All Aboard The Battle Bus
(Author's Note: For all intents and purposes, this is to be treated as Massively Multiplayer: Gaming In The New Millennium. Massively Multiplayer has won its Turtledove, and this shouldn't be considered a new timeline for those purposes. We hit the 10,000 post limit and that's why this topic is going up, I'm just naming it something different because it sounds cooler than "Massively Multiplayer (Part 2)".)
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Welcome to Battle Royale: The Last Generation Of An SNES-CD Saga! This thread is a continuation of the previous stories, Player Two Start: An SNES-CD Timeline and Massively Multiplayer: Gaming In The New Millennium! Those can be found here:
Player Two Start: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/player-two-start-an-snes-cd-timeline.280151/
Massively Multiplayer: https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...tiplayer-gaming-in-the-new-millennium.395490/
This timeline is an attempt to answer the question: “What if Nintendo and Sony had decided to work together in the video game business?” The POD is in 1991, just before Nintendo was set to go behind Sony's back and strike another deal to create a CD-ROM console with Philips. This timeline is video game focused, but with ramifications for pop culture, sports, politics, business, and beyond.
Player Two Start covered 1991 through 2000, Massively Multiplayer covered 2000 through 2012, and Battle Royale starts in 2012 and has a definitive end period: Spring 2021, just before E3 (assuming E3 still exists in TTL's 2021). At the current pace of updates, that should be right around when our timeline and this timeline meet, barring stoppages for major RL events.
I'm not going to do a full recap for this topic like I did for Massively Multiplayer, but here's a quick "on the last episode"-type summary to remind readers where we're at.
It's the fall of 2012. Google has just launched their first ever home gaming console with the help of Samsung, called the Google Nexus. Apple, which purchased Sega's gaming division in 2003, is planning to launch their eighth generation console, the Apple Virtua, in March 2013, while Nintendo (still collaborating with Sony on hardware production after two decades of working together) is set to launch the Reality later that year. The last few big seventh generation games are about to be released as the next generation is set to get underway. Apple and Nintendo have battled it out fiercely, with both of their seventh-generation consoles selling over 100 million units, while Google is hoping to succeed where Microsoft failed (though the Xbox line was successful for a time) by creating a true third competitor to the two companies' dominance over the gaming market.
This thread will feature the same format as Massively Multiplayer: small updates, mostly focused on certain games, covering a three-month period at a time in chunks of 10-12 updates per quarter. The individual game updates may start to taper off as the timeline progresses, in favor of covering more general industry and pop culture news, but for the foreseeable future (2012-2014), I'll be continuing with the previous topic's format.
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November 7, 2012
It was the day after the 2012 United States presidential election. Jon Huntsman, Jr. had won a second term in office, but Satoru Iwata, sitting in his office in Kyoto, Japan, cared little for that at the moment. He was instead reading the first sales reports to trickle out about Google's new gaming console, the Nexus. The Nexus had enjoyed a successful launch, with a million units sold worldwide in the first week. They would be a formidable competitor, though they weren't quite on the same level as Nintendo or Apple.
"Google has created an interesting console," said Iwata to some of his colleagues, as they too studied the latest sales figures. "The Covenant is still a very popular game, and people seem to be having a lot of fun with Forza as well."
"Those were two of the Xbox's most popular games, right?" asked one of Iwata's subordinates. Iwata nodded.
"Google managed to convince Microsoft to give them exclusivity over certain select properties," said Iwata, who had been a bit disappointed that Microsoft hadn't at least offered Nintendo the right to put a Covenant game on the Reality, though he knew that the series wouldn't sell as well as many of Nintendo's most popular titles. "Actually, my favorite game on the Nexus is Combo Smashers. It's very fun, and I could see it pushing sales for them later on, especially among families. It's a puzzle game, a very bright and colorful one. It's not violent, and unlike a mobile puzzle game, one isn't required to make any additional purchases to play. Google was smart to make so many copies available for free."
Iwata knew that Nintendo had its World Of Color series, though that franchise had faded from prominence in recent years, and was no longer a system seller as it had been during the late 90s and early 2000s. He knew of a World Of Color game in early development for the Reality that would likely be available in 2014, some time after the console's release, but it too would be unlikely to move consoles. He'd pondered ideas for puzzle games on his own, and had asked Gunpei Yokoi to help develop one for the Reality, though Yokoi had his own idea for what would be his last game, and Iwata didn't want to ask his old friend to develop something that he didn't feel truly passionate about.
"We could try another Pokemon puzzle game," said another of Iwata's subordinates. "We could ask Game Freak if they're up for it, they may have extra time since that American company is helping them to develop the next game in the series."
