The cracks were showing throughout it, but it was salvageable, and I think had they made more games of the same style we might have tolerated them. It certainly had the best plot out of any of them, and would have remained that way if only that stupid clone hedgehog had stayed dead!
Cronus Invictus: An Alternate Console Wars (Something a bit different)
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
The cracks were showing throughout it, but it was salvageable, and I think had they made more games of the same style we might have tolerated them. It certainly had the best plot out of any of them, and would have remained that way if only that stupid clone hedgehog had stayed dead!
It's an interesting TL. I am a proud Sony Fanboy so where you think Sony TV-tropes'd it, I look at it as Sony saving gaming and creating an atmosphere that helped increase creativity. The smartest thing SEGA has done recently is related to their acquisition of CA and Valkyria Chronicles. So basically I like to laugh at SEGA backers as I think most of their console games were overrated.
So my feelings are mixed.
So my feelings are mixed.
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Thande
Donor
It's an interesting definition of creativity that consists of endless identical FPSes in shit brown and John Major grey
As for the question of when Sonic jumped the shark: being overly conservative, I would actually place it between Sonic 2 and Sonic 3. 3 & Knuckles were certainly good games, but it was at that point that it stopped feeling like Sonic for me.
It also kills two rather than one of the sources of NES homebrew games. Important because the NES saw a fair few (really bad) homebrew ports of 16-bit games from other systems; there was even a port of Sonic 1 if you can believe that. Because, obviously, only licensed companies are allowed to do that (see: half the Game Gear's library
I'm familiar with them existing but were they at all important?
Also...most homebrew nintendo carts I've seen were stand alone.
C'mon, how many interesting games were approved because of Sony's hands-off policy compared to Nintendo's required approval? Not to mention stuff like SoTC and ICO that Sony did themselves.It's an interesting definition of creativity that consists of endless identical FPSes in shit brown and John Major grey
Thande
Donor
1991
The year saw a number of breakthroughs for personal computer based gaming, with the release of Sid Meier’s Civilization and the invention of the first true graphics accelerator chip, which would enable PCs to effectively compete with consoles again. Another World was released for the Amiga 500 and other platforms; the game was not a commercial success, but is historically significant due to being one of the first to use the 3D polygonal graphics that would later become the standard.
Original MSDOS version of “Civilization”, depicting Europe
IBM computers using Microsoft Disk Operating System (MSDOS) had by this point seized the majority of the global market. Sometimes Microsoft’s GUI overlay, Windows 3.0, was used, but Microsoft GUIs did not become truly ubiquitous until the release of Windows 3.1 the following year. 3.0 is nonetheless significant in gaming as it included the first releases of Microsoft’s renowned productivity-destroyers, Solitaire and Minesweeper.
Kiss goodbye to your afternoon’s work, sucker!
However, rumblings from the PC world were indubitably overshadowed by the earthquakes rippling through the still-dominant sector of console gaming. Nintendo released the Super Famicom in North America under the name Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) and using a new casing with a distinctive grey and purple colour scheme.
The American version of the SNES; note the buttons on the controller have been changed to match the colour scheme of the different casing.
The SNES came packaged with Super Mario Bros. 4 under the less sequelitic name of Super Mario World. Meanwhile in Japan Nintendo released its first Super Famicom game in its other main franchise, Zelda III: The Shadow of the Past[1] to rave reviews. Also for the Japanese market only, Sega released its Mega CD add-on, allowing the Mega Drive to play games on CD. Initially the library of CD games was rather poor owing to the fact that game developers didn’t have a clue what to do with all the extra storage space, and mostly resorted to notoriously bad full-motion video (FMV) games where the actual gameplay was hampered by gratuitous video clips. Nonetheless, Nintendo had to keep up with the Joneses, and accelerated development of its SNES-CD add-on collaboration with Sony.
