Nintendo gave home console gaming a good reputation after several years of poor quality, but that poor quality was due in large part to hardware limitations. There's only so much you can do with an Atari 2600. Games could not be very complex, and therefore, were not as fun for the average consumer.

Gaming's growth was inevitable. In other words, where would we be today had Nintendo not shown up when they did? Things would be different, I'm sure, as they have been a trendsetter and a leader this entire time, but realistically, the NES was popular because tech had developed enough to allow for decent games to be developed.

But because Nintendo did show up when they did, you could theoretically say that they "saved gaming", but only with the caveat that gaming would have been saved no matter what.

There's just one big problem with this premise: Gaming didn't need saving, as gaming was totally fine. The only thing that crashed was the US or north American console market, but gaming itself was not affected. People were gaming on their Computers over in Europe and America before and after the crash without any changes, Japanese on their consoles, and all of them in the Arcades, which were very popular even during the crash. If what you said was true, then there wouldn't be a Wikipedia page of videogames in 1984, since that's after the crash, but before the NES released in the west. But there is. And gaming was actually thriving. Just not on consoles in North America anymore.

Saying that Nintendo saved gaming is like saying Apple saved phones with the launch of the iPhone

This is one old bump. I believe I already explained it earlier why Nintendo saved the industry, even if the industry were left to it's own devices, it would ressurge eventually. Much like any industry, really( The music industry passed through alot of ups and downs, and you could say that streaming "saved" it too from becomming a shell of it's former self)

Games have always been a pasttime of humans. Tabletop games, sports, even roleplaying in sex are all games people make to spice life up. So in that sense, gaming would go nowhere. Someone would eventually bring it back from the dead and make it flourish again. Much like VR, in the sense that it was first brought up in the late 90s, but failed to take flight, and only now it is being revisited(and finding success, real success).

But the point is, Nintendo was the first one to do it. Nintendo brought it back from the limbo. The industry was almost dead in the Americas(as in the continent). So that's like 30% to 40% of the industry nowadays. Not to mention that, even if arcades were thriving in Japan, Nintendo basically created the consoles there. At least it made it popular enough to be a viable commercial venture. I am less knowledgble about Europe as a whole, but if I'm not mistaken, it was a similar situation to japan. Arcades were doing fine(nothing spetucular, as far as I know), but with Nintendo, they revived or made the home consoles even more popular.

As a side note, it's thanks to Nintendo direct influence that we have many beloved non-nintendo franchises today, like Sonic, Sony entire catalog in general, and so on.

And as we know today, since history is our friend, home consoles are what defined and pushed the gaming industry. Even PCs owned alot of it's inspiration(gamewise) to it's games from it's console brethen. And even then, outside of a few games, PC gaming only became REALLY popular by the mid;end 2000s. Until then, the home consoles had to carry the industry. And it's all thanks to who? Nintendo.

Like I said, if Nintendo didn't do it, someone else would. Maybe Sega would be the one to save it.  Maybe MS would jump in since there would be no competition. But Nintendo did it first. That's why it saved the industry. And besides, if Nintendo didnt do it back then, and someone else did later, we consoles/gaming tech as a whole probably wouldn't be as advanced as it is today, because gaming would have to need to prove itself tyo be popular at first so that companies would start investing in it, and so on.

The bolded part is probably where we diverge.

You think Nintendo brought video games back from limbo. I'm saying video games were never in limbo to even begin with.

Yes, the industry was almost dead in america, but america is just a part of the world. Germany had over a dozen video game companies, now there's none anymore. But that doesn't mean gaming is dead in Germany. It just means games are not being developed there anymore.

About the situation in Europe, Nintendo brought consoles to Europe, but Sega were actually the ones who popularized the concept of consoles over there in many countries. Still, they had a weak market share compared to computers because computer games at the time cost about 5-30 US dollar while Nintendo's own games were at a starting price of at least 50 dollar, and their big hitters were more like $70+.

Comparing sales between computer games at the time and console games are a bit of a moot point considering how widespread piracy was in the days. In fact, the Amiga mostly died because roughly 98% of their installed software was pirated. The situation was a bit better on PC, but you could still count for about 10 copies for every bought game unless the copy protection was very good and hard to replicate (Lucasarts dial-a-pirate and similar codewheels comes to mind). Doom for instance sold less than 3M copies but was installed on about 15-20M computers, so about one in 6 was a pirated version of the game.

Just to compare Hardware sales, the NES sold 8.3M in Europe. The Amiga sold in roughly the same time 4.5M over there. The Atari XE computers sold about 1M in Europe. The more powerful Atari ST line sold a bit more, about 1.4M sales in Europe. The Commodore 64 sold about 12.5M total, and about half of those in Europe.

