It is May 1995 at the first Electronic Entertainment Expo. Sega has just announced the Saturn is launching that very day at 399 dollars. A Sony executive walks to the podium, says 299 dollars, and walks off. This episode uses that legendary mic drop as the entry point to a full history of the console wars, beginning with the 1983 crash caused by Atari's open ecosystem, where even Quaker Oats was dumping unauthorized cartridges on shelves. Nintendo's answer was the NES, designed to look like a VCR and guarded by the 10NES lockout chip, which let the company charge premiums for cartridges and restrict publishers to five games a year.

From there the hosts cover NEC's bit wars marketing, Sega's Genesis under Michael Katz and then Tom Kalinske, the razor-and-blades price cut, Sonic as a weapon engineered around blast processing, Nintendo's Mode  ...