Ladies and gentlemen, what are my two orders of 561? As always, I'm your host, Justin Baker, and as always, I'm joined by a viable human, Chris Saturn. Hi, Justin. Hi, Saturn.
No housekeeping this week. Things are, I don't want to say normal. Normal's not the word. New what?
New normal. I don't like that. I don't like that. I'm just going to say there's no housekeeping.
How about that? We'll just leave it at that. Why don't we stop at the Matrix server? Go join us in Matrix.
In Andrews Post and we're on Pixel Fed and Limi and all that other shit. If you do the federated spaces, then we're in those. Mastodon. I have no idea what Pixel Fed is.
It's like Instagram, but not garbage made by garbage people. I see. Yeah. It's federated Instagram, basically.
So if you do any of those, then you can hang out with us there. If you do regular social media, then that's good. We're not there. We're not going to go back.
That's good. See you later. Anywho, my week. I've been hard upon the Poke Nans.
Played some more Poke in. My wife is 40 plus hours in Poke. She's coming up on, I keep asking her, I'm like, you done? You're real credit?
Yeah. And she's like, no. I think it is actually quite a bit longer than we're anticipating. But I'm in the third or fourth zone, lagging way behind her.
But I was playing it. I was like, this is fun. I should go back to Pokemon Scarlet because they did fix it for Switch 2 to their credit. And I was like, I need to go back and finish that.
I went back to Pokemon Scarlet. And in like two hours finished the whole game. I got all the rest of the badges. I finished all the Titan battles.
I did all of the Team Star vases and battles that go along. I did all of it at once. Apparently, I was like 95% done with the game and was like, I'm done. But I actually ended up having fun with it because every time I go back to it, I'm like, this, the actual gameplay, like fighting the Pokemon is great.
It's fun. It's more interactive and enjoyable than it possibly ever has been. But then the world itself is the worst. And the story is terrible.
It's so real world. It's terrible in the opposite way. Oh, I see. Where nothing is ever a threat and everyone is your friend.
Literally, this is how patronizing the game is. When you're in the fight, so I don't know if you know. Well, yeah, I mean you play Pokemon the one anyway. You do the eight gym battles and then you go fight the elite four.
And then you fight the Pokemon champion or whatever, right? And when I'm fighting the Pokemon champion, this is the strongest trainer in the world, they are every time I knock one of their Pokemon out, it has a cutscene where they encourage me. Where they're like, that's a great move. Good job.
I can see you're fighting with all your heart and stuff like that. I'm like, shut up. Be a rival or aggressive or something. I don't know.
This is annoying to me. And then your rival in the game, because every game has a rival who traditionally is kind of rude to you. They're like, we're best friends and I love you and I'm so glad we're doing this Pokemon journey together. I love you, but only because I want you to get stronger and I care for you so much.
And I'm like, God damn it. You're just one person and then you go and fight the bad guys, the team star, the team rocket of Scarlet and Violet. And you go over there and they're like, actually, we're pretty nice people. We were just bullied and you're only fighting us because we're true and from school.
But here's our sad story about how we're all best friends and friendship is magic. And I'm like, what the fuck? Is anyone ever angry in this world? Like, does anyone ever like, fuck you?
I can't. Well, the word fuck doesn't exist in Pokemon universe. I just want someone to like, want me to fail. You know what I mean?
It's too positive. It's like saccharin. You need the slightest amount of friction. Yes, I just want anyone to be like, I'm the bad guy.
And maybe like, fuck you then. But there's like, I'm the bad guy. But can we be friends? You're doing great.
I'm like, shut up. I just, I just that last battle where she's like, great job. I'm like, fuck you. I think what it is is I'm so cynical and jaded that it just feels sarcastic, maybe is what it is.
But it's, it's again, the gameplay, the actual combat gameplay, very fun. And I had a lot more fun with it. This go around because I was, I went and I got on my other Pokemon from Pokemon home. And then I've had for years, like years ago, I think I'm one of the DS Pokemon.
My brother traded me a set of starters, a Charizard or a Charmander of Bulbasaur in a Squirtle. And he named them all like Justin Jr, Little Justin Justin the second. And I've kept them for the, I mean, got out of these Pokemon for 15 years, maybe more. I don't know.
And so I got them out of my box and ditched all the new Pokemon. I've been playing with him and I had a lot more fun doing that because something about like playing with the same legacy Pokemon from years and years ago was like this particularly neat. It's fair. Yeah, I just, I want any amount of friction or adversarial attitudes in the game.