"No, I think any puzzle game we developed for the Reality would have to be an original one," said Iwata. "Remember, the best puzzle games are simple. Think about Tetris. Think about how fun it still is after all these years. Unless it's something that can challenge Tetris, it won't be something that will sell consoles."
Iwata decided to change the subject. While Google's Nexus launch was a successful one, it wasn't big enough to be a serious challenge to Nintendo, at least right away, and if Google did prove to be a threat later on, Nintendo would need something more than a puzzle game to challenge it.
"We need to focus on how we can best show off the strengths of the Reality. We have the right line-up of games to demonstrate its power, but showing off the virtual reality applications of the new console will be more difficult. Make sure our software partners are working toward making VR fun."
Iwata knew that games didn't need virtual reality to be fun. After all, he himself had just said that Tetris was still a fun game to play, and it was one of the most simple games around. However, VR would separate Nintendo in a market that was rapidly changing. Iwata knew that making fun games should be good enough. He just didn't know if it would be.
It was his job to make sure it would.
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Across the ocean, where it was still November 6, 2012, Steve Jobs was at a Silicon Valley party. Some of his colleagues were celebrating Huntsman's re-election, others were lamenting it, but Jobs himself knew it didn't make much difference who won, at least to him. Huntsman had put more money in his pocket, but Jobs had made plenty of money under 16 years of Democrats as well, and whoever had won, he planned to make a lot more.
He too was well aware of Google's entry into the console wars and the moderately successful Nexus launch. His mentality about the Nexus was much more apathetic: "I've been competing against Google in just about everything else, why not in games too?" He saw Nintendo as the bigger threat, and knew that the Reality was a force to be reckoned with. Even without motion controls (yet), the idea of VR gaming was something that Jobs wanted to pioneer, though he knew the Virtua wasn't quite powerful enough to accomplish the kind of VR that Nintendo was pushing.
He knew it wasn't. He'd tested it.
The fact that the Reality was capable of VR gaming meant one of two things: either Nintendo was attempting to push out really shitty VR (something Steve Jobs knew was nearly impossible, in what reality would Nintendo ever willingly release a bad VR product?), or the Reality was more powerful than the Virtua (ding ding ding).
He didn't mind the Reality being a more powerful console. The iTwin had been significantly less powerful than the Sapphire, and it had still managed to sell more units. It seemed, at least from early preview footage, that Apple had at least closed the gap somewhat, and the Virtua was at the very least more powerful than the Nexus (and $200 more expensive, which, again, Jobs didn't mind because he knew it would still sell).
He did mind the Reality beating the Virtua to market in VR. He thought VR was ninth generation tech, not eighth. Had he known Nintendo was going to beat him to market on VR, he might well have delayed the Virtua until 2014. It was too late for that now, but Jobs was still fuming, though his colleagues didn't know whether that scowl on his face was because of something specific or just the same scowl Jobs seemed to carry on his face all the time.
"Jesus, man, for somebody that beat pancreatic cancer, you sure are pissed off."
Jobs looked up to see who was talking to him. It was Steve Wozniak, and Jobs couldn't help but give a small smirk at seeing his old friend trying to cheer him up.
"You saw it, right? Nintendo's got VR."
"Yeah, so? How good can it be early on?"
"Looked pretty good from here," said Jobs, taking a sip from his drink. "You know Nintendo wouldn't bring shitty VR to market."
"Maybe not shitty, but maybe not great either. Plus, they don't have full motion controls, they have these weird grip things, it's not like the Virtua with full range of motion."
Jobs had been considering a solution for the Virtua similar to what he'd done with the iPod Play and the iPhone, with successive Virtua models released a couple of years apart from one another. However, it would be a tricky proposition for a console. He risked splitting the player base if he released a Virtua 2.0 with exclusive games. It worked for mobile devices, but trying it for consoles might risk an issue like Sega used to have with their old consoles: add-ons and expensive devices that certain games required. Nintendo had pulled it off with the SNES-CD, but only because the SNES-CD had supplanted the SNES completely. A "Virtua VR" console released in 2015 could work, or it could sink Apple in the next round of the console wars and let Nintendo or god forbid, Google get ahead.
"Now when we do VR, it'll look like we copied Nintendo," said Jobs.
"Great minds just think alike," said Wozniak, shrugging his shoulders. "Cheer up, you're still going to launch the Virtua first, by a few months at least. You'll have a head start again, and people are already excited for it. I know I am."
"Think you'll be able to play the games?" asked Jobs.
"Are you calling me old?"
The two men shared a laugh, and continued to talk and drink together, enjoying the party even as Jobs kept thinking about Nintendo and their new console. Apple was still at the top of the gaming market, and between their game consoles, their computers, and the iPhone, the company that the two men had founded together was still the most important technology company in the world. They were beating Nintendo in gaming. They were beating Google in everything else, and now in gaming too.
