Here's a What If which includes two Points of Departure:

>What are the effects of these changes

>Nintendo makes a more advanced console earlier
>Price increases dramatically
>System sells like shit outside of Japan and Nintendo never becomes a global powerhouse
>Video games in the west stay mostly on PCs which becomes the most popular way to play them
>Casual gamers never come to be

This is a timeline I want to live in

>>3179873
>This is a timeline I want to live in

No it really isn't

>>3179873
Maybe sonygger would stop being a meme on /v/

>>3179852
>What are the effects of these changes?

Honestly?

Pokemon is likely far less successful because a big part of the appeal was the Game Boy's portability and the novelty of game link battles and trades

It would have been more expensive, stuff like "receive input from two cartridges at once." and "better Save/Load" (because apparently saving as it was wasn't good enough?) would jack the cost way up.

Far less people buy the NES, competitors that started dying out during Nintendo's reign would probably have curbed out most of Nintendo's market.

>>3179873
>Casual gamers never come to be
Bullshit, people will always prefer clicking gems and sorting cards to actually doing their jobs. Before smartphones got big PC was the #1 casual platform.

>>3179852
Jesus, you've just thrown a bunch of non-sequitur information out there with no basis in history and that would fall at each and every hurdle.

You might as well have said "what if the romans had cars". You need to also consider the rammifications it'd have on every other fucking thing.

1. Satoshi Tajiri invents capsule monsters in 1980. He is 15, videogames - as far as consumers see it - are in their infancy, nowhere near the complexity required for a monster raising sim.
Yamauchi will not entertain an idea from a 15 year old, and Miyamoto is not yet at the company to sponsor and help him push the idea.

2. The Famicom was already far ahead of the other videogame systems of the day. Without competition, they have zero reason to make the machines any more advanced than they were possible to at the time.

3. Nobody would develop a memory card for a toy designed to replicate the arcade experience at home.

>The console also can receive input from two cartridges at once.

Fucking retarded. Why the fuck would they manufacture a console to take 2 cartridges at once?
Are you suggesting they do this from the outset with the famicom? Name me 5, marketable game ideas this would be useful for.

Are you suggesting the famicom gets a revision including a 2nd cartridge slot? Same question as above, but also justify why anybody would develop a game to use its capabilities as an integral part, when the original, presumably single-slotted famicom would have had such a big ownership already.

What you want is a fucking link cable, you dunce.

>>3179852
My diagnosis is autism.

>>3179873
nigga did you even play tetris

that shits casual as fuck

>>3180498
>Are you suggesting they do this from the outset with the famicom? Name me 5, marketable game ideas this would be useful for.

Sonic 3 and Knuckles

>>3179873
>Casual gamers never come to be

Casual gamers have always existed. Who do you think made Pong, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong popular? Casual gamers are the lifeblood of video games.

Without the linking it would be way less succesful and being on the NES it would've been even more unsuccessful in Europe. But hey, maybe then we would've gotten a C64 port.

>>3179873
.t 15 year old from /v/ who thinks he's enlightened because he doesn't like colladoody.

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>>3179852
Realistically, Nintendo looses market share by not innovating fast enough and goes the way of SNK and the Neo-Geo.

Btw Pokemon is useless without solid handhelds, and would not have worked on the NES, even if you supposed you could connect consoles.

>>3184467

I still don't get why gamefreak doesn't develop for smartphones.

>>3180536
I bet your high score is only 20,000 and you've never played TGM.

>>3184476
Idk you can already emulate on smartphone

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>>3179873
>>Casual gamers never come to be

Starting there, you've got nothing but a huge pile of shit. Wait, back up a bit more...

>>Video games in the west stay mostly on PCs which becomes the most popular way to play them

That's doubtful. master system and turbografx do allright. Even nintendo probably starts getting their shit together. Atari's XEGS and Panther do okayishly. Genesis likely sells as well as SNES or even NES did, or gets replaced by something that's not ready until a year or two later. Wait, back up a bit...

>>3179852
>While the console is released on the same date (1983 in Japan and 1985 in USA), it is more advances, being a 16 bit machine instead of 8 bit.
>The ability to insert two game cartridges into the console allows players to trade Pokemon with each other.

Not necessary, why wouldn't pokemon run fine on an 8bit system? It would just need the floppy drive, or microcassettes for saving, something like that.

Anyway, no matter how it gets there, might as well continue with >>3179873

>sega makes some sort of add on, probably a CD unit, or a polygon crunching chip, that actually does fairly well
>amiga's longer survival includes a bit of living room success
>game gear, atari lynx and portable TG16 survive, receive second, smaller, much more energy efficient incarnations
>doom on consoles becomes more of a hot thing, its engine licensees get vastly better porting treatment
>that includes a highly cinematic FPS
>pioneering cinematic FPS could also be future shock or dark forces, or, say, outlaws coming to consoles

and, UH OH!!

>games become theatricized, watered down, aaaaaaaaannnnnnddddd .... gyah! ... casualized!

Game over! Playing again?

>>3180498
>Name me 5, marketable game ideas this would be useful for.
>5
>>3182892
SF2turbo
Dragon warrior 2 or 3, travelling back to Alefard
Zelda 2 expansion pack
Double Dragon 3, 2 bonus DD2-style stage in DD3, play as chin in DD2
Battletoads and double dragon includes dedicated pimple and jimmy sprites, and can lock on to battletoads, or double dragon

>>3179852
I think Pokemon wouldve been a sucess because its a great game itself.
Then they wouldve make the game for the gameboy.
You know the rest.
The better question is how would the games today be, if we had no internet?