Just literally every person is like, I'm the bad guy because I don't have any friends. Will you be my friend? You seem so nice. I'm like, stop.
I can't, what are the bad guys? I beat her and she cried. And then I felt bad. I was like, you can't cry.
That makes me feel like an asshole. Like I'm sorry. Maybe that's why everybody in the game is nice. Maybe you're the bad guy all along.
Oh my God. I mean, think about that. That makes perfect sense. I'm completely emotionless at all times.
I brutalized people that have like level two Pokemon by showing up at like a level 75, Venus forward, crushing them into the dirt. Well, see they, they see you as the villain. This is my new head cane and I'm the villain of Pokemon Scarlet. Makes it a better game.
Also I think my server project that I've been working on is mostly, I don't want to say complete because are they ever complete? No, but it is in enough state that I'm just going to kind of leave it alone and let it do its thing. So I'm kind of ready to hunker down for this silicon winter that we're entering into where literally everything is just insanely priced. That's the worst.
But I have gotten it to where I don't think I rely on any online services for anything anymore that I'm not hosting. I email, email. I don't post my own email. I do have to pay for my email still.
And I do still use Google Docs for show stuff. So that's the two, I guess everything else. I don't have it. I got my pictures out of the cloud.
I'm not doing, I canceled all my Microsoft 365 stuff. I've canceled all my streaming services. I think I'm pretty well detached and it feels pretty good. Yeah, it's pretty good.
Yeah, yeah. I got another cancellation email this week from one of the services that I allowed to expire when it's terminated. So it does feel good. Yeah, it's nice.
I did realize I've been paying for Squarespace for like three years for what? I don't know. I don't even remember subscribing to it. Courtney was just looking at the bank and she was like, you pay for Squarespace?
And I was like, no, that has to be you. And then I went and looked and I was like, oh, it's me. And I've been subscribed for three years. And she was like, why?
And I was like, I don't remember doing this. I have no idea. Inevitably, I was working on something sub to try to like incorporate it into the project and then abandon the project and forgot to unsubsub. So that's what are you doing?
What are you doing, Satter? So I've been trying to troubleshoot my issues with Xbox remote play for a while now. So one, the services got much worse. It is garbage even over my home network with a wired connection.
I don't know when that happened. Sometime after the Series X released, they did some update and now it's worse than it used to be. But it's a playable and I wanted to be able to play my Xbox, at least on other devices on my home network. Unlike a PlayStation, you can't play it on the last model Xbox because like I can play my PS5 on my PS4 remotely.
Yeah, I can't play my Series X on my Xbox one remotely. That's not an option. It's on a Windows PC or any other device through a Chromium browser. So everything is an Xbox, except your Xbox.
Right. Great. So I was, but the problem was anytime I tried to connect to my Xbox remotely, I would just get a black screen with audio unless I turned on the television. If I went and turned on the TV, it was connected to everything work perfectly.
The CEC maybe? So it's called E-BIP. Oh. It's the HDMI handshake that the TV and the Xbox have.
My TV doesn't provide that while it is off while some other TVs will. It instead provides garbage data because of the E-V-R-R. And so my Xbox thought that it could not handle any resolution at all. So it was just displaying in no resolution.
And I found that there are little devices called E-BIP emulators or E-BIP controllers that you can just stick in between the HDMI connection from your TV and your Xbox that will emulate the signal that the TV was broadcasting and then you can stream it regularly. And I got one of these little guys for like 20 bucks and plugged it in. And it works. It works great.
So when I'm streaming, I don't have to turn on the TV first. It shows the 4K signal downscaled to 1080p, which is as much as remote play can do anyway, which is fine. And then if I'm playing on my TV, it still displays 4K 120 B-R-R. But because the little adapter guy is not technically capable of B-R-R, I sometimes get the slightest amount of video static like once every five minutes in one frame.
And I started to notice it and it's bugging me and I'm like, do I just kill this device and put up with it? Yeah, that's getting to me right now. I'm trying to decide which way I go. And they do make e-bip emulators that support HDMI 2.1 and so they'd be able to handle the 120 B-R-R.
And they just cost twice as much. They cost like five times as much. Oh my God. Some of them are 10 times as much.
