Atari never gets big?

So, they question is simple; what if the Atari company never get big? I know there were a ton of competing companies around the time Atari got big, but what if the 2600 was never released. Would companies like Coleco or Mattel get big? Would Nintendo shoot off, especially if the crash of 1983 doesn't happen?
 
Browse www.old-computers.com. What you'll find is that there really wasn't anything comparable to the VCS at the time Nolan Bushnell was looking for investors; probably the closest "competitor" was the Fairchild Channel F (1976). Pretty much everything else was either not microprocessor-based (i.e., the original Magnavox Odyssey) or a Pong knockoff.

I can't imagine what it would take for Atari to do worse than OTL; by 1976, Bushnell had a steady stream of revenue from coin-op games, and had singlehandledly invented the Pong market (from whence all those above-mentioned knockoffs flowed). He was looking for an investor to pony up the cash to develop the VCS (what we know today as the 2600), and settled on Warner Bros. -- probably the worst potential partner, to be honest.

The bottom line is that someone was going to give Bushnell the capital he needed to develop the VCS (and the 400/800 line of computers).

Now, if you wanted to see Atari do a lot better, well, I might direct you to a little TL referenced in my sig. :)
 
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