The Origins of the Home Console Business

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Nakayama, who was one of the two guys involved in the buyout and Nakayama and Rosen had to get hugely wealthy from this because of how unbelievably little they paid for the equity that by the time they IPO'd it would have been very valuable. He gets worried about what Nintendo's doing and what he sees with the NES. And he says, we should also enter the home console business. It's like a diversification bet. Exactly. They're not dumb. Why would we risk pouring all this capital into the home consolebusiness when we're killing it in the arcades? On the one hand, it's an innovator's dilemma. But on the other hand

Sega and the Genesis was THE underdog story of the early 90’s. In a single console generation, Sega went from ~zero to 50% US market share and dethroned Nintendo’s seemingly invincible global monopoly. But — somehow — it all then died. Two console generations later Sega was out of the hardware game entirely, and the company was sold off for pieces to a pachinko manufacturer. How on earth did this happen??

Today we’re launching Acquired Shorts in order to tell this story and others like it: side tales from the “Acquired Cinematic Universe” that are too brief for a full episode, but too good to leave in the vault. We’d love to hear your thoughts on the format (and this episode). Please send us your feedback in Slack, email or Twitter!

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