Because the one I got was like $20, but the ones that support 2.1 started like $180. Boof. So I'm like, I just put up with it. But then I was also having controller issues because I was mentioning on one of the last episodes about how I was having issues with my 8-bit dev ultimate and I finally switched to Bluetooth and everything was working fine.
The problem is when you run it Bluetooth on Linux, it uses the equivalent of direct input instead of the equivalent of X input. Chromium browsers do not properly see direct input. They see it as generic device. Yeah.
So when they see it, they will not pass through the D-Pads hat switch controls to remote play. And there's no way around it. And I was sitting there trying to find some way to like fake it and emulate X input or whatever. And I'm trying all these different things.
And finally, I'm like, you know what? I'm going to ask the dumb AI bot and I'm going to see if it knows. And I ask Claude and I'm like, oh, I don't want to do. You're doing all the things I would do.
Yeah. And then I ask Jim and I and it's like, oh, this is a classic issue. Let me ask you something. I've been working with AI to help with server stuff lately.
Do they all, whatever your troubleshooting something, do they always go, well, this, that's the smoking gun? Yeah. Yeah. They all want to tell you about the smoking gun.
What the fuck? I don't know what that is. Multiple AIs at this point have been like, well, that's the smoking gun. Yeah.
What? What? What? No, it's not.
It's not. It's not. It's not. It's not.
It's not. It's not. It's not. It's not.
It's not. It's not. It's not. It's not.
Say that. It's not. It's not. It's not.
It's not. I don't want any 15 minutes. How you do this. We can go out to it and buy Jet Prop 10.
I don't want to have any more'. We can go out to it, because that's literally what we get out the top. It's what we get in our B desis. What we got out the top three is night we got our new Gamer optimized format much better than space.
Killing it Microsoft you're killing it. So so my solution is either use Firefox and have my signal drop out or use a PlayStation 5 controller to play my Xbox Series X games That are things that like most people would be like that doesn't bother me But I know that both of those things bother you yes So I could just go into the other room and get an Xbox controller and plug it in my fucking computer But I'm not gonna do that. I'm right proud of that. It's the future.
We shouldn't have to so anyway That's where I'm at right now with my what I've been doing is just giving up on remote play walking into the other room and playing my Xbox It's like like a caveman. Yeah, but Still going through slight aspire. I'm up to ascension seven on all my time now I'm having beaten it with all the characters. Oh, yeah, I know I finally beat it with the silent after like 20 runs on more I don't know I was gonna look how many hours I have maybe it's just hours thing Maybe just played a lot more than me.
I see what steam says. I'm at 36 hours I'm at 21 So definitely behind by a good margin, but not six ascension levels behind I've had some real good luck on some of these runs I think I just bad at the game. I think it's what I'm deciding is I'm just I guess me to that just Real not good at now. You know what I should do.
We should share some seeds Yeah, thank you guy in the chat just more evidence that Justin is terrible at card games, but loves them so much This is true. I am real bad at card games. I do really like them We should share a seed in because then we'll get the same run and we can see it's good call if I'm I think I really do think I'm just real bad at it. I'm enjoying it But yes, I'll drop back down to ascension zero just so we can have the same like level of everything.
Oh boy. Thank you so kind of I'll drop back down to loser level to play on your level. I guess sure Let's see if there's an idiot mode toggle. Let's do some news.
All right First up Sony has spiked prices on PlayStation hardware yet again effective April 2nd. I think it was good to push it a day Sony Well, they announced it the week before April Fool's day, but I'm glad that they did not say it was going to be effective April 1st That would have been two on the nose. I think PS 5 is now six hundred and forty nine dollars It's a PS 5 with no disk drive is now five hundred and ninety nine dollars More than the the PS 5 with the disk drive was at launch by the way. Yeah PS 5 Pro no disk drive is eight hundred and ninety nine dollars.
That's obscene We are right underneath that fabled thousand dollar price point. Yeah, we are right below it I guess brought up to two forty nine, which is brutal for that device I felt like 200 was not a rip off but like rip off adjacent at two forty nine. I struggled to recommend it at all I'll be honest. I I felt some some some fear as soon as they announced that and I immediately bought one while really 99 really have you used it yet?
Nope. I powered it on I connected it and I got it a neat little charger dock And I have not touched it so far. I've got you huh? I expected and then they announced this prices were going up like I gotta get Also, Sony's temporarily suspending sales of SDCF cards and other memory card formats fucking awesome great Yep, I just under the wire bought 10 micro SD cards because I had run out I paid $95 and it was as cheap as I could get them micro center brand And I got two five packs, 32 gig and 64 gig, it was $95.
