Did Nintendo save gaming with the NES?

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The NES/Famicom definitely saved console gaming.  Did it save gaming in general?  It probably saved it from being a much less popular hobby.  Consoles are really what popularized gaming in the long term.

The alternatives to console gaming during the mid-80s, US, were the arcades and home computers.  The arcades still remained popular even when the home console market crashed.  However, there one big problem with arcades was that people did not want to pay more for newer games.  They still wanted to pay $0.25 per play.  The solution was that games like Guantlet and Street Fighter found ways to get people to put quarters in more frequently, however players were extremely resistant to an across the board price increase.  The alone would have kept arcades from staying mainstream.  Even though arcades still did well in the mid 80's, they still didn't have the massive impact like the games from the late 70's/early 80's era.  This would have gradually become a more and more niche market.

Then there are home computers.  During the console market crash, the C64 became the new leading gaming system.  According to Wikipedia the C64 sold 12.5m-17m, the Atari 2600 sold 30m, and the NES sold 62m.  The C64 basically halved the console market while the NES doubled it.  This illustrates the kind of advantages that consoles have.  They make gaming a lot more mainstream.

But without consoles, PC gaming becomes the main gaming medium, and PC gaming alone would never have gotten to same popularity that consoles have reached.  It might have been somewhat more popular than it actually was historically, but PC gaming never gets to the popularity of console gaming.  The lower hardware costs and convenience of consoles bring in a lot more gamers than there would be on PC alone.  I might be overstating it to say PC gaming is a niche, but the total gaming market becomes significantly smaller without consoles.  And if you look at the devs that popularized PC gaming, they are western devs.  While all of the Japanese publishers would have never become hugely successful in gaming without consoles (including Nintendo, Sony and Sega).

So what the NES really did is that it kept gaming as a popular medium like film and music.  In the US, comic books were actually the most popular medium in the US, but in the 50's and 60's the market imploded and it has been considered more of a niche medium ever since.  That was more like the fate that gaming faced without the NES.  The NES made gaming popular, and it has stayed that way ever since.