If there was no NES, there would be no industry for PlayStation to expand. And if there was an industry, I doubt Sony would've even bothered putting any money into something that they would've viewed as playing with fire. It was the partnership with Nintendo that led the way to PlayStation being a thing in the first place.
- The western market was the ONLY substantial market at the time. 
- They also created the Japanese market. 
- And the market was expanding anyways. All the kids who were brought in with the NES and SNES/Genesis, would've been adults and teenagers by the time the Saturn and N64 hit the market, along with all the kids and new generation that THOSE systems would have brought in. 

The console market crashed in the U.S. only because the U.S. essentially was the console market in the early 80s. Consoles were irrelevant in Europe until PlayStation came along, and that first generation of cartridge-based consoles didn't arrive in Japan until 1982 (the Atari 2800, the 2600's Japanese counterpart, was actually launched after the NES was).

And it wasn't just a glut of bad video games (largely a consequence of a lack of publishing control by the console makers, though Atari-published 2600 titles like E.T. and Pac-Man contributed to the mess) that triggered the Crash of '83. It was a glut of hardware as well. But regardless of the causes, it showed that console games, a market still in its infancy, was something consumers could easily sour on and reject entirely en masse. At the time, one could easily characterize consoles as a fad, and many did just that (arcade revenues were declining rapidly at the time as well).

If I could do it again, I'd list the Odyessy.  I just didn't think anyone would choose it, because it barely moved the needle in terms of sales.  But, after reading the comments in this thread, I realize that many people think otherwise.  

Actually the original XBox did bring in the mature component. Before that - look at PS1 and PS2 games: cartoony, colorful, wacky, mostly kid-friendly. Xbox changed that and PS3 and X360 followed that path.

I mentioned a point you made from another thread about Nintendo and their IPs. We forget the types of games that were being made prior to the NES. Can you imagine being someone during that time whether as a kid or as an adult playing a game like Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda? It was almost night and day compared to the games before. And it doesn't hurt that characters like Mario, Donkey Kong, and Link were, and still are, endearing among the community. Even Samus to a smaller extent, especially as a surprise being known as a woman. Then adding characters like Simon Belmont, Mega Man, Chocobo, and others, it worked out for the NES with the help of these characters.

It did save gaming in terms of where it was headed and it would have died with nintendo running the ship eventually. People did not realize how much video games could sell until playstation consoles came around. The market was stagnant in comparison to what it could do. Alot of 3rd party sales were generated from playstation console sales. You damn well know that no nintendo console can push the kind of 3rd party game sales a playstation console can. Nintendo carries no weight with 3rd parties because they know that most of their games won't sell that well.

What would happened to a lot of 3rd party devs if they never had those kind of sales? Would they have created some of the games they did? Who really knows but to act like it would have been business as usual without playstation consoles around. lol That's absurd. More than likely, the bulk of third party devs would have went to the pc market and told nintendo to eat it's shorts. If ms still entered the market when it did, the devs would have put games on that console along with pc. 

If you disagree with me, by all means have at it.  This is nintendo fan forum and I never expected anything different from a nintendo console being the favorite choice or that I would catch some flak for saying something opposed to the  group think. I don't really give a shit what nintendo fans think of the best console or best games or what is the most influential console is. We're going to agree to disagree on that stuff and that's that. 

This is a lot of unfounded speculation. Yes, this could be possible, but we will never know.

And this has nothing to do with being a Nintendo-fan. I see most influential:

1. Magnavox Odyssey (they created the damn business)

2. NES (recovering from the game crash)

3. Xbox (changing many things in gaming: made online multiplayer popular, mature games, DLC, trophies, shooters - the console didn't sell much, but seeing that X360 and PS3 followed it's path it was indeed influential)

I don't see either Wii or PS1/2 as influential. They were successful, but no game changers. And I don't see why you can deride other opinions as fanboyish when you explain your choice with very cloudy could-be-stuff.