Would an alternate history kill the NES?

So, there's a certain retro video game "reboot" console that's pretty notorious right now, and a comment I read about it was that, much like the creator showing off hoaxes and basically lying about the project, Nintendo similarly "lied" about the NES, using peripherals such as ROB and the PowerPad, and a unique appliance-like form factor to market the NES as something other than a video game console in order to get it into American homes, during a time period where "video game console" was basically poison.

Obviously, the comparison is unfair because Nintendo was marketing actual hardware that existed and wasn't just showing hoax after hoax, which is what the other guy is doing right now, but it's still an interesting point. The NES was marketed as something other than a video game console. What if NES games didn't sell as effectively as they did? Would Nintendo continue pushing "not video game" software, turning the NES into something more like a computer or some kind of activity center? Would there be more ROB and PowerPad games? Would Family Basic (and a keyboard) have been released in America?

I think NES games would always eventually gain traction and revive the video game market in the US, but if it took longer for them to do so, or if it failed at first, I really wonder what it would change. Nintendo could also just back out, killing the NES.

I bet Super Mario Bros would have sold the NES crash or not.

You're forgetting the rest of the world. The Famicom had already taken over Japan, as well as Russia and China bootlegging it, the SG-1000 found a market in Australia (and the Master System would do in Europe and South America later and ultimately Sega would have luck in Arabian countries as well).

ROB was only an excuse to get the NES into stores, they didn't market the NES like a toy to people, so the real problem would be that if they didn't have ROB, they wouldn't have been able to sell it in the US in the first place. But I don't think the US would be happy leaving behind what was starting to take off everywhere else, especially not when it was becoming a lucrative market for real this time.

I think it might be a mistake to think you can really predict anything about how it would have went if they had changed their marketing strategy in this or that way.

Like, when you have something that was a success, people tend to write about it as if everything they did must have been some magic perfect solution to the problem. Like calling it an "entertainment system" etc. you can't really say that if they had taken a different approach it wouldn't have also worked. All we really know is that the decisions they made were good enough.

The home video game market was going to rebound sooner or later. They were really taking off in the home computer sector already, and arcade machines were growing in popularity too. The "crash" was really about competition, a gold rush quickly flooded the market and poisoned the waters for everybody in it. You had a lot of people dumping poor quality products into the market at once. The same people who rushed into the business to make "easy money" ran right back out the door at this point.

There was still a growing consumer demand for this stuff, just most of the makers in the USA got scared at that particular moment, and the NES was entering at a very good time to take advantage of this. A quality product placed into a market that has conveniently emptied itself. Timing is probably their biggest selling point. If they'd waited another year somebody else was bound to capture the market.

Sik: But they were trying to market it like a toy. A very sophisticated set of toys unlike anything else on the market. The original release featured ROB and the Zapper, but the next year introduced the PowerPad, and they certainly could've brought more over, like the keyboard, or even the Oeka Kids tablet. About leaving the NES behind, I don't think the US would've thought twice about it, considering we were focused on IBM compatibles. So much so that we seem to have missed the MSX, the C64, the Atari 8-bits, etc, which were gaining popularity in Europe.

Rainwarrior: I agree with the lack of competition being a factor, but the lack of confidence in video games was probably the bigger factor. All they had to do was establish a system of knowing what you're getting when you buy a game, and preventing any manufacturers from invalidating that system. Anyone else could've tried but it wouldn't have been effective unless you tried to do the exact opposite of what Atari had done.

And that's fine and dandy for rebooting the industry, but the problem would be getting the system into stores and homes in the first place.