Cronus Invictus: An Alternate Console Wars (Something a bit different)

Thande

Donor
Anyone who wants detailed explanation behind this - suffice to say that you get weird ideas when you're trying to get to sleep in order to wave cuvettes in a German's face in the morning.




Part 1: Before the POD

1983:

Videogames are all the rage in the United States, with many different consoles competing for the market, including the Atari 2600 and 5200, the ColecoVision and Coleco Gemini, the Mattel Intellivision, and the Magnavox Odyssey Squared to name just a few. Arcades also proliferate rapidly across the nation.

Too rapidly. So many people and companies have jumped on the bandwagon that its wheels are about to fall off. The vast number of consoles and games has supersaturated the overestimated market share. Personal computers are starting to muscle in on the same area. Loss of creative control and the urgency of competition has resulted in many games being rushed in production, resulting in poor quality. Atari gambles that its undertested, imperfect port of Pac-Man and its licensed E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial will sell wildly on name alone. They don't, with millions of unsold cartridges famously being buried in a landfill in El Paso.

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The Atari Landfill

The result of all this is that the swelling video game bubble finally bursts and the bottom drops out of the market in the Great Videogame Crash of 1983. Countless American console manufacturers go bust or at least withdraw from the market with heavy losses. Atari hangs on by the skin of its teeth. For the American mainstream consumer, videogames have become a toxic, risky area in which to invest.

Such an economic bubble, more than two centuries earlier, had inadvertently created the British Westminster parliamentary political system that had, by 1983, spread across much of the world. The Videogame Crash would not be quite so important to world history, but its aftershocks would nonetheless be felt for a long time...

Meanwhile, in Japan, unnoticed and uncommented on by the rest of the world, two established arcade games companies are releasing their own consoles, apparently with horrible timing. Nintendo, a company dating back to 1889 when it had made card games, unveils the Family Computer, abbreviated to Famicom. The Famicom is deliberately designed to look toy-like, appealing more to children than previous U.S. console releases whose marketing had been aimed mainly at teens and young adults. Meanwhile, Sega, a company founded mostly by Americans in the 1950s whose original role had been to make mechanical arcade games for American servicemen in Japan, releases the Sega SG-1000.

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The Nintendo Famicom

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The Sega SG-1000
 

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1984:

Nintendo recalls the Famicom after it emerges that a faulty circuit is causing many games to hang [modern: freeze]. Fortunately for them, this product recall fails to tarnish the product's image, and the new version rapidly outpaces its Sega competitor in popularity, selling 2.5 million units by the end of the year.

Meanwhile in the United States, Atari slowly begins to dig itself out of the abyss with the release of the Atari 7800. This new 8-bit console's design represents learning from the mistakes of the flopped 5600: it is almost completely backward-compatible with the large game library of the popular 2600, has more robust and rationally designed controllers, and is far cheaper. However, it relies a little too much on that backward compatibility, with few new games being written for it, and fails to appeal much to younger consumers.

Even the few original games tend to be somewhat clinging to the past in their static arcade style; while the Famicom and SG-1000 launched with similar games, such as Donkey Kong Jr. and Congo Bongo respectively, Japanese games developers soon began exploring how their consoles' hardware capabilities meant that new kinds of games could be created. But then who cares what the Japanese are doing?

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The Atari 7800

In "Europe" (note: I am using the videogame industry's typical Nipponocentric definition of "Europe", which includes the British Isles and parts of Africa and Asia and at this point usually excluded Eastern Europe and Russia) the U.S. videogame crash manifests itself as consoles losing out to personal computers as gaming stations. This year in particular sees the release of the seminal game Elite for the BBC Micro in Britain, along with its cheaper commercial counterpart the Acorn Electron. Praised for its groundbreaking wireframe 3D graphics, Elite becomes a major influence on later games.

