Sony released two different Slim models of the PlayStation 3 that reduced the system size and subsequent retail price which helped improve sales.

[56] Microsoft initially wanted to drive the Xbox One as a replacement for a cable box in the living room as a single source for entertainment with features aimed around television viewing in addition to gaming.

To achieve this, the Xbox One was to be shipped with Kinect and was to use an always-on Internet connection to enable numerous features, such as the ability to share games with other family members.

[52] Sony took the opportunity in their PlayStation 4 marketing to play off Microsoft's missteps, such as demonstrating the simplicity of game sharing by simply passing along the physical media to another person, as well as its lower price point.

As these handheld releases were alongside the Sega v. Nintendo console war, they were also subject to heavy marketing and advertising to try to draw consumers.

[80] Nintendo's DS, 3DS, and Switch each faced competitors in the form of Sony's PlayStation Portable (PSP) and PS Vita, and the Steam Deck from Valve.