Love the chart.

I have lived thru 6 eras. I hope to see more.

It takes way more faith to believe that no one would've ever popularized video games if Nintendo didn't. It's completely asinine to belive natural evolution doesn't happen when there are billions of people on this planet. Which is why I reject any such notion.

On that note, cult around any company is an inherently bad thing. You can acknowledge someones accomplishments without ascribing god like powers to them.

Don't see how this is an argument. They were the ones that put out SMB. They were the ones that caused consoles to sell at a larger scale. I would say they saved the console and handheld market. Not so sure about arcade and PC though. Pretty sure franchises from blizzard and sega had a hand in that.

Not really, the crash of 83 was mostly an american thing. In Japan arcades were more popular and in Europe PC gaming was more popular than consoles. The market would've adapted to the more popular forms of gaming and the landscape would have been much more different than today's. Nintendo saved console gaming as a vital part of the gaming sphere, but saying they saved gaming overall it's a bit much.

They certainly reinvigorated it. Hard to say if they singlehandedly "saved" it, as in - gaming would have died or virtually be dead without it. I probably wouldn't go that far.

I do think without the NES gaming would have EVENTUALLY recovered. Though not nearly as quickly, and not nearly in the same manner. It probably would have carried on as a more stagnant and less inspiring medium, maybe even leading up to today. It would certainly take on a very different look, especially in the US. 

No, looking back NES sales are subpar to PS1. Play Station saved gaming overall.

Yes.

Next.

In the US? Yeah maybe. Worldwide? Hell no.

In Japan consoles were just keeping business as usual. So there would certainly be tons of consoles being released in Japan, and I imagine at least one of them would have been sold internationally and exported. If Nintendo had decided not to export the NES to the US for some reason, maybe Sega would have and instead we'd have threads about "Did Sega save console gaming with the Master System?".

And like others said, PC gaming kept dominating Europe until like the PS1 came out.

The absolute worst case scenario I can think of is that the 3rd generation of consoles never gets released internationally, and the first console to launch internationlly ends up being the Game Boy in 1990. The Game Boy would undoubtbly take off just like it did irl, and it is certainly a console, so the Game Boy would be considered the saviour of consoles I suppose. With the success of the Game Boy, maybe Nintendo launches the SNES in 1992 or something like that

Edit: Wow the question is even dumber than I thought. Gaming at large was certainly not saved by anyone lol. Even in the absolute worst case scenarios, PC gaming would continue going on.

What kind of argument is that? By that logic the PS2 and NDS are the saviors of gaming, no reason why a companies first console would only count.

And if you mean to look at sales at the context of the time then the NES destroyed previous sales records selling more than twice the Atari 2600. The PS1 never even held the number 1 spot because of the Gameboy.

Don't get me wrong, the PS1 was a fantastic console, but the gaming market was pretty healthy at the time. It can't save gaming if it's doing fine already.

To answer the thread question, I would say to an extent. I certainly don't think gaming would have faded into obscurity without the NES, but it might not have gotten as big as it is today.

Saved it from what exactly?

Growing at a slower pace than it was?

2nd generation (Atari 2600, etc) ~30-35 million

3rd generation (NES, Master System, etc.) 70-75 million

4th generation (SNES, Genesis/Mega Drive, TurboGrafx-16, etc.) 85-95 million

There was also this other thing called the handheld gaming market, which had this thing called The Game Boy which was still going to get this thing called Pokemon which went on to become a global phenomenon. That was still going to no matter what.

Saved it? There was nothing to save. The overall video game market, console AND handheld, was already healthy and steadily expanding.