Alternate Outcomes Of Game Companies/Series

M

Magikrazy

Donkey Kong
Come up with an alternate outcome for a game company or series by changing a notable event in their history.

I'll start with a pretty big one.

Super Mario Bros. Is Not A Success:
Super Mario Bros. is for whatever reason a financial flop. Mario becomes mostly forgotten alongside Ice Climber. The NES's top seller instead becomes Duck Hunt. Duck Hunt would later get incarnations on future consoles and inspire Nintendo to bring back some Laser Shooting Systems. Meanwhile, Zelda being the next biggest hit for them would get a lot more attention, and some concepts Nintendo would have otherwise used for Mario games (for instance, Yoshi debuting in A Link to the Past as a horse, Ganondorf having children named after famous musicians, etc.). However, the big money maker comes later in the SNES era with the mostly unchanged Donkey Kong Country series thanks to their partners at Rareware. However, it's not enough to compete with the Genesis, who just barely sneak ahead. The Nintendo 64 is ultimately their final system. Despite their still great Rareware titles and Zelda 64 critically acclaimed, it wasn't as good as it could have been due to it now being the launch title in this timeline (alongside Duck Hunt 64). The N64 is no match for the PlayStation, even more so due to fewer AAA titles from them. Finally, Nintendo merges with Rareware to form NintendoRare Games (NRG), pulls out of the home console market, and becomes a partner of Sega. With NRG's great library and solid games behind it, the Dreamcast manages to hold its own against the PS2 and Xbox, and Sega keeps making consoles to this day.
 
Final Fantasy is a flop:

There's no alternate scenario here the world would've gone to shit years ago
 
Dr. John H. Watson said:
Final Fantasy is a flop:
Click to expand...
More like Drag-on Quest VI (WIP) said:
Welcome to 19971995, a time where nobody knew yet you could do Watch for Rolling Rocks in 0.5 A presses Super Mario 64 wasn't out yet and a time where GameFAQs was still bloomingliterally emerging as a site. But this is not about modern-day exploits experimental 3D platformers or about an internet site with fairly popular forums despite having very little features. There's a reason this is posted on the Super Mario Boards and not GameFAQs after all.

*something something remember when Enix was good?*
Click to expand...
 
Dr. John H. Watson said:
Final Fantasy is a flop:

There's no alternate scenario here the world would've gone to shit years ago
Click to expand...

iirc Actually that's why its called Final Fantasy. Squaresoft or whatever they were at the time was doing financially poor and they released this as a last hope kinda thing.
 
zero escape 3 was actually satisfying:

the empty void in my soul is filled and i am a whole person again
 
The Wii U ended up being a success finically within it's selling over 10 million in it's first month with Zombi U and Nintendo Land being big hits, as a result Nintendo's third party support increased massively and the PS4 and Xbox One ended up behind in the industry due to Nintendo's one year advantage,. Today in 2017 the Wii U is the by far most played console and is used for e-sports world wide with the most popular being Call of Duty and Smash Bros, sales show no sign of slowing down and new games both first and third party come pumping out with race reviews.
 
Doom is a failure, thus FPS games take a much different direction or just don't get popular and be derided as "infectious" by jealous Mario fans.
 
Nintendo didn't help Sony become popular with the CD thing, so therefore, Nintendo would continue to dominate and I don't know how Sony exclusives would come into fruition.
 
Rareware stays with Nintendo
We get Banjo Threeie
Banjo Threeie announced best game there ever was and ever will be. It even cures cancer

Rohan Kishibe said:
zero escape 3 was actually satisfying:

the empty void in my soul is filled and i am a whole person again
Click to expand...

Life is simply unfair, don't you think
 
smash bros 64 performs poorly and is never released internationally, leading to characters such as captain falcon, ness, and the ice climbers completely fading from memory, while the entire fire emblem series remains completely japan-exclusive due to it never receiving the limelight it got in ssbm

EDIT: i also wanted to add on to the hypothetical smb flop; if smb did actually fare poorly commercially, the entire video game industry of today may not even exist, or at least be much smaller than it is now. if you didn't know, the success of smb and the nes saved the video game industry from the 1983 crash, which threatened to destroy the entire industry due to market oversaturation of poor quality games. it just makes you think that if nintendo was unlucky and smb flopped commercially, a very major component of today's entertainment may not have even come to exist, and not just our lives, but a fairly sizable proportion of the world's lives would be vastly different.
 
