Maybe it can go slightly different?
January 1980: Plans for a Popeye arcade game fall through.
November 1980: Nintendo acquires the video game rights to Disney's beloved characters. Probably for dirt cheap, given the stuff Disney was going through at the time.
August 1981: Mickey Mouse debuts in arcades, in which you play as Mickey Mouse trying to save Minnie Mouse from an incredibly-rambunctious Pete, who will do everything it takes to stop you.
March 1982: After the success of Mickey Mouse, both in the arcade and on the Game and Watch systems, production on a 2-player Mickey and Donald game for the Atari 2600, a Sorcerer's Apprentice video game adaptation, various Tron video games, a Dumbo shoot-em-up, and Mario Bros., a repurposing of that brief figure from the time between Popeye and Mickey Mouse in DK's development cycle, where two Italian brothers, Mario and Luigi, clean the sewer pipes free from enemies.
Summer 1983: All of the in-development titles have been released. Some of them have been more successful than others, especially due to the Crash of 1983 in North America.
September 1983: Ruby-Spears hour-long gaming anthology series, Saturday Supercade, premieres. However, due to both Donkey Kong and Donkey Kong Jr. being butterflied, the show now has Q*Bert as its most popular character, and the only one of them to make it past the first season. Not only that, but more Pitfall! episodes and an adaptation of Space Invaders would be made in order to meet the quota of five different games in 1-2 episodes.
September 1984: Michael Eisner, inheriting the Nintendo deal when he became the new head of Disney, talked with Shigeru Miyamoto and Hiroshi Yamauchi to not only bring their video games to the USA with a brand-new console, but also to bring the acclaimed Hanafuda cards to the US as well. Unfortunately, discussions about the latter fell through, but the idea of a whole console was too good not to pass up on.
October 1985: With Disney's marketing team on board, the NES launches worldwide with games like Gyromite, Stack-Up, Mickey Mouse, Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, Ice Climber, and by far the most popular game they had at launch, Super Mario Bros., which still becomes as iconic as it does IOTL, and even becomes a franchise that Disney makes bank on as well.
December 1985: After the success of Adventures of the Gummi Bears, Walt Disney Television Animation begins plans for a Nintendo-focused anthology series on ABC for next year's Saturday Morning schedule.
September 1986: The Nintendo Power Hour premieres on ABC at 9:00 A.M., between The Flintstone Kids and The Real Ghostbusters. Unfortunately, this means that The Wuzzles would move its only season to Sunday Mornings on The Disney Channel. This anthology series starts each episode with The Super Mario Bros., and then has three random games adapted afterwards, like Duck Hunt, Gyromite, Wild Gunman, Excitebike, Ice Climber, and Punch-Out, which was likely how a lot of kids were introduced to Little Mac back then.
Despite that, the original Famicom would launch in September or October of 1983 instead of in the middle of the summer, due to the outright butterflying of all three of its launch titles in one hit.
What do you guys think, despite its ups and downs?
