From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The 16-bit era was the time in the early 1990s when the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Genesis were major rivals in the game console market. It was one of the most intense periods of competition in North American video game history.
In 1987 Sega released the Genesis and it had a very slow start due to the lack of games and the fact that Nintendo had about a 90% share of the market for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The Genesis would not start to pick up until 1991 when Sonic the Hedgehog was released. Until then, Nintendo was not willing to release a successor to the NES because the system was still selling quite well, however the console was clearly aging and the time was right for Nintendo to finally update it.
In 1991 Nintendo released the 16-bit Super NES to compete with the Genesis and they capitalized on it with their mascot, Mario. The Super NES was packed with Super Mario World which was the first 16-bit Mario game. Soon afterward, comparisons from gamers and the media between Mario and Sonic began.
Sega took a huge advantage that Sonic was fast and used it to get gamers' attention. After word about Sonic the Hedgehog got out, many people started thinking that Sonic was cooler then Mario due to the speed of the character. Also, Sega came up with a marketing term called Blast Processing which was what made the speed in the games.
Nintendo was able to easily keep up with the competition with their own blend of games such as other Mario games, The Legend of Zelda, Star Fox, Super Metroid, Donkey Kong Country, and many others for the Super NES and Game Boy.
Gamers became either a Nintendo fan or a Sega fan and had either one system or the other. Sega released Sonic the Hedgehog 2 in 1992 and it became more popular than the first game. Less than a year later, Nintendo released enhanced remakes of the original NES Super Mario games on the Super NES titled Super Mario All Stars.
By 1995 the 16-bit craze started to die down due to Nintendo and Sega both having new consoles in the works. Nintendo would go on to have much success with the releases of the Nintendo 64 in 1996 and the Nintendo GameCube in 2001 as well as the Game Boy Advance. However, Sega was not as successful after the 16-bit era. After the Genesis, they released the Sega Saturn in 1995 and the Sega Dreamcast in 1999 which both had very little fanfare, which eventuality caused Sega to leave the home console market. By the end of the Genesis' run, it out-sold the Super NES by a slight margin. The Sonic series was mostly responsable for it.
Nintendo now competes with Sony and Microsoft and their former rival, Sega, is now a third-party developer for all three companies' consoles.The beginning
The war
In the end