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Screenshot of "Elite" (BBC Micro colour version)
 

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1985:

In Japan, Sega releases the SG-1000 Mark III, whose enhanced hardware can better stand toe to toe with the Famicom's capabilities. However, at the same time, Nintendo releases a platforming game whose formula will shake the very foundations of the videogame industry: Super Mario Bros.. It proves to be a killer app for the Famicom, selling ten million copies before the year is out.

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The SG-1000 Mark III

In America, Nintendo decides to try a limited release of its Famicom under the name Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). Using an excellent marketing strategy, Nintendo redesigns the console to look like a grey, modest home media amenity such as a VCR and packages it with the accessory Robotic Operating Buddy (R.O.B.) This is almost pointless as R.O.B. is badly designed and only works with a few games anyway, but allows Nintendo to market the console as a toy for children, blasting open the market sector that Atari was failing to appeal to. The NES soon becomes a runaway success, though at the cost of painting videogames as a kiddie medium in the minds of the post-1983 generation.

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The Nintendo Entertainment System and a screenshot of its killer app, "Super Mario Bros."

In Europe, meanwhile, Atari releases the Atari ST home computer and Commodore supersedes the popular Commodore 64 with the Commodore Amiga. These two will duke it out head to head in the European gaming sector, pushing BBC/Acorn and ZX/Amstrad models out of the mainstream gaming field. In most places the Amiga proves victorious, but in Britain and France the ST puts up a fight into the 1990s.

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The Atari ST
 

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1986:

Sega, following Nintendo's lead, redesigns the SG-1000 Mark III as the "Sega Master System" and releases it globally. The console fails to make much impact in the United States, where Nintendo reigns supreme, but proves surprisingly popular in Europe, where it effectively competes with the NES and sometimes even outsells it. Sega also releases the platforming game Alex Kidd in Miracle World, clearly inspired by Super Mario Bros. in many ways but not a simple ripoff (unlike some of their earlier efforts, e.g. Congo Bongo vs. Donkey Kong). Alex Kidd has superior graphics to SMB but somewhat looser controls, and proves popular enough to be integrated into later models of the Master System and for Alex Kidd to displace Oba-Oba (from the Sega arcade game Fantasy Zone) as Sega's mascot.

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The Sega Master System

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Screenshot of "Alex Kidd in Miracle World" and Alex Kidd as mascot of Sega

Nintendo is not idle, either. Shigeru Miyamoto, the brains behind Super Mario Bros., proves lightning can strike twice when he produces The Legend of Zelda, another enormously influential and successful game. The other main Nintendo success of the year is Metroid, which introduced non-linear gameplay on a large scale. Ironically both games suffer from the same "I am not Shazam" problem in that people assumed their title is the name of the main character.

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"The Legend of Zelda" and "Metroid"

Nintendo also released the Famicom Disk System in Japan only, the company's first foray into non-cartridge media. The Disk System was an add-on for the Famicom, allowing it to use magnetic disks as media. The disks used were similar to floppy disks but of proprietary size, meaning the drive was difficult to service. The disks offered impressive storage capacity for the time (112 kilobytes, when for example Super Mario Bros. was just over a third of that in size) and allowed save games, but the project was eventually judged a failure and an NES disk system equivalent was never produced. A side effect of this is that games intended to use the Disk System for save states were ported to the international NES without this save function and without their difficulty altered, helping give rise to the phenomenon known as "Nintendo Hard".

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The Famicom Disk System with the Famicom atop it
 
Oooo, you have the Atari 7800 come out earlier. Took me a couple or rereads to figure out what the change was.

If the Atari 7800 gets good 3-party support they'll might give the SMS a good run, doubt they can challenge the NES though.
 

Thande

Donor
1987:

The Famicom and NES get a boost from two popular, franchise-spawning launches by Konami: CastleVania and Contra. Konami also produces Metal Gear the same year, but the NES version is considered technically inferior to the release on the Japanese-only home computer the MSX2, and is further hampered by an inept American localisation. For these reasons, the Metal Gear series will remain almost unknown outside Japan for the forseeable future.

