Gather around, children, and I’ll tell you a story about the Great War. Its name was true to its nature - it pitted man against man, red against blue, and blast processing verses brand name. This was the Great War — The Console War.

Hey kids! Put down your DSes and your PSPs - quit swingin’ those Wiis around, and knock it off with your newfangled pixel shading and your whipper-snappin’ bump-mapping. I’m going to tell you kids a story about allegiances back in the days of the console wars. Much like the Allies and the Axis during one of those other unimportant wars, there were two camps: you were either a Nintendo kid or you were most certainly a Sega kid. Back in the days before Sony entered the fray with its PlayStation, it was one or the other — you wore Mario underwear or Sonic underwear, period. And you were pitted against each other constantly!

That is, until the day that Sega turned everything we grew up knowing on its head. What scared me the most wasn’t that my biggest childhood rival was openly fraternizing with my epic hero - it was that I just didn’t care.

Imagine yourself in the dog days of the early 90s. The political climate had just completed yet another revolution before I’d popped out of my mother’s womb and the pitfalls that other companies had fallen into time and time again were leaped over in effortless bounds, eventually making the Atari 5200 seem like a mere San Fransisco Rush. Indeed, out of the blue came soaring the Gauntlet – the burly and enduring Nintendo Entertainment System. Along with her came yet another HardDrivin ‘ force: they called him, Mario. With hammer in hand, the mysterious plumber and his brother won my family’s heart — and when I came hurdling out of the ether, I learned to love him just as the Paperboy loves a good, healthy readership.

The Nintendo wasn’t alone, though. Riding in a glorious black ship in the NES’s wake came the strong but vulnerable Sega Master System. Its hair was groomed finely, it surrounded itself with a strong crew, and most importantly, it had a sense of style that Nintendo just couldn’t match – however, its most important role was that it was a vanguard. The Sega Master System was simply a testing of the waters. As soon as its signature characters stepped from the gangplank onto the fertile soils of Reagan’s America, an unmatchable rivalry was born.

When Sonic was born on the SMS in 1991, suddenly, our Super Mario Brothers 3 had both a competitor and a rival. It wasn’t simply Final Fantasy vs. Phantasy Star - it was the birth of something much bigger than myself. It wasn’t just grey vs. black, or price vs. price — this was Mario vs. Sonic, and I was born right into it.

I suppose that, in retrospect, fanboyism was just completely silly when scaled to all of the immensely terrible things happening in the world at the time. However, you know the drill - when you’re a little kid the world scales according to where you are. Unfortunately/fortunately, I was born into a suburban culture of gamers, and we treated it as if it were a facet of life itself. This was a time where everybody played video games , and everybody had an allegiance - it was just what kids did. Suburbia wasn’t the most exciting place to be, and we replaced that boredom with the vicarious excitement that game politics brought up. It fueled our childhood arguments, and it collected our thoughts together into a single, identifiable clique - and you know, I don’t think any of us really saw a problem with it. Nothing then seemed more natural than being loyal to a single company.

Gosh, I can still distinctively remember kids actually having physical fights and forcing other kids into isolation just because of their particular preference. We’d have arguments in class, kids would fight over Mega Man vs. Alex Kidd, Mario vs. Sonic and Robotnik vs. Bowser - just really stupid stuff. I’m pretty sure that, if it was either red or blue respectively, we’d probably have kids fighting each other from either side of the room, praising its virtues out loud. This is how it was for the first couple years of my school life, pretty consistently. We Nintendo kids had our Gameboys in tow, and the Sega kids had their (admittedly impressive) Game Gears and Nomads failing to do their backpacks justice. We’d grasp at straws for anything to insult the systems over – “Hey Game Gear! Why don’t you use sixty more batteries! Ha!” and “Hey Gameboy! Have you gone blind yet from your tiny screen?”

As with most kids, we measured one major milestone in the console war first - that was one of Pokemon. Every kid played it, and every kid played with the cards. If I could ever remember one time in which Sega was just a word forbidden, it was when Pikachu was king. Suddenly, though, it was inaugurated as a moment where videogames didn’t matter anymore. We started to grow up into middle school (grades 6-8, for you non-Americans out there), and kids disappeared into other cliques and fads.

While they were busy stealing cigarettes from their siblings and drinking stolen boxes of wine coolers, there were just a few of us that were left to fight the rest of the war. Middle school is a strange and awkward time for kids, though - instead of attempting to fit in with the girls of my time, a couple of us decided to become even more dedicated to our respective camps. I fell completely into Nintendo, abandoning my passionate (but secret) love for the Sega Genesis and dedicated myself as a Nintendo boy - I only bought and played Nintendo systems. Other friends gave up their SNESes and bought into the (respectively ill-favored) 32Xes, the Sega-CDs, the Sega Saturns and the Dreamcasts. We’d tease each other constantly, but within the tumultuous and heartbreaking world of being a 6th grader, we were all happy with the state of our own camps.

As we played our exclusives, PlayStation rolled its tanks through our world. As I moved through high school, being loyal to a company became less important. I was beginning to play PS1 and PS2 games that my brother brought home, and everything was okay. I was in happy game land, and that section of my life was filled with cream. That’s when the console war ended in a whimper - and the same thing that was so important to me growing up was just a sliding headline seated on a silent ticker tape. I remember reading about it in EGM that bitter Pennsylvanian winter of 2001 - Sega’s Dreamcast was done, and Sega would be making games for other systems now.

And just like that, Sega, the once mighty rival, was reduced to just yet another blip on the third-party radar. Nintendo won. Sonic began appearing everywhere - and only becoming successful on Nintendo systems. That went against everything I’d ever grown up to expect, and you know what? I didn’t care. I care now, with the side-by-side release of Sonic and the Secret Rings and Sonic on the 360 - on the back of its greatest enemy seems to be the only way for Sonic to really flourish. Sega’s been successful elsewhere, but apparently, only true enemies can work together.

Rumas discussed this a bit, but from my perspective, there aren’t really words to express the shock of Mario and Sonic appearing legally in their first game together. It feels appropriate, I suppose, but coming from a world where they were separated so viciously, I’ve never felt so apathetic towards such an exciting game. I’m not outraged, but I’m not approving either. Perhaps the kids these days who grew up outside of the Great Console War will care a little bit more than I do – but it still feels wrong.

It sounds so silly to put so many fond memories in a war that was about as real as the Cola Wars, but for we little kids that grew up around it, it was certainly a real thing. It’s over now, and we’ve moved on to an even greater cold war - but even as Mario and Sonic compete in the Olympic Games, I’ll remember back to the times when this wouldn’t be a sign of peace among camps: it’d be a shot of mockery across our collective bows. I’ll remember to a time when games were all that kept our little minds together in the tear-jerkingly boring world of suburbia. And most of all, I’m not going to play as Sonic, ever.

Eff Sonic.