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>>3184656
No internet, you say?

>>3184484
>and you've never played TGM.

Neither has 90% of the general gaming public; everyone and their mother has still played Tetris on an NES/GB or nowadays, their smartphone.

>>3184476
It'll be a cold day in hell before Nintendo lets them release Pokemon on anything but a Nintendo console. It's one of the last things selling 3ds systems. Hopefully that cold day in hell happens shortly after the NX. The tears of Nintendo going third party would be too sweet.

>>3179852
>2. Engineers / Technicians at Nintendo make several breakthroughs in electronic technology, making the NES console a bit more advanced than in our timeline.
They could've done this easily. It would've cost more money and sold worse.

Unless we're assuming nintendo magically figures out a way to cheapen the production of other people's chips in the 1980s.

>>3185786
>Unless we're assuming nintendo magically figures out a way to cheapen the production of other people's chips in the 1980s.

Why don't they just sell their soul to sony?

>>3179852
On a different note, what if you couldn't choose which version of the game you got? What if the box just said Pokemon and when you opened it you randomly got blue, red, yellow, green, etc. version? Certain colors could be more rare than others, making certain Pokemon harder to get, because you would need to know someone that had the rare cart in order to trade for them? I'm pretty sure the new, Internet enabled versions have something like this, but I haven't played Pokemon aside from the 1st generation games, and we're talking about the game coming out for a console that isn't network capable, so...

>>3187470
Sony finds out that nintendo is trying to jew them, deal falls through.

>>3187590
So why doesn't nintendo just get really devious at jewing sony?

Sure, sony doesn't have to keep taking it. So, let's say that the fallout is that sony aborts their soundchip for the SNES, and nintendo is forced to go for a more conventional off the shelf choice and ends up using the yamaha OPZ.

>>3187512
> I'm pretty sure the new, Internet enabled versions have something like this,
They do not.

>>3179873
Tetris and Pac-Man are some of the biggest casual games in the world, anyone can get into them, and anyone did, kids and their parents would gladly play them on their lunch breaks if they could, and many did.

Pac-Man is a lot like Angry Birds, sudden big hit, popular with kids and parents alike (with easy to learn gameplay but also a real difficulty curve), is commercialized and exploited shamelessly with all manner of asinine branding and merchandizing.
There's fucking Angry Birds skin cream, likewise, there probably was some fucking lipbalm or shampoo with Pac-Man on it back in the 70's and 80's. Both have cartoon adaptions, which are probably shit.

Casuals are nothing new, they've always been a substantial element of videogame economy, and they always will be.

>>3189194
I don't think you know what casual means, and your ignorance of definitions doesn't mean you get to go on an autistic tirade over nothing.

>>3179873
>SEGA WINS
wew i do want this timeline

>>3189215
You realize >>3189194 is absolutely correct right? You're just trying to save face?

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>>3189194
>there probably was some fucking lipbalm or shampoo with Pac-Man on it back in the 70's and 80's.
yeah there's all kindsa shit. pic related, rollerskates, thermoses, on and on.

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>>3189215
So basically you're expecting everyone to assume that casual means casual gamer? Go fuck yourself, "gamer".

>>3179852
>two cartridge slots
literally why
>NES EXT port could actually get some use with a transfer cable

>>3179873
>Video games in the west stay mostly on PCs which becomes the most popular way to play them
>Casual gamers never come to be

As if Facebook games weren't the entire genesis of the modern casual gamer overload. PC masterrace my ass.

>>3189215
Then do explain to me, boy, what it fucking means.

>>3189730
>As if Facebook games weren't the entire genesis of the modern casual gamer overload
Those also date back to old times.
In terms of gameplay, the average game on an Apple II computer plays a lot like Facebook and mobile games, the graphics were just not as good.
>inb4 I like teal, purple, black and white as my only colors
Well, to be fair, a lot of Apple II and Commodore 64 games were shameless knockoffs of Atari 2600 games and Colecovision games too, but most of those didn't exactly have a lot of depth to their gameplay either.

I would hear people lament how Romero had brought himself down to the lowest common denominator because he's been making Facebook and mobile games, as if they aren't practically the same basic kind of games he'd cobble together as a kid and sell to Home Computing publications back in the day.
Of course, now he's going to make us a pitch.

Facebook style games predate Super Mario Bros. and Doom, as do their demographics, and it's hysterical to me how teenagers on /v/ thinks this is some sudden new development, as if the 80's and 90's were some sort of golden age.

ITT: One hundred people who weren't alive at the time and don't understand why things were the way they were and how changing a couple of things with no basis in history makes this a stupid non-excercise.

>>3191416
The main difference with facebook games is that they're designed to either get you to pay for bonuses, or get you to drag your friends into it.

Gameplay isn't the main focus.

>>3192245
They've become multiplayer friendly, not a gargantuan leap.

>pay for bonuses
Lots of titles were released with a retail price, or as shareware

Microtransactions are pretty devious, but not every game can sustain reliably on that kind of model.

Also, lots of people avoid that kind of game on principle, it only takes a few looks at the stores and some quick dirty math to see that either you play for free at a snail's pace (and have a bad time), or you're looking at paying way more than retail price of a brand new game to actually get somewhere fun and then stay there. Some people accept that, others spend only some money but get bored and move on, but many quickly realize that they're not getting a good value for their money and never get involved to begin with.

>>3192135
>31 ips
>100 people
loving every laugh