The Mega Drive with Mega CD[2]
Meanwhile, Sega hesitated over the Game Gear. The handheld had failed to claw away much of the Game Boy’s market in Japan, and now they were preparing to release it in the North American market, where besides the Game Boy there was also the Atari Lynx, a sophisticated colour handheld which had been annihilated by the Game Boy. For a while a plan called Project Vulcan[3] was mooted, by which Sega would release the Game Gear in tandem with a redesigned “Game Gear Lite”, a cheaper, lighter, monochrome version that would compete more directly with the Game Boy. This was eventually vetoed on the grounds that it would be difficult to interconvert games, and releasing two separate libraries of games would be prohibitively expensive. Instead, Sega went ahead and released the Game Gear in America anyway, but elected to continue with its alternative plan, Project Hermes, hoping it would bear fruit before the European release…
But the Game Gear’s future, like that of the Mega Drive and Mega CD, would ultimately rest not on technical considerations but on marketing, on inspiration – on genius. For it was this year that Sega’s AM8 division – soon to rename itself Sonic Team out of pride for its creation – released the Mario-killer Kalinske had envisaged.
The little blue hedgehog that could.
Sonic the Hedgehog, whose underlying concept of a supersonic blue hedgehog fighting an egg-themed villain based on Teddy Roosevelt by collecting emeralds made entirely of evil was every bit as bonkers as anything the Mario franchise could offer, was technically impressive. The Mega Drive’s graphics capabilities were used to their full to deliver a high-speed experience that outdid anything the NES could manage. The gameplay took some inspiration from the Mario and Mega Man franchises while also developing its own ideas, including the iconic loop-the-loop. Finally, the game’s soundtrack was exceptional, illustrating that the Mega Drive’s inferior sound capabilities compared to the SNES need not hold it back – it was what you did with it that counted. At this point in time the only other game franchise to equal Sonic’s diversity and quality of music was Mega Man, which was still restricted to the 8-bit sounds of the NES.
The Green Hill Zone: “If it has loop-the-loops in it, it must be good!”
Gambling everything on Sonic’s success, Sega also released 8-bit versions of the game on the Master System and Game Gear (part-developed by Ancient) which reproduced some of the levels of the game while adding new ones and concluding in the Sky Base Zone – which would set a trend for later Sonic games finishing with a confrontation in the sky.
Sonic 8-bit: the Sky Base Zone
The game was a runaway success. Kalinske’s gamble had succeeded. In North America the “Genesis” held off the SNES’ entry into the market, while in Europe – despite a mistake with the PAL conversion resulting in the game being noticeably slower – Sonic made Sega’s already good position dominant. Even in Japan the blue hedgehog made an impact, though the character had been designed for the American market (the colours are a dead giveaway).
Some notes on butterflies: this version of Sonic 1 is subtly different from OTL’s. The order of zones goes Green Hill – Marble – Labyrinth – Spring Yard – Star Light – Scrap Brain, with the Labyrinth and Spring Yard zones switched; this reflects some of the swaps made in OTL development. Also, the ball-running sequences in Green Hill are retained (and therefore Robotnik uses a spiked ball on his Egg-o-matic for the Green Hill boss rather than the reused textured ball) and the random UFOs in the background of the Marble Zone were also kept. Finally, the Final Zone got its own distinctive music rather than a reuse of the boss theme.
Sega was quick to capitalise on Sonic’s success by going full throttle on tie-in media and merchandise, authorising two different animated series, a British series of novels and eventually tie-ins, a Japanese manga and much more. Continuity was chaotic and cheerfully random, with almost every adaptation following its own version of the backstory, which would have consequences later on. All of them took the opportunity to direct many Take-Thats to the series Sonic had dethroned.
At the same time, in America Atari had been considering re-entering the console market for a while, and was working on ‘leapfrogging’ the competition by developing a 32-bit console called the Panther or possibly even a 64-bit console named the Jaguar. However, disappointing progress on the Panther led the company to consider scrapping it and just focusing on the Jaguar[4] before the hype surrounding the Sega Mega CD, the PC Engine Super CD, and the SNES-CD in Japan led to a new plan. Atari decided to pursue a pure 32-bit console using CD media, which they would be able to sell at a lower price as a single unit than the Mega Drive plus Mega CD or the SNES plus SNES-CD. Furthermore, the use of CDs would make it much easier to port the growing number of popular PC games onto the console. To that end, Atari hired Flare Technology, a British-based company made up of former ZX Spectrum people, to design the new console in collaboration with Trip Hawkins of Electronic Arts and a host of American multimedia interests: it was hoped that the new console could also be promoted as a multimedia platform. In the end, this was scaled back to a CD player and photo-CD system in order to cut pricing down to acceptable levels.[5] The wisdom of this decision was demonstrated the same year with the release of the Philips/Panasonic “eCD”, an overpriced multimedia system-cum-console plagued by reliability issues.[6]
[1] Here we can see butterflies start to appear – in fact the game is very close to OTL’s The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, but titles tend to be the most amorphous things in gaming, often changed at the last minute, and so are very susceptible to butterflies.