Steve Jobs had already won the fight of his life.
He was ready for another.
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Welcome to Battle Royale: The Last Generation Of An SNES-CD Saga! This thread is a continuation of the previous stories, Player Two Start: An SNES-CD Timeline and Massively Multiplayer: Gaming In The New Millennium! Those can be found here:
Player Two Start: https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/player-two-start-an-snes-cd-timeline.280151/
Massively Multiplayer: https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...tiplayer-gaming-in-the-new-millennium.395490/
This timeline is an attempt to answer the question: “What if Nintendo and Sony had decided to work together in the video game business?” The POD is in 1991, just before Nintendo was set to go behind Sony's back and strike another deal to create a CD-ROM console with Philips. This timeline is video game focused, but with ramifications for pop culture, sports, politics, business, and beyond.
Player Two Start covered 1991 through 2000, Massively Multiplayer covered 2000 through 2012, and Battle Royale starts in 2012 and has a definitive end period: Spring 2021, just before E3 (assuming E3 still exists in TTL's 2021). At the current pace of updates, that should be right around when our timeline and this timeline meet, barring stoppages for major RL events.
I'm not going to do a full recap for this topic like I did for Massively Multiplayer, but here's a quick "on the last episode"-type summary to remind readers where we're at.
It's the fall of 2012. Google has just launched their first ever home gaming console with the help of Samsung, called the Google Nexus. Apple, which purchased Sega's gaming division in 2003, is planning to launch their eighth generation console, the Apple Virtua, in March 2013, while Nintendo (still collaborating with Sony on hardware production after two decades of working together) is set to launch the Reality later that year. The last few big seventh generation games are about to be released as the next generation is set to get underway. Apple and Nintendo have battled it out fiercely, with both of their seventh-generation consoles selling over 100 million units, while Google is hoping to succeed where Microsoft failed (though the Xbox line was successful for a time) by creating a true third competitor to the two companies' dominance over the gaming market.
This thread will feature the same format as Massively Multiplayer: small updates, mostly focused on certain games, covering a three-month period at a time in chunks of 10-12 updates per quarter. The individual game updates may start to taper off as the timeline progresses, in favor of covering more general industry and pop culture news, but for the foreseeable future (2012-2014), I'll be continuing with the previous topic's format.
-
November 7, 2012
It was the day after the 2012 United States presidential election. Jon Huntsman, Jr. had won a second term in office, but Satoru Iwata, sitting in his office in Kyoto, Japan, cared little for that at the moment. He was instead reading the first sales reports to trickle out about Google's new gaming console, the Nexus. The Nexus had enjoyed a successful launch, with a million units sold worldwide in the first week. They would be a formidable competitor, though they weren't quite on the same level as Nintendo or Apple.
"Google has created an interesting console," said Iwata to some of his colleagues, as they too studied the latest sales figures. "The Covenant is still a very popular game, and people seem to be having a lot of fun with Forza as well."
"Those were two of the Xbox's most popular games, right?" asked one of Iwata's subordinates. Iwata nodded.
"Google managed to convince Microsoft to give them exclusivity over certain select properties," said Iwata, who had been a bit disappointed that Microsoft hadn't at least offered Nintendo the right to put a Covenant game on the Reality, though he knew that the series wouldn't sell as well as many of Nintendo's most popular titles. "Actually, my favorite game on the Nexus is Combo Smashers. It's very fun, and I could see it pushing sales for them later on, especially among families. It's a puzzle game, a very bright and colorful one. It's not violent, and unlike a mobile puzzle game, one isn't required to make any additional purchases to play. Google was smart to make so many copies available for free."
Iwata knew that Nintendo had its World Of Color series, though that franchise had faded from prominence in recent years, and was no longer a system seller as it had been during the late 90s and early 2000s. He knew of a World Of Color game in early development for the Reality that would likely be available in 2014, some time after the console's release, but it too would be unlikely to move consoles. He'd pondered ideas for puzzle games on his own, and had asked Gunpei Yokoi to help develop one for the Reality, though Yokoi had his own idea for what would be his last game, and Iwata didn't want to ask his old friend to develop something that he didn't feel truly passionate about.
"We could try another Pokemon puzzle game," said another of Iwata's subordinates. "We could ask Game Freak if they're up for it, they may have extra time since that American company is helping them to develop the next game in the series."
"No, I think any puzzle game we developed for the Reality would have to be an original one," said Iwata. "Remember, the best puzzle games are simple. Think about Tetris. Think about how fun it still is after all these years. Unless it's something that can challenge Tetris, it won't be something that will sell consoles."
