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NEWS: John Kirby, Namesake of Nintendo's 'Kirby' Character, Passes Away at 79

But some people didn't give up on the home console idea. Sega released it's Genesis platform which sold well initially, until the NES hit the market

Whether they do or don't, it doesn't matter because the research capital that went into designing the NES came primarily from Donkey Kong. It probably would have been Mario Bros. anyway, but that would have pushed back release of the NES for three years and given Sega a better chance to lock the market.

Also would have given someone else, perhaps Atari, to come out with a console which allowed the player to save game data.

Apparently the Master System wasn't terribly popular when it launched in it's home market. And did no better anywhere else (bar Brazil). Not helping was Nintendo preventing publisher's from making ports of their games for other systems at the time in addition to the system being poorly marketed.

Fred Lougee wrote:

But some people didn't give up on the home console idea. Sega released it's Genesis platform which sold well initially, until the NES hit the market

Sure you didn't mean to say Sega Master System?

The Genesis didn't hit the market until 88/89 The NES had already been out for 5-6 years by the time the Genesis hit. And even then the Famicom had released first in 83 while the Master System didn't come out til 85/86/87 for the Japanese, American, & European Markets.

Fred Lougee wrote:

Whether they do or don't, it doesn't matter because the research capital that went into designing the NES came primarily from Donkey Kong. It probably would have been Mario Bros. anyway, but that would have pushed back release of the NES for three years and given Sega a better chance to lock the market.

Apparently the Master System wasn't terribly popular when it launched in it's home market. And did no better anywhere else (bar Brazil). Not helping was Nintendo preventing publisher's from making ports of their games for other systems at the time in addition to the system being poorly marketed.

Fred Lougee wrote:

Also would have given someone else, perhaps Atari, to come out with a console which allowed the player to save game data.

With Atari being one of the key players responsible for the crash I don't think anything changes for them regardless.

Where they began to get into trouble was when Howard Hughes bought the operation. Hughes was notoriously an obsessive/compulsive with his fingers in too many pies who micromanaged everything.

He made Citizen Kane starring Orson Wells as a personal affront to newspaper magnate William Randolph Hurst, it's regarded as one of the greatest movies ever by some people (not me) but everything else that came out of the studio during his ownership was substandard. In the early 1950s he sold the studio the General Tire. There were in the process of building a broadcast empire, lots of radio stations, it eventually became the Mutual Radio Network. Ho hum, another day in corporate America. The bosses at General Tire decided that the studio was unsalvagable so they closed it in 1958 and sold the property. RKO General was the company which existed to manage the copyrights for the intellectual properties of RKO Pictures. Probably just some guy in an office in the HQ of General Tire wearing three other hats.

The Universal came along in the late '70s with a blockbuster remake of King Kong, directed by Dino De Laurentis, starring Jessica Lange and Jeff Bridges, with the big ape climbing the World Trade Center. Now that I think about it, that might have been the first time Jeff Bridges had a beard for a role, so genesis of "The Dude" right there. If whoever was running things at RKO General had better lawyers, or more money for better lawyers, then Universal probably would not have gotten away with a judgement that King Kong was public domain. At the least, RKO General would have been able to collect a nice lump of the box office gross. Who hoo...one corporation taking from another, color me enthused. Or not.

But then it would have been RKO General coming after Nintendo for copyright infringement. Know what? Some old guy in an office somewhere, has no idea what the heck arcade video games are. I think Yamauchi-Sama would have settled out of court for $2M, the guy at RKO General would have walked away like he'd just won the lottery.