Did Nintendo save gaming with the NES?

[Conina]

snyps said:

Doctor_MG said:

Sega had created not one, but two relatively unsuccessful consoles during the time of the NES (SG-1000 and Master System). Sega Genesis was created as a response to the success of the NES with a push towards marketing. Had the NES not been a thing Sega probably would have seen the video game market as a niche market and stopped after their second failed system. 

Part of the reason the master system failed (in the US) is because it was crushed by the NES. It sold well in other reagions. Sega was pushing tech to enable its arcade games into the living room and would have continued to do so. 

Yeah, without Nintendo the "gaming vacuum" would have probably been filled by SEGA (for consoles), Apple (Apple II) and Commodore (C64). I really doubt that video gaming would have died without Nintendo and that people lost all interest in gaming.

Maybe many people only lost interest in these very simple and repetitive games the first and second gen hardware allowed.

Even with dumbed down graphics more complex games like Zelda, Metal Gear, Zork or King's Quest were impossible on the Atari 2600 and many other first and second gen consoles. With only 128 - 512 bytes of RAM, not much more than the highscore could be transfered to the next level/screen of a game.

Even simple things like remembering the items in your inventory, which items aren't in the "game world" anymore, which dialogues you already had with NPCs... would have used up far too much of these precious bytes of RAM. So nonlinear games with different tasks were out of the question.