[2] Note the significant lack of the qualification “Version 1”.
[3] Sega plans in this era were named after planets. The Game Gear was Project Mercury; Vulcan was the hypothetical, and eventually proved to be nonexistent, extra planet between Mercury and the Sun that was invented before general relativity to try and explain perturbations of Mercury’s orbit.
[4] Which is what happened in OTL, with disastrous consequences.
[5] In OTL Hawkins and co. formed the 3DO Group, which indeed produced an overpriced CD “multimedia platform”, the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer.
[7] The eCD is TTL’s version of the CDi, basically the same except without even Nintendo’s name to give it any credibility.
The year saw a number of breakthroughs for personal computer based gaming, with the release of Sid Meier’s Civilization and the invention of the first true graphics accelerator chip, which would enable PCs to effectively compete with consoles again. Another World was released for the Amiga 500 and other platforms; the game was not a commercial success, but is historically significant due to being one of the first to use the 3D polygonal graphics that would later become the standard.
Original MSDOS version of “Civilization”, depicting Europe
IBM computers using Microsoft Disk Operating System (MSDOS) had by this point seized the majority of the global market. Sometimes Microsoft’s GUI overlay, Windows 3.0, was used, but Microsoft GUIs did not become truly ubiquitous until the release of Windows 3.1 the following year. 3.0 is nonetheless significant in gaming as it included the first releases of Microsoft’s renowned productivity-destroyers, Solitaire and Minesweeper.
Kiss goodbye to your afternoon’s work, sucker!
However, rumblings from the PC world were indubitably overshadowed by the earthquakes rippling through the still-dominant sector of console gaming. Nintendo released the Super Famicom in North America under the name Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) and using a new casing with a distinctive grey and purple colour scheme.
The American version of the SNES; note the buttons on the controller have been changed to match the colour scheme of the different casing.
The SNES came packaged with Super Mario Bros. 4 under the less sequelitic name of Super Mario World. Meanwhile in Japan Nintendo released its first Super Famicom game in its other main franchise, Zelda III: The Shadow of the Past[1] to rave reviews. Also for the Japanese market only, Sega released its Mega CD add-on, allowing the Mega Drive to play games on CD. Initially the library of CD games was rather poor owing to the fact that game developers didn’t have a clue what to do with all the extra storage space, and mostly resorted to notoriously bad full-motion video (FMV) games where the actual gameplay was hampered by gratuitous video clips. Nonetheless, Nintendo had to keep up with the Joneses, and accelerated development of its SNES-CD add-on collaboration with Sony.
The Mega Drive with Mega CD[2]
Meanwhile, Sega hesitated over the Game Gear. The handheld had failed to claw away much of the Game Boy’s market in Japan, and now they were preparing to release it in the North American market, where besides the Game Boy there was also the Atari Lynx, a sophisticated colour handheld which had been annihilated by the Game Boy. For a while a plan called Project Vulcan[3] was mooted, by which Sega would release the Game Gear in tandem with a redesigned “Game Gear Lite”, a cheaper, lighter, monochrome version that would compete more directly with the Game Boy. This was eventually vetoed on the grounds that it would be difficult to interconvert games, and releasing two separate libraries of games would be prohibitively expensive. Instead, Sega went ahead and released the Game Gear in America anyway, but elected to continue with its alternative plan, Project Hermes, hoping it would bear fruit before the European release…
But the Game Gear’s future, like that of the Mega Drive and Mega CD, would ultimately rest not on technical considerations but on marketing, on inspiration – on genius. For it was this year that Sega’s AM8 division – soon to rename itself Sonic Team out of pride for its creation – released the Mario-killer Kalinske had envisaged.
The little blue hedgehog that could.
