The chosen style of the book is overly detailed recreations of events with cheesy dialogue. It's a very grating style, and one that makes everything feel incredibly fake.
Also, I'm sure that there are a huge number of awesome stories that could be told of that industry and era. The author of the book found very few of them. Instead the rather thick book is filled with retellings of cheap marketing stunts, ad design, junkets, uninteresting human interest stories of people who aren't important enough to the story to really merit fleshing out, etc. And of course all told with way too many words. There's actual material for maybe 150 pages, not 550 pages.
I enjoyed actually reading the book -- it's a page-turner, at least -- but after I finished reading it I had a feeling of: "Great! Now I'm curious as to what really happened." Similar to how I feel after watching a film that purports to be "based on a true story."
And, yeah, it's really more about Sega's marketing efforts than anything. It's a story of the business side of things, with less detail about technology, game design itself, etc. And that's a shame, because there's a more interesting cultural tale there, I suspect.
Also, I believe this book was actually written at the behest of Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg. They also write the (god-awful) introduction. And they're apparently making a film based on the story. So treating it as one would treat a "based on a true story" film is probably fair.
That said, there's still some really fun tidbits in the book. If you are interested in the video game industry from 1985-1995, there's enough in there to make it an interesting read. Just feel free to skip any chapters that seem boring because there are several that you could skip without losing anything.
I really enjoyed it, and as a programmer and gamer, found it really interesting to read about what goes on outside of just writing a great game and shipping it.
I didn't find the dialogue cheesy and I was quite immersed in the story. I felt sad once the book was over, and started playing through Sonic the hedgehog.
I do wish it had more about what was going on at Nintendo. It was much more about Sega, or really just Tom Kalinske.
It was originally written in 1993, but received revisions up until 1999. I read the original version so I have no idea how the revised content stacks up.
I had a dreamcast when they launched. Sega Bass Fishing, House of the Dead 2, Sonic, and Crazy Taxi were awesome.