Sega formally replaces the SG-1000 Mark III with the Master System in Japan, thus standardising its console for all markets.

Two of the most important Japanese RPG series have their dawn this year. The struggling company Squaresoft releases Final Fantasy, so called because it would supposedly be their last game before they folded. However, the runaway success of the game (in Japan) saves Squaresoft from destruction. Meanwhile, Sega produces rival RPG Phantasy Star in-house. Localising RPGs turns out to be difficult due to the quantity of text requiring translation, but Sega win by two years, releasing Phantasy Star worldwide in 1988, while Final Fantasy only reached foreign shores in 1990. This gave Phantasy Star something of a head start in gaining a following.

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Phantasy Star

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Final Fantasy

This year Capcom also releases Rockman for the Famicom, and it is soon released for the NES as Mega Man in the American market, but this seminal platformer does not reach European shores until 1989 (with Mega Man 2), by which time it has visibly aged and thus the Mega Man series is never as popular in Europe as in America (or Japan).

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Mega Man
 

Thande

Donor
Oooo, you have the Atari 7800 come out earlier. Took me a couple or rereads to figure out what the change was.

If the Atari 7800 gets good 3-party support they'll might give the SMS a good run, doubt they can challenge the NES though.

Actually that's not the POD, the Atari 7800 came out then in OTL; it was just withdrawn for a couple of years due to low sales (which I forgot to mention).
 

Thande

Donor
Part 2: Divergence


1988:

Although the Japanese consoles were starting to eat into the European market, the cross-platform release of Exile this year - an impossible-to-define arcade-cum-adventure game and the first game to have a true physics engine - showed there was still gaming life in the Atari ST, Amiga, and even the BBC Micro/Acorn Electron and Commodore 64.

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"Exile" (Amiga version)

Nintendo was at this point ready to release the pinnacle of Famicom games, Super Mario Bros. 3. However, a problem arose in that America had never had a Super Mario Bros. 2 - the Japanese game, from 1986, was simply more levels of the original game with no enhancements beyond giving Luigi different running and jumping properties to Mario. It was also so frustratingly hard that Nintendo of America rejected the idea of publishing it in the USA. To that end, in order to have a Super Mario Bros. 2 before 3 was released abroad, Nintendo modified the existing Japanese-only Famicom Disk System game Doki Doki Panic, changing sprites to Mario characters and adding various Mario mechanics such as Super Mushrooms, although keeping the very non-Mario mechanic of dying if the characters jumped on the enemies' heads and instead requiring them to pull up vegetables and throw them. Despite this bizarre premise, the game did reasonably well in the US and Europe, though suffering from the lack of the Disk System's save states that the original had been designed around - in an attempt to compensate, a bonus system where extra lives could be won on a fruit machine was added.

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Spot the difference.

Sega, meanwhile, sought to overtake Nintendo with its MK-1601 project, later changed to the more impressive-sounding "Mega Drive", suggesting the new console's speed and capabilities. The Mega Drive was based on Sega's popular System 16 arcade hardware, and indeed much of its early library consisted of arcade ports such as Altered Beast. The Mega Drive failed to make much impact in Japan despite its superior 16-bit capabilities, with Sega offering such bizarre accessories as online banking and answerphones in a failed attempt to overtake sales of its competitors. Clearly a different strategy was needed if the console was to sell well abroad...

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The original Mega Drive.

And then there was another area. Quite minor, really, but in the long run...

Nintendo had always been concerned that the magnetic disks of the Famicon Disk System meant that conceivably game disks could be erased, overwritten and copied, opening the door to piracy. Thus, when Sony and Philips together developed a new CD-ROM format called CDROMXA, which would allow the use of the read-only optical discs as gaming media, Nintendo's interest was piqued. Nintendo's own future console plans for the Super Famicon or "Super Nintendo Entertainment System" (SNES) which would match the capabilities of the Mega Drive, were still in their preliminary stages - but the idea of an add-on that used the much greater capacity of CDs was intriguing. Tentatively titled the "SNES-CD", Nintendo approached Sony representative Ken Kutaragi, who had already assisted them with the SNES design itself, for the possibility of a collaboration.