Sonic the Hedgehog, whose underlying concept of a supersonic blue hedgehog fighting an egg-themed villain based on Teddy Roosevelt by collecting emeralds made entirely of evil was every bit as bonkers as anything the Mario franchise could offer, was technically impressive. The Mega Drive’s graphics capabilities were used to their full to deliver a high-speed experience that outdid anything the NES could manage. The gameplay took some inspiration from the Mario and Mega Man franchises while also developing its own ideas, including the iconic loop-the-loop. Finally, the game’s soundtrack was exceptional, illustrating that the Mega Drive’s inferior sound capabilities compared to the SNES need not hold it back – it was what you did with it that counted. At this point in time the only other game franchise to equal Sonic’s diversity and quality of music was Mega Man, which was still restricted to the 8-bit sounds of the NES.
The Green Hill Zone: “If it has loop-the-loops in it, it must be good!”
Gambling everything on Sonic’s success, Sega also released 8-bit versions of the game on the Master System and Game Gear (part-developed by Ancient) which reproduced some of the levels of the game while adding new ones and concluding in the Sky Base Zone – which would set a trend for later Sonic games finishing with a confrontation in the sky.
Sonic 8-bit: the Sky Base Zone
The game was a runaway success. Kalinske’s gamble had succeeded. In North America the “Genesis” held off the SNES’ entry into the market, while in Europe – despite a mistake with the PAL conversion resulting in the game being noticeably slower – Sonic made Sega’s already good position dominant. Even in Japan the blue hedgehog made an impact, though the character had been designed for the American market (the colours are a dead giveaway).
Some notes on butterflies: this version of Sonic 1 is subtly different from OTL’s. The order of zones goes Green Hill – Marble – Labyrinth – Spring Yard – Star Light – Scrap Brain, with the Labyrinth and Spring Yard zones switched; this reflects some of the swaps made in OTL development. Also, the ball-running sequences in Green Hill are retained (and therefore Robotnik uses a spiked ball on his Egg-o-matic for the Green Hill boss rather than the reused textured ball) and the random UFOs in the background of the Marble Zone were also kept. Finally, the Final Zone got its own distinctive music rather than a reuse of the boss theme.
Sega was quick to capitalise on Sonic’s success by going full throttle on tie-in media and merchandise, authorising two different animated series, a British series of novels and eventually tie-ins, a Japanese manga and much more. Continuity was chaotic and cheerfully random, with almost every adaptation following its own version of the backstory, which would have consequences later on. All of them took the opportunity to direct many Take-Thats to the series Sonic had dethroned.
Sonic the Hedgehog in Robotnik’s Laboratory said:
At the same time, in America Atari had been considering re-entering the console market for a while, and was working on ‘leapfrogging’ the competition by developing a 32-bit console called the Panther or possibly even a 64-bit console named the Jaguar. However, disappointing progress on the Panther led the company to consider scrapping it and just focusing on the Jaguar[4] before the hype surrounding the Sega Mega CD, the PC Engine Super CD, and the SNES-CD in Japan led to a new plan. Atari decided to pursue a pure 32-bit console using CD media, which they would be able to sell at a lower price as a single unit than the Mega Drive plus Mega CD or the SNES plus SNES-CD. Furthermore, the use of CDs would make it much easier to port the growing number of popular PC games onto the console. To that end, Atari hired Flare Technology, a British-based company made up of former ZX Spectrum people, to design the new console in collaboration with Trip Hawkins of Electronic Arts and a host of American multimedia interests: it was hoped that the new console could also be promoted as a multimedia platform. In the end, this was scaled back to a CD player and photo-CD system in order to cut pricing down to acceptable levels.[5] The wisdom of this decision was demonstrated the same year with the release of the Philips/Panasonic “eCD”, an overpriced multimedia system-cum-console plagued by reliability issues.[6]
[1] Here we can see butterflies start to appear – in fact the game is very close to OTL’s The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, but titles tend to be the most amorphous things in gaming, often changed at the last minute, and so are very susceptible to butterflies.
[2] Note the significant lack of the qualification “Version 1”.
[3] Sega plans in this era were named after planets. The Game Gear was Project Mercury; Vulcan was the hypothetical, and eventually proved to be nonexistent, extra planet between Mercury and the Sun that was invented before general relativity to try and explain perturbations of Mercury’s orbit.
[4] Which is what happened in OTL, with disastrous consequences.
[5] In OTL Hawkins and co. formed the 3DO Group, which indeed produced an overpriced CD “multimedia platform”, the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer.
