Does Nintendo get too much credit for saving videogames?

[mike_intellivision]

Nintendo reinvented the industry in the early/mid 1980s.

Video gaming was essentially dead. I know, I was there (see my login).
People had moved on from the Atari 5200 and Colecovision (which came after the Atari 2600 and Intellivision and Odyseey 2 and other machines) to "home computers."

"Home computers" meant a lot of non-compatable competing formats, from Atari 8-bit series (400/800/XL) to Commodore Vic 20, then C-64 to Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, etc.

The PC as we know it was only 3-4 years old and generally had four-color graphics at best. It was not a gaming machine, per se -- though the PC Jr tried to be -- and was among the "etc." listed above for home computers.

Too much quantity and too little quality led to people moving from consoles to computers. Games were sold for pennies on the dollar. I remember buying a game or two each week from the discount table at JCPenny (I bought so many, the lady signed me up for a store card).

Of course, given the nature of the computer market, it was niche at best. Most people were afraid to type LOAD "*",8,1 or something like that to start a game (that is the actual Commodore 64 to load off the disk drive).

By this time, Nintendo was become a successful arcade machine company in the US and had developed a home unit (the Famicom -- Family Computer) for sale in Japan (which easily overtook a market which had systems like the Atari 2800 and the Bandai Intellivision). It sought a US distributor, but Atari declined and instead tried to release its its Atari 7800.

About the same time, Jack Trammel bought Atari from Warner Communications and the former Commodore boss took Atari out of the video game market. Coleco also had gaven up the ghost in favor of Cabbage Patch Dolls and there was no one doing consoles in the US.

Nintendo decided to "go it alone." They had to convince people that this was a viable product. As such, they made sure it didn't look like the previous video game systems (hence the awful top-loader) -- and wasn't even called a video game. ROB was part of the gimmicks used to differentiate the NES from all that came before.

Finally, the NES went on sale. And the system started selling, and selling, and selling. Then Sega joined the game. About a decade later, Sony joined the game. A few years after that, Sega left and Microsoft entered. Which is where we stand today.