If Atari had done a US distribution deal with Nintendo (Which Nintendo suggested) there's a real chance they would still be around in a real sense as a software developer.

If Saturn played Megadrive carts - but only if they hadn't pissed all that money and trust away on the those damn addons.

The Sony/Nintendo deal: I don't think would have been successful - the console would have been a compromise. No Playstation = a bad thing.

And yeah - Dreamcast with a DVD drive. Might have helped but Sega had pissed too much money away by then.

Blue Swirl wrote:

. On the Dreamcast + DVD front, wouldn't it have saved Sega money to use an extant format, rather than creating their own? Plus part of the DC's downfall was the rampant copyright infringement, aided by the GD-ROM system being easier to circumvent than Sega thought it would be.

Possibly ,though piracy didn't harm the PS1. The PS1 was the console of choice for Pikeys.

Re DVD, I suppose Sega didn't want to pay licences to Sony for DVD but it was a wrong move.

The Atari/Ninty front, I think you are right with Atari messing Nintendo about. According to the David Sheff book, Nintendo were after their distribution chain as well as the name. But Atari were arrogant and really rubbed them up the wrong way. Painful to read. I was a real Atari fanboy around the time. I seriously considered the Jaguar for the longest time but the library was more or less DoA.

davyK wrote:

Possibly ,though piracy didn't harm the PS1. The PS1 was the console of choice for Pikeys. Re DVD, I suppose Sega didn't want to pay licences to Sony for DVD but it was a wrong move.

I think Sony would have something to say about the effects of illicit copying on PS1!  

The Dreamcast disc format is a great example of hindsight being 20/20; as you say, Sega didn't want to give any money to Sony, whose PS1 had stomped the Saturn. Sega thought they could kill two birds with one stone by developing their own format, not realising that one of their aims (reduced copy-ability) would later prove to be false.

Time_on_my_hands wrote:

If Sony hadn't been a thing and the market had remained Nintendo vs Sega, would the Xbox even be a thing? I like to think that Atari would still be in the game if they hadn't messed up with the lack of availability of Jaguars at launch.

The Xbox is an interesting "What If?". Like Sony working with Nintendo, Microsoft wanted to get in on the console market without having to do all the leg work of making their own machine. Hence the Dreamcast running Windows CE. You can see the legacy of the Dreamcast's DNA in the original Xbox: the controller of the latter is definitely inspired by the former. It even has two memory card slots in it; the only thing missing is a hole in the pad for a screen to show through.

I don't think that having a lot of Jaguars available early on in the machine's life would have saved it. Despite being 64-bit, it wasn't that much of an upgrade over the 16-bit machines available at the time, which were by that point much cheaper and with vast game libraries, and it paled in comparison to the 32-bit machines that were on the horizon for comparable money. To save the Jaguar, a whole shit ton of different decisions would have had to been made.

Maybe that’s an interesting ‘what if’ in itself: What if the Xbox project wasn’t approved back then? What if Sony did use the PlayStation as the hub of connected home entertainment - console, TV and hi-fi all hooked up to broadband. Would they have dominated gaming completely?

I think Microsoft is raking in the cash from the Xbox division these days. But yeah, I remember reading it took ages for it to make a profit. So much so that people within Microsoft were trying to kill off the Xbox project before it had even launched, and I think Ballmer was getting huge pressure from shareholders to cancel it, even when the 360 was ruling the roost.

It’s interesting how many brands have aimed at that ‘one box under the TV to rule them all’ model over the years, when in the end the TV itself has swallowed the role up. You’d think we would all have seen that coming a mile off.

Consoles are the only secondary input left and I wonder how long they can last with cloud gaming on the horizon. It can’t be long until Xbox becomes an app on your smart TV.

The tv is the most likely thing to replace consoles. I always thought Sony would make a play with PS built in.

There was a TV with PS2 built in but it was late in its life and wasn't pushed.

Okay - so my knowledge of console controlers is patchy, but what if the N64 analogue stick hadn't existed, and therefore the PS1 controller had remained face-buttons only? Would mice have been more widely adopted for consoles?

Or was the development of analogue sticks for consoles inevitable given the rise of 3D games at this time?

What if EA didn't get exclusivity to all the sports games? Surely all related sports games would be in a much better state than they are now?

What if no one had an exclusive deal and any dev could use the license. Kind of like you can have forza and gran turismo have car licenses

How about the D-Pad?

Without the Game & Watch/NES pad would everyone have stuck with arcade style control sticks?

I remember thinking the NES pad was a really weird way to play games after using a joystick on the 2600 and my Amstrad 464.

Time_on_my_hands wrote:

Okay - so my knowledge of console controlers is patchy, but what if the N64 analogue stick hadn't existed, and therefore the PS1 controller had remained face-buttons only? Would mice have been more widely adopted for consoles?

Or was the development of analogue sticks for consoles inevitable given the rise of 3D games at this time?

Sega made the first analogue stick I think and it was for a (I think) basically 2d polygon game (Nights)

Ah only by a few weeks in the Europe and US. The n64 was out earlier in Japan.

So analogue was sega first in US and Europe but N64 Japan launch trumps all the dates.

Nintendo not releasing wii is kind of saying what if Nintendo stopped being Nintendo....