[7] The eCD is TTL’s version of the CDi, basically the same except without even Nintendo’s name to give it any credibility.
I wonder what New World Computing's fate will be, given that 3DO has been removed...
President Al Bundy
Banned
An Atari Jaguar with the library of 3DO-Games (Where some games were really good, like Super Street Fighter II Turbo or the first Need for Speed) could make up a good contender against Nintendo and Sega.
Your timeline will also create butterflies which reach the Angry Video Game Nerd. Maybe you could "write" a fictional AVGN-Episode from TTL. Maybe from the "eCD"
Your timeline will also create butterflies which reach the Angry Video Game Nerd. Maybe you could "write" a fictional AVGN-Episode from TTL. Maybe from the "eCD"
Hm, it seems butterflies didn't begin to set in in earnest until 1991, so SC1 should be safe. SC2... hm, I can't see any reason why any direct change here would kill it, so I suspect that a SC2 would still come out, though it might not be The Ur-Quan Masters, and many details of it might be different.
Interesting.
More ripples: According to an old article I read the Saturn was beefed up to have a better chance against the Playstation. If that does not happen the 3DO and Atari Jaguar consoles should do better even if Sega now avoids that disastrous early launch that flogged their image.
The 32x might also do better. The CD32 and CD-I OTOH were true duds. I recall seeing them demonstrated in a shop right next to a tired old SNES. The CD-I looked somewhat impressive with 7th guest, but that was its only good game, while the CD32 pumped out graphics and sound that looked and sounded worse than whatever the SNES was playing.
Now, what system will Namco port Ridge Racer and Tekken to?
As I recall, the Saturn was supposed to have a single Hitachi SH-1 processor as it's CPU, but Sega redesigned the Saturn with 2 SH-1's to compete with the Playstation's rumoured specifications, which turned out to be iincorrect...
As a result, the Saturn's launch was delayed by a year to 18 months, while they redesigned it, & it became harder for delevopers, to code games for a dual processor system...
So Saturn gets launched in it's original spec, a year earlier...?
JJohnson
Banned
Thanks for keeping Atari in the game! I hope they manage in this ATL to bring back some classic Atari 2600 games (Pitfall, etc)...which may have ripple effect on Tomb Raider - having two archaeology games competing like Mario/Sonic might help keep both series fresher.
As to the SNES CD, I hope it does well enough that Nintendo sticks with it, and possibly CD-based N64. I heard that it was going to also beef up the specs of the SNES a bit more, possibly bringing it up to a 32-bit system in some stories I read.
Also, will MS still bring out X-Box? I hope so, as their console is actually a favorite of mine, aside from the SNES. With Sony out of the console game, perhaps HD-DVD will win out in this reality as the X-Box HD media for the possible X-Box 360, or an avoidance altogether of the BR/HD-DVD conflict.
Keep up the good work!
As to the SNES CD, I hope it does well enough that Nintendo sticks with it, and possibly CD-based N64. I heard that it was going to also beef up the specs of the SNES a bit more, possibly bringing it up to a 32-bit system in some stories I read.
Also, will MS still bring out X-Box? I hope so, as their console is actually a favorite of mine, aside from the SNES. With Sony out of the console game, perhaps HD-DVD will win out in this reality as the X-Box HD media for the possible X-Box 360, or an avoidance altogether of the BR/HD-DVD conflict.
Keep up the good work!
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I suspect NSF was made as a 3DO show off piece so it may just have been butterflied away. Also, without the 3DO and later M2 Matsushita may try to develop their own console instead.
Thande
Donor
Thanks for the links mate - some better pictures of the Neptune than I had for a start...
"Overly conservative" it is, but hey, conservatism is better than the guy who said in his youtube review of '06 "This is a pretty good game."
Thande
Donor
I have actually ordered Sonic Adventure for Christmas to see what all the fuss is about. TBH my objections were never about graphics or control, but about how the tail was wagging the dog at Sega: the Japanese divisions should never have been allowed creative control over what was ultimately an American franchise appealing primarily to Americans and Europeans.
Thande
Donor
Yeah but it's associated with Atari.
TTL we might see an exclusive release of something like OTL's Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure (only with better graphics) on the new-Atari-console-whose-name-I'm-not-giving-away-yet.