Iwata decided to change the subject. While Google's Nexus launch was a successful one, it wasn't big enough to be a serious challenge to Nintendo, at least right away, and if Google did prove to be a threat later on, Nintendo would need something more than a puzzle game to challenge it.
"We need to focus on how we can best show off the strengths of the Reality. We have the right line-up of games to demonstrate its power, but showing off the virtual reality applications of the new console will be more difficult. Make sure our software partners are working toward making VR fun."
Iwata knew that games didn't need virtual reality to be fun. After all, he himself had just said that Tetris was still a fun game to play, and it was one of the most simple games around. However, VR would separate Nintendo in a market that was rapidly changing. Iwata knew that making fun games should be good enough. He just didn't know if it would be.
It was his job to make sure it would.
-
Across the ocean, where it was still November 6, 2012, Steve Jobs was at a Silicon Valley party. Some of his colleagues were celebrating Huntsman's re-election, others were lamenting it, but Jobs himself knew it didn't make much difference who won, at least to him. Huntsman had put more money in his pocket, but Jobs had made plenty of money under 16 years of Democrats as well, and whoever had won, he planned to make a lot more.
He too was well aware of Google's entry into the console wars and the moderately successful Nexus launch. His mentality about the Nexus was much more apathetic: "I've been competing against Google in just about everything else, why not in games too?" He saw Nintendo as the bigger threat, and knew that the Reality was a force to be reckoned with. Even without motion controls (yet), the idea of VR gaming was something that Jobs wanted to pioneer, though he knew the Virtua wasn't quite powerful enough to accomplish the kind of VR that Nintendo was pushing.
He knew it wasn't. He'd tested it.
The fact that the Reality was capable of VR gaming meant one of two things: either Nintendo was attempting to push out really shitty VR (something Steve Jobs knew was nearly impossible, in what reality would Nintendo ever willingly release a bad VR product?), or the Reality was more powerful than the Virtua (ding ding ding).
He didn't mind the Reality being a more powerful console. The iTwin had been significantly less powerful than the Sapphire, and it had still managed to sell more units. It seemed, at least from early preview footage, that Apple had at least closed the gap somewhat, and the Virtua was at the very least more powerful than the Nexus (and $200 more expensive, which, again, Jobs didn't mind because he knew it would still sell).
He did mind the Reality beating the Virtua to market in VR. He thought VR was ninth generation tech, not eighth. Had he known Nintendo was going to beat him to market on VR, he might well have delayed the Virtua until 2014. It was too late for that now, but Jobs was still fuming, though his colleagues didn't know whether that scowl on his face was because of something specific or just the same scowl Jobs seemed to carry on his face all the time.
"Jesus, man, for somebody that beat pancreatic cancer, you sure are pissed off."
Jobs looked up to see who was talking to him. It was Steve Wozniak, and Jobs couldn't help but give a small smirk at seeing his old friend trying to cheer him up.
"You saw it, right? Nintendo's got VR."
"Yeah, so? How good can it be early on?"
"Looked pretty good from here," said Jobs, taking a sip from his drink. "You know Nintendo wouldn't bring shitty VR to market."
"Maybe not shitty, but maybe not great either. Plus, they don't have full motion controls, they have these weird grip things, it's not like the Virtua with full range of motion."
Jobs had been considering a solution for the Virtua similar to what he'd done with the iPod Play and the iPhone, with successive Virtua models released a couple of years apart from one another. However, it would be a tricky proposition for a console. He risked splitting the player base if he released a Virtua 2.0 with exclusive games. It worked for mobile devices, but trying it for consoles might risk an issue like Sega used to have with their old consoles: add-ons and expensive devices that certain games required. Nintendo had pulled it off with the SNES-CD, but only because the SNES-CD had supplanted the SNES completely. A "Virtua VR" console released in 2015 could work, or it could sink Apple in the next round of the console wars and let Nintendo or god forbid, Google get ahead.
"Now when we do VR, it'll look like we copied Nintendo," said Jobs.
"Great minds just think alike," said Wozniak, shrugging his shoulders. "Cheer up, you're still going to launch the Virtua first, by a few months at least. You'll have a head start again, and people are already excited for it. I know I am."
"Think you'll be able to play the games?" asked Jobs.
"Are you calling me old?"
The two men shared a laugh, and continued to talk and drink together, enjoying the party even as Jobs kept thinking about Nintendo and their new console. Apple was still at the top of the gaming market, and between their game consoles, their computers, and the iPhone, the company that the two men had founded together was still the most important technology company in the world. They were beating Nintendo in gaming. They were beating Google in everything else, and now in gaming too.
Steve Jobs had already won the fight of his life.
He was ready for another.