alternatehistory.com

In contrast to pop-culture wish-fulfillment timelines like Player Two Start, your challenge is to make video games suck as much as possible, and have the industry be as small as possible. Imagine a perpetual 1983 video game crash.

Some ideas:
-The computer industry is as monopolized and closed as possible, dominated by a megacorp like IBM, or a totalitarian government like the USSR, who see computers solely as business machines for professionals, not toys for the mass market
-Worse moral panic/evangelical revival in the 1990s leads to video games actually being banned, and the industry in shambles
-WWIII/TEOTWAWKI sometime before gaming really kicks off. That would be cheating, though.
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