And that was substantially cheaper than I could get that configuration anywhere else. That's about $10 a card. Yeah, yeah, which is a lot. Yeah.
But I was like, I need to get these because I'm doing a lot of projects right now. And I need micro SD cards. Also just for future stuff. Like I have a super station coming sometime whenever it comes out.
And that's an everybody going to need an SD card. Just like that. Yeah. I was looking at the price comparison because I'd forgotten what the current obscene prices were for Xboxes.
The two terabyte series X, which is their highest ed model, is $800, which is a disgusting amount of money. And it's still 100 bucks less than the PS5 Pro. Yeah. I feel like Nintendo is going to follow suit before two.
Oh, yeah. And I imagine that this is just bracing us all for next generation consoles being $1,000. Yeah. You know, we talked about that steam box a little while back talking about $1,000 like $1,000 and up is going to be a death.
Now, it's starting to seem like $1,000 and up. It's just going to be the same as any console here before too long. It might end up working to valid advantage. We might get priced into the market.
Right. Yeah. Restoring. Let's discuss.
Anyway, mod developer Infidelity announced an SNES port of Mega Man 2. If you don't play Mega Man 2, SNES looks pretty cool. He said that they're not just going to reuse the assets from the Wilywars. Instead, he's requesting, or from the community, he's requesting people to draw our pixel art to put it into the game, which is fun.
That's fun. Propeller Arena, an unreleased streamcast game from Yousuuki that was canceled due to 9-11, is having its online service restored by fans. Yeah. That's fun.
I can imagine what can happen. And we can have our interactive 9-11. Goddamn it. I'm guessing it involves planes?
Possibly. It's a plain, fine game. I don't know why that's where I went with my mind. But I was like, what?
Propeller has to do with 9-11. Maybe it's just really sad about 9-11. He's like, I can't release it. There's a bunch of idiots running around in Propeller hats.
But they only run around on the Twin Towers. What's the problem? Right. That was the issue.
It took place. Andy Dev James Lambert is developing an open world homebrew in 64 game with draw distance and map sizes on scale close to Skyrim that runs at a reasonable frame rate on original hardware proving that the in 64 could have been a lot better than it was probably. That's neat. That's very neat.
Glad to see. Maybe he can fix Quest 64. No. No, I didn't fix Quest 64.
Xenosaga 1 and 2's DS port has received a fan translation. I didn't realize it was reported to DS. Yeah. Well, not in America.
Right. Yeah, obviously. Yeah. But still, just reporting them at all.
Those were the PS2 ones, weren't they? Yeah. Those PS2 ones. I can't imagine what kind of downporting they needed to do to make them work on DS.
Likely had to scale it a bit. Yeah. A little bit. Especially to get both of them on one cart.
I thought there were two separate games. No. Oh my god. The cancel GDC port of 40 Winx has been found and dumped online.
Ritesholder Pico and Reactive has put out a poll asking if they should produce a fiscal release of the prototype release, which is a little odd. Yeah. You should do that. Well, what's nice is they did not immediately issue a take down request for the prototype instead.
That is nice. They apparently endorsed the prototype in a way, because the guy who had found the cart a few months ago, I don't remember, I think it was the hard for games channel. They had found the cart and they're like, well, we're not going to dump it because there is a Ritesholder and we don't want to cause any conflict with them. And all of a sudden, last week, it was released.
And immediately after it was released, the Ritesholder comes out like, hey, should we make a fiscal of this? So let's go. There you go. I'd also cancel the game that was in development for the last seven years and laid off the staff working on it.
Yay. Yay. The future is awesome. This industry is in great shape.
EveryCade Nexus announced coming October for $199, includes dual analog input, Tate Mode, and comes bundled with a Banger because we too pack. Finally, Banger because we make sense on EverCade. It's got Joy-Six. It looks like how the fuck are you going to do this?
Yeah, I'll say this. I have an EverCade. I got one of their handhelds. I'm not in love with EverCade, but I do greatly appreciate what they're doing and that they do seem to kind of care and that they're still putting out new hardware and stuff, more power to them.
It doesn't work well for my situation and the way I play, but I'm glad that they're other doing it. Yeah, I'm glad it's there for the people who want it. I don't know that I'm their audience though. Yeah, I got one and I was like, this is neat.
