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Service Games: The Rise and Fall of SEGA Sam Pettus CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012. Acknowledgements, images. 396 pp. $17.99 paper. ISBN: 9781463578473
The History of Sonic the Hedgehog Pix'n'Love Ontario, Canada: UDON Entertainment Corp., 2012. Images, bibliography. 297 pp. $49.99 cloth. ISBN: 9781926778563
By now, the ty pical digital gamer has become so familiar with the words "con- sole war" that he or she scarcely bats an eye when someone invokes them. Still, in the aftermath of the 2013 Electronic Enter- tainment Expo and the ongoing struggles between console manufacturers to capture consumer dollars and loyalty, we should remember how the competition evolved over more than thirty years of video game marketing. As we rapidly approach the eighth generation of the home-console war, and current titans Sony and Microsoft vie for attention, reviewing the landscape is both interesting and illuminating. Sam Petus's Service Games: The Rise and Fall of SEGA offer a history lesson from a for- mer console contender about the way the world of digital games has changed.
SEGA (a n acronym for "Ser v ice Games") remains a household name in the gaming industry, although the company is less prominent than in the past. Once an industry standard for home gaming hardware, SEGA now focuses primarily on software production for multiple hard- ware platforms. Pettus's book serves an in-depth introduction to the SEGA Cor- poration, offering chapter-length descrip- tions organized chronologically for each individual generation of console hard- ware. Each chapter offers less a focused argument than a detailed account of hardware components and technical specs. But the work also explores the relationship between...