So hey everybody, I'm Greg.

C.J. is here with me.

And we are speaking with Blake J. Harris, the author of Console Wars, Sega,

Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation. The book came out recently. It's getting

tons of buzz. And of course, if you listen to our show, you'll know that we've already praised

this book up and down. So we're really excited to get to talk to Blake. Thanks for joining us, Blake. Oh, it's my pleasure. I love the subject matter, and I'm kind of sad not to be working on the book anymore. So I love talking to you online and also just anybody who's interested in talking about the process of writing it or just how fun and crazy the war was back then. I'm actually, that's one of the things I'm really interested in the process of writing it. Like, I'm curious, actually, look, what's your background? Well, I have a pretty unimpressive background. So it really was kind of a leap of faith on a lot of these people's parts initially to speak with me, which in hindsight, I'm even more impressed that they took that leap of faith. But just to give you a quick rundown of how I got into this project and sort of what my background is, is in college I knew I wanted to be a writer. I had no idea how you make money doing that. I still kind of don't have a great idea on how you do that. But I thought screenwriting was the best way to do that.

At least there was the idea of selling a script.

And so I spent seven years writing scripts, producing some movies.

I produced a movie about competitive rock paper scissors called The Flying Scissors.

And learned a whole lot about what you should do and not do.

And I spent the money I'd saved up for film school for that.

But I got a really good literary manager named Julian Rosenberg, who was at Calibur Media.

And in 2011, I started investigating this topic about Sega and Nintendo just out of pure curiosity at first

and then just naturally as a writer I started to think okay is there something I could add to this story

is there some way I can connect some dots an interesting way and I thought that surprisingly there

was because there were so little out there on not just this topic but video games in general.

And I don't mean that to disparage those books that are out there because I enjoy it a lot of them.

David Schaff's book is great. Harold Goldberg's book is great.

Stephen Kent's history is fantastic.

But in terms of the books that I like to read, like the smartest guys in the room, Disney

War, Michael Lewis books, Ben Mezzrick books, I was surprised that there really wasn't anything

on the topics, except for maybe David Schiff's book. But even that was a little bit less of a narrative.

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