Why is it better than any of my other emulation of the answers? It's not. In any ways, it's worse. But it's cool.
But those have cartridges and that's cute. It's cool and it's legitimate. So give it that. Trucks didn't extreme received an official release date of July 31st this year.
I hope someone has got to buy a dog too. I hope someone has notified classic game room. I'm sure that he already knows. I'm sure.
Yeah. Nintendo has delisted Mario and Sonic at the 2020 Olympics. Yeah. So goodbye to that one.
Presumably lost the rights to the Olympic Games. Which that one was received kind of OK. If I remember, I think I was most of the Mario and Sonic Olympic Games were received well. Pretty well.
For what it is anyway. Yeah. Right. French consumer rights group UFC choice here.
Quay. Let's say Quixon. Yeah. Has that what you said has filed a lawsuit against Ubisoft over the shutdown of the crew.
Yeah. Good. Yeah. Yeah.
I want to see more consumer rights groups do more of this kind of stuff. I want to see more of my brother's Super Show. And it looks horrible. Oh man.
Some of the pictures make Mario look like he looked in the Donkey Kong cartoon from several years earlier. And that's the weirdest shit to me. The weirdest part is people in the comments being like, obviously you didn't watch the cartoon because that's how bad it was. No, it wasn't.
No, it wasn't. It was bad in many different ways. Yeah. That wasn't a lot of ways.
That wasn't. They've made it worse. Yeah. Across the board.
Right. And finally, a US patent examiner has rejected Nintendo's patent on summoning monsters to fight in combat. Good. Yeah.
Good. Yeah. Because I think that mechanic may have predated Pokemon by no, that's impossible. That's impossible.
Kirby's first appearance was a Super Smash Brothers Pokemon was monster battling game. Yeah. This is all has to be fed. Yoshi's Cookie was the first falling block game.
That's just facts. Nintendo facts. Saturn. Yeah.
Nintendo facts. Steve. Which brings us to our topic at hand. Which is a world without the NES.
World of tomorrow. Synopsis where Fred Savage brings his brother to California to compete in a ColecoVision tournament. California. So we can stop there.
I feel like that's all of it. Yeah, we nailed it. That's it. This is kind of a weird one.
We want to do another hypothetical because we enjoy doing the what if Sega one hypothetical episode. We've done a couple of hypotheticals over the years. So as far as scope, we enjoyed that episode. We want to do another one.
This is again purely speculative and counterfactual, which means you can't prove us wrong. Nobody can. It's the best kind of information. We can declare proudly that we are correct about all of these things.
Saturn, you did most of the notes here. So I appreciate that. There's not a lot to write down because it's mostly just discussion. I did have some big questions.
I want to keep reconsidering as we go through these different sort of historical contexts that we're going to talk about. The first of is what would we have gotten instead of Nintendo Mania? The answer is WrestleMania. I think we already had WrestleMania.
All right. We were got WrestleMania too. We needed a new Mania. So I just want to, for people that maybe don't know, in Nintendo was, it was in the late 80s early 90s, especially around the release of the wizard sort of time, it was kind of treated as like a toy fad for anyone that's been around for like Beanie babies or tickle me Elmo.
It was just kind of this sort of like toy fad is sort of how the media treated it. And obviously it went on to be a lot more than that. But I do think the Nintendo Mania era of NES was really important to the industry. So I do want to keep that thought in kind of in the back of our heads as we're moving forward discussing things like what would that Nintendo Mania area have looked like instead.
Which again, that's very North America centric. The Sollebs is going to be North America centric. Right. Yeah, to be clear.
We are really qualified to talk about North America. It's difficult for us to talk about what it would look like in other markets because we don't have as much information about that. But we're qualified to talk about most of North America. Not really no.
No. I can specifically talk about a small section of Texas. Yeah, that's about it. Pretty confidently.
Yeah, that's what we've got. Which was 40 miles from your slice of Texas and apparently was totally different. So that tells us very strange. My second question that I want to keep in mind is how would the broader landscape of consumer electronics have evolved because I think it's important to remember the NES while accredited in some markets with revitalizing the failing game industry or console industry at the very least.
It also did a lot in the world of consumer electronics. Just broadly, it was a highly successful piece of consumer electronics. And I think it's worth considering that. And then obviously what if Lou Albano was painted blue and eating chili dogs on a poorly constructed children's program instead of what we got?
I think he would have been tails. You think he'd have been tails? Yeah, he would have been tails. That's really not Robotnik though.
