Hey folks, one thing we all do, but I do a LOT, is speculate about what might have or could have happened in classic gaming history. There's definitely OUT THERE stuff like "Dreamcast 2!", but what's most interesting to me is considering, instead of the impossible or implausible, more minor or possible changes to the gaming timeline that could have altered outcomes. What are some games we could have seen on consoles that never got them? What consoles might we have seen that were otherwise never meant to be? What are the "what if?"s that DON'T require massive restructuring of the flow of time?
I'll throw out a couple examples for one of my favorite little underdogs, the PC Engine. Telenet Japan released a port of Golden Axe on CD for the PC Engine. It was awful. Like, REAL bad. But the fact that Telenet released such a game indicates Sega was willing to license it. What if NEC Avenue had licensed it instead and released it on Super CD? NEC Avenue ports were generally pretty good. Another PC Engine "What If" is what if NEC/Hudson had released a ROM mapper sooner, enabling HuCard releases larger than 8 MB POWER? It would have been nice to see a port of Final Fight on the PC Engine, but I don't think the Super CD would have truly done it justice. That said, I think Nintendo probably would have discouraged that. But there are other brawlers that followed that were much better than the weak-sauce Riot Zone the PC Engine Super CD got that weren't otherwise politically encumbered.
What do you folks think? What are some of your favorite could-have-actually-happened What Ifs?