Y'know, the more familiar I've gotten with the Japanese library on the Super Famicom, the harder it's become to make a case for why the Sega Mega family of consoles was better overall. It's fairly widely agreed that Japanese developers were still a cut above Western ones back then, and Nintendo was just dominant over there back then, so a lot of incredible games, even ones that better fit the Sega style (Undercover Cops, Wild Guns, Clock Tower, Hagane, Majyuu Ou, EVO: The Search for Eden, et cetera) wound up being exclusive to their console. In certain cases, I think that the fact that Nintendo is more popular now has altered the way that we regard the status of these games in context, and I think that a lot of people are frustratingly dismissive about what was being offered on the Mega Drive/CD simply because it's become the popular notion that Sega "lost" (more on this later), but when you're comparing something like 1,500 games for Nintendo's console worldwide vs. maybe 1,000 for all of Sega's combined, it just adds up.
But in regards to Sega's output vs. Nintendo's specifically, I don't think it's any contest. Nintendo only released a couple of games every year, and in terms of productivity, Sega ran circles around them. Not taking titles that either company produced into account -- I'm talking ones that they developed in-house -- Nintendo developed around 20 games over the entire seven years that the SNES was on the market, and that's including co-developed titles (Star Fox, Sim City) and compilations. Sega developed nearly 100 in the same span of time. Quantity doesn't always equal quality, but out of those 20 games Nintendo released, I would only really deem about 10 of them classics -- once you take out less celebrated games like Yoshi's Safari, Wario's Woods, Super Play Action Football, Super Scope 6, and Winter Gold, what you're left with is a collection of dizzying highs, to be sure: the Super Mario series, Link to the Past, Super Metroid, Super Mario Kart, Star Fox, F-Zero, Pilotwings, Stunt Race FX, Tetris & Dr. Mario, and Super Punch-Out... But do those few games really stand up to...
The Sonic, Streets of Rage, Phantasy Star, Shining, Shinobi, Super Monaco GP, Puzzle & Action, and Mickey & Donald series, alongside Ristar, Golden Axe, Virtua Fighter, Virtua Racing Deluxe, Star Wars Arcade, Space Harrier, After Burner II, Out Run, Super Hang-On, Comix Zone, E-Swat, Bonanza Bros., Alien Storm, Gain Ground, and The Hybrid Front, among others?
Honestly, I don't think so. And if you're not a fan of one or a few of those Nintendo games (personally, Mario Kart, Pilotwings, and Super Punch-Out do nothing for me), pit those 10 against Sega's 35+, and things are starting to look a bit dire. You have to really, REALLY like Mario, Zelda, and Metroid to give them the nod clean over all of the quality that Sega was pumping out.
This leads me rather haphazardly into something that really bothers me: I don't agree with the popular notion that Nintendo "beat" Sega during the 16-bit period. So many years on and journalists are still coming to this discussion from a playground perspective: who sold more at the end of the day. There are a lot of flaws in this approach when you consider this bearing in mind how big business is actually run. Nintendo was projected to maintain 90%+ market share with the SNES, and they faltered all the way to 35%, and didn't maintain a remotely convincing lead until Sega had already shifted their focus on to their next generation of hardware. Had the Nintendo 64 not been delayed by an entire year, it's doubtful that they ever would've racked up all of those extra sales after the competition was already over.
The Super Nintendo outsold the Genesis only by the point that their entire company was going full-bore against the last of Sega of America's graveyard shift that was giving their last-generation console a send-off. Nintendo lost in the ways that mattered: they lost a monopoly, they lost a ton of money (the pay cuts after diving from 90%+ to less than 40% market share must have been massive), they lost third-party support, and their entire vision for how they would run the industry was permanently ruined. Sega, on the other hand, stood only to gain. The exact opposite of all the negatives I just mentioned for Nintendo. And again, Nintendo didn't catch up, quite specifically on the 16-bit front, until Sega had already moved on.
Not to reduce how incredible the Super Nintendo was as a console, just that it didn't "win" in any way that had meaning in the real world. Nintendo did a LOT of losing that generation. Doesn't make Super Metroid any less of a masterpiece, though.