A contract was ready to be signed, but at the last moment Hiroshi Yamauchi, the author of Nintendo's successes, insisted on being brought in and threatened to cancel the whole deal when he saw that the contract would give Sony creative control over all games to be produced on the CD format.[1] In the end, despite both sides making threats to pull out, the contract was renegotiated and a compromise was reached by which the two companies would share creative control and each would have a limited veto over games. But of course all of that lay far in the future...


[1] This is the POD. In OTL, Hiroshi did not read the contract until three years later, just before the SNES-CD was about to be formally announced at the 1991 Consumer Electronics Show. He pulled Nintendo out of the deal without telling Sony, swapped sides to work with Philips on the ill-fated CDi, and Sony only learned of it when Nintendo of America CEO Howard Lincoln announced at the CES that Nintendo was now aligned with Philips. Shamed by this public humiliation (particularly given Japanese corporate culture), Sony reacted by taking their existing work on the SNES-CD and modifying it into a little stand-alone console of their own which might take a little bit of Nintendo's market share to get revenge on them. You may have heard of it: it's called the PlayStation. But in TTL, it will never exist...
 
I'm tempted to say I like this TL already, but seeing as you're a Sega fanboy I can only imagine the horrendous things you're planning to do to Nintendo...
 

Thande

Donor
I'm tempted to say I like this TL already, but seeing as you're a Sega fanboy I can only imagine the horrendous things you're planning to do to Nintendo...

Actually I've always seen Nintendo as more the Worthy Opponent. It's Sony that RUINED IT ALL FOREVER as far as I'm concerned, hence the POD.
 
Ooh, this should be interesting...

And I approve of killing the PlayStation, it will give the rightful market dominance to Nintendo 64. :D :p
 
Bright day
*Big yawn* Oh no some silly console won't come to exist... Thankfully I have the superior platform, the computer. And Thande if you think of messing up personal computers for worse... a man always should be careful not to indulge personal information on the internet:cool:...;)
 
1986:


Nintendo also released the Famicom Disk System in Japan only, the company's first foray into non-cartridge media. The Disk System was an add-on for the Famicom, allowing it to use magnetic disks as media. The disks used were similar to floppy disks but of proprietary size, meaning the drive was difficult to service. The disks offered impressive storage capacity for the time (112 kilobytes, when for example Super Mario Bros. was just over a third of that in size) and allowed save games, but the project was eventually judged a failure and an NES disk system equivalent was never produced. A side effect of this is that games intended to use the Disk System for save states were ported to the international NES without this save function and without their difficulty altered, helping give rise to the phenomenon known as "Nintendo Hard".

famicomdisksystemconsole.jpg

The Famicom Disk System with the Famicom atop it
The Discs used by the Famicom were a 3 inch disc, orange/yellow in colour, with the above capacity...
Reportedly, Amstrad used these discs, in the U.K, although in black, in the late 1980's, as data storage for their low cost PCW series of word processor systems & their personal computer systems...
Given that Amstrad also sold a games console at the time, could Nintendo have allied with Amstrad to sell a rebadged Nintendo NES with the disc system, under the Amstrad name...?
 
Bright day
*Big yawn* Oh no some silly console won't come to exist... Thankfully I have the superior platform, the computer. And Thande if you think of messing up personal computers for worse... a man always should be careful not to indulge personal information on the internet:cool:...;)

Gladi, Thande couldn't possibly mess up PC gaming any worse than it currently is. It's running on empty, as sad as that is.

Anyway, Thande, this is highly interesting, and I'll be following along.

I simply beg you, PLEASE let Sega not screw up as badly! There's room for three active gaming companies, and the Dreamcast was awesome!
 
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