It's me tails. Hey, give back to us, Onik. I did well. I did enjoy imagining that.
So let's center take us into this first section which is. What are the wells that have been sonic and then Lou is tails you think? Ah. I'll take it.
I'll take it. I have Sergeant Flutter as Dr. Robotnik. No, it'll be a kind of like teen idol I had on the first episode.
I forget who it was. It was wonderful. So this first section we're kind of talking about what if the Famicom didn't happen at all? Right.
What if they just, Nintendo did not make it? They came up with the idea and Uemura never designed it. Yamushi never approved it. And they're just like, no, we're not doing this.
Forget it. We'll keep doing what we're doing. And that starts, the conversation kind of starts here with SEGA. Right.
Which is where we kind of already went with that last episode. But we did a little bit. It's kind of retreading some ground. I think the question is, would the Master System have been more successful?
And would it have remained on the market for a longer period of time? Again, North America specific. Right. I'm not talking about you, Brazil, where I think you can still buy the Master System on socials.
Since this is explicitly saying if the Famicom itself never even existed, we're kind of dabbling in Japan here as well. And my question is, would the SG-1000 have been so quickly replaced by the Mark II and Mark III, which was the Master System, if Nintendo wasn't there? Or would they have just stuck with the original SG-1000 for a while? I don't know.
I think the SG-1000 was problematic on its face. Because it's basically a cleavision. Yeah. Again, I'm not a huge fan of anything pre-genesis from Sega, to be honest.
I'm not the person to ask. When it comes to the 8-bit era, I'm in ES all the way. But I think the Master System kind of had more identity. It felt like a more cohesive product.
Like the SG-1000 from top to bottom just felt like, I don't know, it felt like when you buy a new computer and it's just got some random part name. It feels like the, to me, whenever I try any of the SG-1000 games, they feel like the Japanese equivalent of Intellivision games like that. Yeah. That late Atari pre-Nintendo era, which is why it got soft so hard by the Famicomps.
Yes. Because it was a little more basic. But yeah, I do wonder if they would have just rode that out for a while if they didn't have the competition or they would just decide it was good enough. I don't know.
I mean if we're talking, because the SG-1000, did it not come out here at all? No, no. We didn't get any of them at all. Yeah.
Okay. I don't think anyone outside of Japan got anything until the Mark III. So I don't know. I think SG-1000, they would have, and again this is us speculating heavily on the 1980s.
But I kind of wonder if they would have released it, looked across the pond at America and how at the same time all this shit was shit in the bed. Right. And then like, ooh, this doesn't seem different enough. This might have issues domestically.
Possibly. And so I kind of wonder if maybe that would have influenced them a little bit just watching the crash across the ocean. Maybe the crash would have also happened there if not for Famicom. Maybe we would have started seeing a downturn over there.
I mean, I know if I remember right, I think the 80s was kind of a boom period for Japan in general because the 90s was the opposite. I remember that. Especially mid 90s. So I don't know.
I think I might have been space in the market. The question is did it differentiate itself enough from the other things that were available? And one of them is the next thing on our list, which is the MSX. MSX 1 and 2 were out and successful and they came out in Europe as well.
And so before we get to the question of what they have happened here without the Famicom, I think we have to ask ourselves like, this would have been second competing with the MSX and with the PC engine and what other places. If the PC engine even happens. If it even happened. I don't know.
The MSX is a weird beast because it was pretty successful in Japan. I've not looked at numbers, but I think in the realm of micro computers in Japan, which is already kind of a sliver of a sliver, it was, you know, it sold well enough. I think obviously it was more. Yeah, it was a...
Right. If you remember the companies behind it were Microsoft and Sony. Right. Who both had some money at the time.
Sony more than Microsoft, but they could have definitely pumped some more marketing into it. But in Japan, it already did pretty dang well. In Europe, it was okay. It was okay.
I am more curious if it even would have shown up over here. If we were to see it. I don't know. I mean, micro computers were never really a big deal over here.
It's Commodore was. Yeah. I mean, let me rephrase it. A few had success, but it wasn't the diverse ocean of micro computers like they had in Europe.
We had several that were really successful over here. We had Commodore, Atari, Apple and Tandy. I've got about Tandy. I guess I don't think about Apple in the same way because they're obviously still around.
Right. Well, Apple too was effectively a micro computer at the time. Yeah, that's true. I mean, we're talking early to mid-80s.
