Most influential system (and why)

[Soundwave]

Chrkeller said:

Soundwave said:

And plenty of companies do flat out just copy other companies too. See that a billion times over. 

Nintendo of the 80s/90s especially was the industry trend setter, whatever they did basically others copied. They had a six button controller so ... Sega released a six button controller and later on tried to pass that off as the new standard Genesis controller .... that's not random coincidence, they obviously saw the SNES had 6 buttons and reacted to that. Then Sony copied that same exact layout and added an extra shoulder button. 

Nintendo was the standard so anything they did basically got copied almost immediately. The analog stick and rumble pack were quickly copied. 

No fucking sense in doing cartwheels and mental gymnastics to pretend none of that happened, even at the time I remember in the 90s most people just accepted "oh yeah, Sony/Sega are going to copy that". 

It's actually part of the reason Nintendo is so annoying with drip feed news to this day ... they just embraced a company wide philosophy from those days onwards that they weren't going to show virtually anything too early (especially hardware wise) which has made it a pain in the ass for fans. Everything is treated like it's some top secret government secret with Nintendo, it's extremely annoying. 

If you want to argue Nintendo had the largest influence on gaming, that is fair and I would agree.

But that is a goal post shift from non of this existing because only Nintendo could think of it, which was your original asinine comment.

Could you imagine if someone argued videogames would never ever existed without Magnavox?  Me neither because that is silly.

They may not exist in a way you recognize them today either though. Without Magnavox who knows if the game industry develops in the same way. Maybe it develops better or worse, but it would almost certainly different. 

I mean the example above where the person said the telephone would've happened even without Graham Bell ... says who? It could have taken decades longer or never happened in that same exact way at all, it may have been invented in a form factor much later that was not as attractive or more expensive or something like that and not have achieved mass adoption at the same rate if at all. 

Even more than, it's very probable none of us would even exist. If you change things in a time line like that, you realize none of us are probably born at all. The entire time line changes so that everyone's mother/father may not meet at the exact same time or even get together at all, certainly enough to shift who is born period. Like you're getting deep into the weeds of time causality if you just assume "well if I change this one thing, everything else just continues on the same way". No it almost certainly wouldn't.