Actually there was this great study. They found that teenagers at the time would not under any circumstances admit they owned a Super Nintendo and not a Genesis. Genesis really did a good job at making it the machine the cool kids had (to the kidish Nintendo system image). Playstation did the same thing if you remember the Crash Bandicoot talking trash in the Nintendo parking lot. It's not hard to be the adult company vs Nintendo when it makes developers censor games like Mortal Kombat for violence (which Genesis did not do). After years of Nintendo when Cid and the rest kept saying s**t in FFVII I was amazed beyond belief. I didn't know people in games were allowed to say anything worse then damn after 10 years in Nintendo World.
That said when genesis vs SNES was picking up I was 8 so obviously I went SNES though I had friends with genesis. There just weren't many good Genesis games in the end, almost all the immortal 16 bit games were on SNES especially near the end. Despite that, Genesis was undoubtedly cooler (especially in the US) and I bet if the Saturn hadn't been so bad they could have passed up Nintendo the following generation like Sony did on the teenage and up market.
Ever since the PS1 took the adult market pretty securely from Nintendo I think there has been kind of a truce between the two companies. Nintendo dominates the child market (and family market by proxy) along with casual gamer markets (the kind of gamers who make carnival games a 2 million seller) while Sony takes the decided majority of teen and up gamers (the Genesis sweet spot). They really don't talk too much trash because they're not really competing.
They overlap a bit but Sony's real enemy is Microsoft and Nintendos....I don't think anyone really bothers fighting with Nintendo since Nintendo is so strong in its segment fighting with them for that kid/family demo is pointless. Besides, a lot of Nintendo players are introduced to video games via Nintendo systems then move to Sony as they got older and God of War starts to look better then Mario (some not all, some will want to play Mario till the day they die). I bet you anything at the end of the day Sony is thankful to Nintendo in a lot of ways, the market wouldn't be as big as it is without Sony, but it wouldn't have been to the point where the PS1 could sell 100 million consoles if not for 15 years of Nintendo. I would bet anything that 90% of Sony gamers have owned one or more Nintendo consoles over the years (I think I've owned 8 counting handhelds).
PSN ID: ChosenOne feel free to add me