When was the Commodore 64? Was it 83? 83. No, it was 82.
Sorry. So it would have been about the same time, if not a little bit later, for the MSX to have come out here because it hit the Japanese market in 83. Right. So we'd probably be talking 84, 85 before you hit here.
I don't know that it would have made much of a splash by the mid-80s, to be honest. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it depends on what it came with because if it shows up alongside Metal Gear and Snatcher, maybe it's some attention. Yeah.
I think, and this is kind of getting back to one of my key things I want to keep in mind of like, hey, would any of these have tipped off their own version of Nintendo, and how would this have kind of changed consumer electronics? I think there was one of the most important changes that the Famicom made when it came to the States was shifting from, because the initial designs of the NES were like these very home computer adjacent sleek VCR looking prototypes. For anyone that's ever seen them, it looked like a micro computer had a keyboard. It looked very like, it kind of looked like an answering machine to me, but it was very like 80s sleek with faceted panels and stuff.
And they redesigned it to be very toy-edic, whereas very much like this is kind of a kids thing. So I suspect that they did that. Well, even the final release of the NES was designed so it would kind of look like VCRs did. That's a little VCR-like, yeah, but I think they took some of the sleekness away and took all of the computerness away.
Yeah. And so I wonder if maybe at the time the market was just kind of shifting that direction where it's like, yeah, people are buying a lot of like smaller micro computers, because the MSX is very much like, it's a micro computer, like it's the little deck and it's got the keyboard built in, so I kind of wonder if maybe there was some concern in the market of like, hey, we don't want to be throwing new platforms, new computer platforms out there. Well, before NES was successful, everybody was shifting to micro computers because they were selling consoles in the US at the time. Sure, yeah.
I wonder if the NES hadn't happened, would they have continued to shift more towards micro computers and that would give their MSX a chance? Yeah. I don't know. That's a good question.
I mean, like as a piece of hardware releasing in the mid 80s, would it have, you know, because it's not a previous machine. I think it's a touch more powerful than the Commodore 64, though, which would have been its key competition at the time. It was a Z80, eight to 64 kilobytes of memory maximum for the MSX-1 and the graphics for the MSX-1 were at TMS-9918. I think the MSX-1 would have had a harder time competing, but if they jumped straight to the MSX-2, I think you could have seen some traction there.
That's fair. I mean, really, if NES didn't happen, the question is, would micro computers in general have continued on? Exactly. I don't know.
Because it kind of seems like NES comes out and then post NES, it's more the computer market really sort of crunches down a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Let's talk PC Engine.
Yep. Because the question is, do they even bother? Yeah. Yeah.
Do they even fucking bother making a thing? Yeah. I think they're really struggling to get into that market at some point, if video games were continuing to succeed anyway, because they already had the PC-88. They had the most successful computer line in Japan at the time.
I could see them trying to make something of a home console. I don't know if they would have teamed up with Hudson for it. I don't know if they would have gone the way they went. I could see them just releasing a consolized version of a PC-88 in the same way that Commodore released a consolized version of the C64 over here in the West.
Yeah. And just calling that the PC Engine, which that would have been weird. Yeah. I mean, the PC-88 was a big deal.
I mean, not here, but just like it was like, it was like a big deal. It was really successful. And there are a lot of important PC-88 games. So I could see it.
I do wonder if it would have been a thing, because I mean, in Japan, the PC Engine's main, I like how we were like, we were assuming North America's Century in the morning, and so like, I'm in Japan. This is specifically the part about the Pam Com itself and I have any kind of good Japanese stuff out of the way. In Japan, I mean, the NES was kind of the main competitor of the PC Engine. Right.
So they would have been trying to theoretically compete with, I guess, Sega? Well, also, the whole point of the PC Engine was Hudson wanting to make a more powerful NES, because effectively NES hardware, but more powerful. And so that was their whole gimmick behind it, was we want to keep making NES-style games, but we want some more juice to be able to make them with. And that was Hudson's whole imperative of making the PC Engine.
So without that base of the NES to come from, what do they do? Yeah. I mean, I could see them maybe releasing a less powerful machine trying to compete with Sega in that whatever console space exists, you know, in the non-existent power vacuum of the Fam Com not happening. Right.
I don't know. Like you said, I could see them just going computer, you know, why? Yeah, why? Yeah.
