In terms of sales, indubitably it was the most heated. In terms of fighting amongst the fans of the different brands, not even. Before the PS2 era, about the worst you saw was an occasional schoolyard fight (and pretty much everybody not part of the fight thought it was stupid to get into fisticuffs over a video game system). While Sega took potshots at Nintendo in their ads, the two rarely got into PR spin battles of the scale witnessed in this generation.
Something changed around the PS2 era, however. Suddenly there were a lot more insults getting flung around, a lot more fights were breaking out (online especially, offline only a bit more), and a lot more PR spins were being made. Funnily enough, most of said PR spins were coming out of (and still come out of) Microsoft and Sony. And most of the fights were getting started by Sony or MS fans, too. Not to say anything against the fanbase at large, just that their, ah, most devoted supporters tend to turn to fighting words and actions a lot.
Sky Render - Sanity is for the weak.
