What if gaming never recovered from the 1985 crash? How would the world culture and entertainment industry be affected? How would companies like Nintendo, Sega, and Sony react?
America looses its advantage with Atari and others dead, since Atari was one of the worst for flooding the market with crap. Comes down to will Nintendo, Sega or someone from Europe pick up the ball and continue.
Early 90s 8bit, 16bit & 32bit console wars could look different depending on who emerges as the big boys.
What if gaming never recovered from the 1985 crash? How would the world culture and entertainment industry be affected? How would companies like Nintendo, Sega, and Sony react?
One way that might make it unrecoverable until probably the 1990s and PC gaming is to have the 1983 Atari/Nintendo deal to sell the Nintendo Enhanced Video System in the US, which was a full computer system before it was pared down to the familiar NES, go through. The NES re-vitalized the video game industry, but in this timeline it goes down with the Atari sinking ship. As for Sega, Gulf and Western retains ownership of Sega of Japan in 1984 and kills the development of the Master System after poor sales of the SG-1000 and SG-1000 II.
I'd actually argue that gaming would never actually die off completely, even in North America; sooner or later, somebody *would* try to take Atari's place.