Atari is obviously the big one. You know, the question is, could they have risen from the ashes? Could 7800 have done anything? What stunts could they have pulled to make it happen?
They would have needed different management, because man, they were a wreck. There is, you was the company less than the product. Right. And so I think the market had soured on them enough that they were going to be down for a while, because they, well, when was the 7800?
Was it? It was 878, 788, is when it finally released, but the thing is it was ready to be released in 83. It's just the management, shelved it for three or four years. Yeah.
The imaginary world, Famcom doesn't come out and they don't shelf the 7800. It does come out. That's the scenario where I think Atari has a chance, because the 7800, once backwards compatible with 2600 games, which means it already has a massive library of mostly crap, and two, hardware-wise, it was pretty powerful. Aside from its sound chip, it could compete with the NES in a lot of ways.
So I could have seen that having some traction for a while. Yeah, definitely, definitely. Let's talk the other competitors, Mattel and Gligo, et cetera, because I don't know them. So I'm just going to let you tell me about them.
So Mattel had the Intellivision. Right. But Gligo's main moneymaker at the time was Cabbage Patch Dolls. So I don't know if they really would have cared that much about the video game market for my project.
You know, I do feel like anyone looking at Cabbage Patch Dolls has got to look at it and see, like, this is a limited window. Yeah. Cabbage Patch Dolls are not going to be the toy of the year for more than a few years running. They were a big deal for a little while.
For decades though. Surprisingly long time. The first few years were the real fervor. Yeah, after that, it was just, this is a brand.
Yeah. But I can see them looking at me like, we got to do something other than these Dolls, because it's not going to keep making us the big bucks. Right. But if the Cligo vision itself didn't pick up in sales, I could see them saying, okay, but electronics isn't it.
Let's go back to Toys or Dolls or something. Yeah. Which is effectively what they did do. Yeah.
So I don't know if they really had the long term interest in it. Mattel also seemed to be given up on Intellivision pretty quickly. I think the real competition would have been your PC manufacturers, Commodore, Apple, Atari, and IBM, and Tandy to an extent. But Tandy was mostly making IBM clones already.
Yeah. So I think that Commodore and Atari were the most likely if they had properly pitched their microcomputers as home video game systems earlier. So I have a question. Do we think, because I think, you know, I think you got a fair point, you know, that the market in general might have leaned more into multi-purpose devices, i.e.
computers, that like these also play games, which, you know, there was a market for, you know, here and abroad. Obviously the console market rose alongside it. But if in this imaginary world, the Famicom never comes out, you know, it pulls out, Atari has crashed and burned. Everyone's like, nah, maybe this console thing was just a fad, which to be fair at the time.
The running theory of the time. The sentiment. Yeah, this was just a thing. It was a big deal for a few years and now we're moving on to the next thing, which is Capitraptol's, or...
It was the 1970s version of Londarks. It was everybody got in the car for a while. Creepy crawlers, whatever the next thing is. Easy make ovens.
So my question is, if we're leaning more into microcomputers, that does put us more in the multimedia space. I think it would push us into the multimedia space earlier. Yeah. And I think that means that we would have been pushing into the FMV space earlier.
So my question to you is, assuming these things happen, we all lean microcomputers, which pushes us into CD-ROMs and multimedia, and that's what the market's excited about. Animated menus on your CD-ROM or whatever does FMV stick instead of sort of being a thing that we do for a few years and then go, actually, this is terrible and move on with our lives. So the question I would have is, when could we have gotten to that? Because by the time CD-ROM was really viable in a consumer product, we're already looking into the 90s.
True. That means that they would have shown up at basically the same time we did get them. And I think that in that scenario, we all still would have realized how bad they were. You think so?
I do. I don't think that our tastes would have been that different. Because we still have arcade games to play. True.
We knew what real video games were. We didn't have to put up with this. But it's fair. And I think we would have seen how bad it was.
I've picked up on this kind of thing where there's this sort of, there was this vibe amongst some wrongies out there that it was like, yeah, we've got these arcade games, but these FMV games are the next generation of what video games are. This is what we're moving in. Which, I mean, that was the pitch. Yeah, that was what was pitched, but I don't think anybody would have bought it.
I don't think anybody would have bought it in a different scenario either. I don't know. Because I mean, have you played them? No, I have.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not going to bat for FMV games. I'm just saying, if we don't got Mario 3 at home, it makes it look a little better. I think that pretty quickly everybody would have been like, we could play Solid Hair instead.