Now why did I list the sales of those instead of PC? Because those were mainly used as gaming machines, with being able for more serious applications on the side, while it was the opposite for the PC and Mac, who both largely outsold all these computers (they got less than 10% marketshare taken together after 1988) because of their increasing usage in businesses. But even with their little market share, together they largely outsold the NES without even accounting of the PC, Mac or even some more smaller or regional computers, like the ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro or the Amstrad/Schneider CPC, which all were also mainly used for gaming. Heck, the Atari XE and the Amstrad CPC were even both turned into consoles later in their life, as the Atari XEGS (XE Gaming System) and the Amstrad GX 4000 respectively, because that was their main usage anyway.

Long story short, gaming wasn't dead or even in limbo, it did just fine outside of the consoles in the americas, which were the only ones who died. Computer games thrived, Arcades did the same, and did so all around the world. In fact, most people outside of North America didn't even know there was supposed to be a videogame crash in 1983 until they heard about what happened in America. The crash was both localized and confined to a specific segment, and Nintendo did only revitalize that segment, but not gaming as a whole.

This person does not know what he is talking about and is using his own weak personal experiences rather than facts, and I debunked this argument long ago in this thread and it is a point that needs to stop being used because it is a flat out lie.

Console gaming was not the only thing dead in North America, gaming in general was dead from PCs to Arcades. Literally no one in America was interested in  video games after the crash, period. The arcades and PC gaming was far from flourishing as arcade revenues dropped after the crash considerably. Proof alone is looking at this revenue chart right here where it shows the global gaming revenue over the years where after the crash, console gaming and arcade gaming revenue WORLDWIDE dropped considerably with majority of consumers losing interest in the video games as a whole, believing it was a fad. I feel like the only reason why people bring this extremely false point up that somehow "PCs and Arcades were doing fine after the crash" is because after the crash PC gaming revenue did go up, However, PC gaming clearly was not enough to replace the console and arcade business because even though PC gaming revenue went slightly up after the 1983 crash,the industry as a whole was crashing down considerably. Which shows that most people completely stopped gaming after the video game crash with the EXTREMELY SMALL MINORITY LEFT moving to PC. Here's the chart right here:

Take a look at years between 1983-1985, both Console and Arcade revenue dropped exponentially and while PC gaming slightly rose, it was far from ever replacing the console industry that this guy is trying to make it out to be, showing that a large majority of people globally left gaming and it wasn't until the NES where gaming blew up again.

Also, for every person that attempts to claim that the video game industry was somehow fine in NA after the crash, I could name 10 other experience that prove the claim that it was far from alive. As shown here:

Again, not only the console industry was dead in North America, Arcades and PC gaming was dead over in America as well. Gaming in general was dead in North America, not just the console industry.

Also, to the people that keep claiming "the gaming industry was fine without Nintendo in Europe" take a look at this chart:

Around HALF of Europe's entire video game revenue today us driven by console gaming. Nintendo made gaming bigger than ever than Europe with console gaming and PC gaming wouldn't have done shit to make gaming as big. Nintendo is the reason why the European Juggernaut Playstation exists which make gaming big all over Europe including Eastern Europe. 

Gaming would have existed regardless however they were the first to put it back on the right course

Yeah I'll add to this as a lot of people often try to peg the home computer market as gaming being fine when in actual fact in the lead up to the 00s it was heading into problems, the PC market that took over from HCs ran into massive problems in the 00s developers couldn't make money due to rampant piracy and PC gaming wasn't very user friendly at the time meaning not as many people got into it. To reference how bad the situation was EA in 00s infamously declared PCs as a dead platform for gaming it took Steam to turn things around but even then it needed six to seven years to really get going and fix the platform's problems which was around 2008.

The point of this is consoles were what was keeping gaming going at that point no consoles in this period means the industry would have crashed again so even then people can't really say gaming would still be going with out what the NES brought as the alternative ran into a situation that would have caused another crash the only objective is that gaming is still here because of the NES.

The entire video game crash thing is a pretty misunderstood phenomenon IMO.

When something is new, it often becomes huge. That happened to video games in the early 80s. Then most people get bored. In video games, that was everyone who wasn't a computer geek around 1984.

I am not convinced that gaming ever recovered from just how huge it was when it started in the 80s. It's like smartphones now - everyone has one, but the obsession with buying them is gone now (apart from smartphone geeks).  A quick test would be to ask a random person on the street if they know that there is a new console generation out - I bet most don't.