Lol, is your disdain for Nintendo so strong that you'll ignore facts just to smite them?

Sony was comissioned as a partner with Nintendo to provide the CD drive but the deal Sony had writen up would put Sony's name on the sytem and the games, not Nintendo's and all licensing fees would go to Sony, not Nintendo.  When Nintnedo realized the extent of the deal, they dropped the partnership immediately and announced a deal with Philips (they had approached Nintendo around the same time Sony did for a CD drive).

Nintendo didn't screw over Sony, Nintendo realized they were about to become nothign more than a software house if the deal had finalized and took measures to protect itself.

Some of you young guys one the first page need to read on your history.  Retailers in the US refusd to carry video game products after losing millions from the Crash of 1983.  It took Nintendo almost 2 years to convince a New York retailer to stock its new product...the Nintendo Entertainment System (never once did they call it a video game system so they wouldn't be held to the stigma of the crash).

Of course it proved successful far beyond the retailers projections and other retailers took notice.  They finally got a country wide distributor to take national orders for retail in 1985.

There'd be no AVGN.

That's what i said, Ninty was the company that revived gaming in the Occident, i saw it first hand, i remember when my friends said "Another Atari from Japan?? i'll pass" and then we saw Super Mario Bros on a store, we played it like for seconds and all of us agreed that we must have it... Ninty took the time, the resources, etc., and brought gaming back...

No. Master System and Atari 7600 were marketed in  USA because of the resurrection of console gaming by hand of Nes.

Master System and Atari 7600 were never really the rivals of Nes. Nes' competitors at that time were 16 bit home computer like Amiga and Atari ST and people ( retailers, investors, consumers ) indifference towards Console gaming caused by crash '83/'84.

Probably gaming without Nintendo may be more focus towards home computers ( don't forget that even in Japan, home computer gaming was quite spread at the time of Famicom release thanks to MSX).

No, I didn't mean consoles turning into multimedia centres, I meant computers turning into multimedia centres. Machines like Amiga or Atari ST were basically ready for that at least conceptually (if not technologically) back in 1985. Had they met bigger success (which they didn't in part because they competed for the home market with cheaper consoles), it would allow for cost reduction and more dedicated development that could produce an affordable multimedia machine as early as around 1990. Hell, Commodore, at least, tried to do just that with CDTV, but they were already on the way down by this point.

It was the Atari 7800 and it was developed in 1984 -- so it actually pre-dates the crash (Atari went a whole three years between upgrades).

It was pulled because the market was dead and the focus was on computers. The Atari 8bit series and the C64/C128 series (we won't mention the non-compatable attmepted replacements) were the kings of the day. They continued their wars with the Atari ST and Amiga computers later. That would been the focus of "console gaming" had Nintendo never come along. Instead, it was just a side note to the main show of NES.

Because of Nintendo, Sega got into the act and brought over its S3000 and dubbed it the Master System. Atari tried to get back into it with the 7800 and a re-release of the 2600. Heck, you could even find a re-release of the Intellivision at Toys R Us then too.

So we owe Nintendo a lot.

Sony entered and moved things further as well -- again because of Nintendo.

Mike from Morgantown

PS -- Of course, Phillips did CDI because of Nintendo, so we can curse them for that.