What If…Atari Had Acquired The Rights To The NES?
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Here is a fun little hypothetical article. In fact, Ive often wonder this myself. I hope they do a second one about ‘What If Nintendo and Sony had made the Playstation a CD drive for the SNES’. Its always fun to play the What If game.
But what if? What if things hadn’t fallen through, and Nintendo’s Famicom had made it to the U.S. as the Atari Entertainment System — the AES, rather than the NES? Here’s a rundown of how history played out… and how it could have happened.
Submitter: Nobullet
Nick - July 18th, 2005 - 
tutu tom on July 18, 2005 at 10:29 am
oh this is bad
tutu tom on July 18, 2005 at 10:29 am
This really isnt good.
tutu tom on July 18, 2005 at 10:30 am
My goodness this cant be true
vakerorokero on July 18, 2005 at 11:58 am
You wish. Had This happened, maybe this site would still be about Comics, or maybe the internet would be the same as now. If Atari had bought the Nintendo, we probably wouldn’t have as many developers as right now. Sony probably wouldn’t be in gaming. Sega would still be alive and all those 64bit jaguars would still be in the works, why? Look at Atari, this was a company of giant hits, but hundreds of crap games, just like Sony’s Playstation became. We would be using joysticks for gaming and the gamepad would have never work for an american market. Nintendo even did the NES ADVANTAGE for the american market in case someone couldn’t use the gamepad. Mario would still be Mario, but he would have never beaten Mickey Mouse in recognition, probably Donkey Kong would be Nintendo’s biggest star, why?? atari, wouldn’t have released the Nintendo with Super Mario Bros or even Duck Hunt. It would have been something American and cheap, like Missile Commander or a Puzzle game. If Atari brought the Nintendo to America, the japanese developers would have been reluctant to bring all their japanese games to america without changes and most of the great ones, would have made it here. The Big Players? Probably Capcom, Konami, Mattel, Disney, Akklaim, Activision, and a few obscure companies that passed away during the 80’s.
That I think would have happened is that Apple and IBM would have gotten into gaming and would probably be having big battles with Sega, the Japanese giant. Maybe even Apple would have game development, something like Mario Paint or quirky games like those in the KOnami Bemani line.
namor7 on July 18, 2005 at 7:04 pm
1up is really starting to feature some great work recently. They started as a bit of an IGN clone, but are getting better and more unique by the day.
daniel schroeder on July 21, 2005 at 11:28 am
egm’s sept, oct, or nov issue did a what if with a bunch of things including ‘what if nintendo didn’t f themselves in the b by telling sony to piss off about the cd drive for the snes’