Donkey Kong 3 Exceeds Donkey Kong in Success
Donkey Kong 3 becomes way more popular than Donkey Kong. When the NES is released, a new game called "Stanley the Bugman" is a pack-in. The game has Stanley wielding a bug-spray can, using it to shoot enemies much like Super Mario Bros.'s early ideas (List of Super Mario Bros. pre-release and unused content). The game is a huge success and goes on to spawn many sequels and spin-offs. Stanley becomes a world-famous videogame icon while Mario only makes a cameo occasionally.

Nintendo 64DD is a Commercial Success
The Nintendo 64DD has great sales and is released in 2000 in North America, Europe, and Australia. Ura Zelda, the expansion for Ocarina of Time, is released for it, featuring a new plot and new dungeons; as a result, Majora's Mask as we know it never comes into being. [EDIT=Actually, Majora's Mask is released separately. I just found out that Ura Zelda and MM were being developed separately in real life.] A sequel to Super Mario 64 called Super Mario 128 is released. It has similar gameplay to its predecessor, but with new worlds and a 2-player Co-op mode featuring Luigi (causing my avatar to get stuck in Super Mario 128 and never find his way to Super Mario Wiki). All the Mario Artist games are released. Mother 3 is released in 2001 for the N64DD, possibly paving the way for more sequels. Other games that were originally planned as 64DD titles, such as Paper Mario, do end up being released on it. As a result of all of this success, the Gamecube is not released until 2003, making Luigi's Mansion stick to being an N64 title.

Samson said:
EDIT: i also wanted to add on to the hypothetical smb flop; if smb did actually fare poorly commercially, the entire video game industry of today may not even exist, or at least be much smaller than it is now. if you didn't know, the success of smb and the nes saved the video game industry from the 1983 crash, which threatened to destroy the entire industry due to market oversaturation of poor quality games. it just makes you think that if nintendo was unlucky and smb flopped commercially, a very major component of today's entertainment may not have even come to exist, and not just our lives, but a fairly sizable proportion of the world's lives would be vastly different.
Click to expand...
I think in Magikrazy's scenario, Duck Hunt and Zelda would be the ones saving the industry, while Mario would be one of the overlooked series like Ice Climber.
 
sonic 06 was never made and sonic the hedgehog is hailed as a series that's never gone down in quality
 
Kamina said:
sonic 06 was never made and sonic the hedgehog is hailed as a series that's never gone down in quality
Click to expand...

Weelllllll Sonic 06 surely was the big game where the Sonic series really hit their lowest low of which even now haven't completely recovered. That much is true, though that's no guarantee there wouldn't be some people saying the series went downhill. That just happens with anything that has gone on long enough especially in terms of internet fandoms and such. The Shadow the Hedgehog game was also a big concern. Some argue that game started the "Dark Age of Sonic". (And while some would say the Adventure series was when it went downhill, a notion that has come out of the woodwork more recently then back then. Something I'll never ever agree with, but it's certain that alot of what was once considered at least decent when they first came out has been challenged recently)

Though it's possible Shadow might of just gone down as simply a bad game and things would move on. Sonic and the Secret Rings wouldn't exist since that was just a bonus project thing that a team that was originally just supposed to port Sonic 06 to the Wii worked on. So both that and Black Knight doesn't happen. Though that's the only thing about future games that we know somewhat came from Sonic 06. We don't know what would of been the fate of Unleashed and as a result Colors and Generations would be without an 06 happening.

A history of Sonic without Sonic 06 could conceivably be better then how it turned out. But no guarantee of it being that much better that Sonic is considered a near perfect franchise. Alot of what happened with Sonic 06 was the many, many, many, mistakes from Sega. Without a Sonic 06 to humble the company, it's possible they make a game as terrible as Sonic 06 sooner or later. (And no, I'm not talking about Rise of Lyric. In this hypothetical scenario it'd be an entirely different Sonic game they screw up)
 
Samson said:
i also wanted to add on to the hypothetical smb flop; if smb did actually fare poorly commercially, the entire video game industry of today may not even exist, or at least be much smaller than it is now. if you didn't know, the success of smb and the nes saved the video game industry from the 1983 crash, which threatened to destroy the entire industry due to market oversaturation of poor quality games.
Click to expand...
While Super Mario Bros. certainly helped, it was Nintendo's initial marketing of the system as a toy and not a game console that saved the industry. With Super Mario Bros. not selling as well, they probably would kept up the toy aspect of the system until the following year, when The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Kid Icarus were released. Perhaps this would have meant more games compatible with R.O.B. and the Zapper, possibly some other toylike peripherals such as a steering wheel.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back