What If?
Our hypothetical history lesson examines what would happen if Pong, the 1983 industry crash and the Game Boy had never happened.
11/4/2008 5:30 PM | 0 Comments | Page 3 of 3
What if Nintendo never released the Game Boy?
With sales of its once-popular Game & Watch units starting to flag by 1989, Nintendo decides to abandon the portable market and focus its efforts on the extremely lucrative NES. Atari's Lynx, a clunky, overpriced, battery-hog of a portable system that had attracted minimal interest at first, gets a new lease on life when Atari acquires the exclusive portable licensing rights to an addictive little Russian puzzle game called
Tetris. To capitalize on the surefire hit, Atari designs the Lynx Lite for the 1990 holiday season. This new version of the system is the same on the inside, but sports a much smaller form factor, longer battery life, a brighter screen and, most importantly, a copy of
Tetris included in every box. Sega's Game Gear puts up some token resistance, but the
Tetris-powered Lynx takes off, selling 5 million units in during the 1990 holiday season alone.
Some investors begin to push Nintendo to create a portable system of its own, but the Big N decides it can't afford to take on the Lynx while also defending the newly launched Super Nintendo Entertainment System against the threat of the suddenly hot Sega Genesis. Third-party developers increasingly decide to create simplified, portable Lynx versions of their games alongside those for the Super Nintendo and Genesis. Nintendo and Sega eventually come to the same conclusion, effectively ceding the portable market to Atari by publishing portable versions of their top franchises for the Lynx.
By 1994, the Lynx has a library of over 600 games and near-uncontested control of the portable market. Nintendo decides that it's suddenly not too fond of letting another hardware maker profit from its hottest software franchises (flagging cash reserves from the punishing home console wars might have something to do with this). The company quietly slows down development of games for the Lynx as it prepares to take the portable market by storm with a new kind of system -- one that has a stereoscopic, 3-D, head-mounted display. The Virtual Boy makes a minor splash when it's first released, but the system's clunky design and headache-inducing display fail to attract the support of both gamers or third-party developers. A year later, Atari releases the Lynx Next, a traditional 16-bit portable with a backlit screen that cements Atari's control of the ever-growing portable segment of the market.
By 2000, Sony's PlayStation has effectively sucked up the majority of home console gaming dollars. Without an alternative revenue stream, Nintendo is forced to team up with an equally ailing Sega to release the DreamCube, a desperate joint effort to compete against the Sony juggernaut. When inter-company infighting between Sega and Nintendo causes the DreamCube to predictably fail, the cash-strapped companies decide to drop out of the hardware business and focus exclusively on software. Shortly after dropping out of the hardware race, both companies announce major new releases for the just-announced Lynx DS, expected to be in stores by the end of 2005.
