-I have the headcanon that Gamindustri, at least its Hyperdimension incarnation, overwhelmingly reflects the state of the IRL Japanese game industry. Which is why they have so little contact with PC Continent, and most of the contact was with the PC Islands Dameko mentioned—"Neca" and "Azure Fleet X". They represent NEC's PC-88/98 line and the MSX, the two most popular Japanese PCs in the 80s and early 90s.
(She'd have known them, because the Famicom era was actually the time when western PC games started getting ported over to Japan and becoming popular—like Lode Runner, though this short period of contact soon passed.)
-That's also why there's never a Great Tari Shock, and most of the NA console manufacturers—Mattel, Coleco, etc. and minor Japanese console manufacturers just never exist as a nation in the continent's history, or they existed, but had never formed a Goddess of their own.
-In contrast, G-Dimension's general history, prior to the 1991 deviation, is more heavily grounded in the North American game market. Therefore the PC Continent is a lot closer to Gamindustri proper, their first Goddess is based on the Magnavox Odyssey, who split into many fragments (Pong consoles), one of which is Filina (Magnavox-Philips), and there were more Tari CPUs that came after Rei.
-Makers based on western game companies also have a much bigger role to play in G-Dimension's Gamindustri, compared to their Hyperdimension counterparts. See, if you read the Japanese Wikipedia page of some major western game companies—Activision and EA's, for example, you'd find that there are only a tiny amount of information compared to the English ones, and the Japanese branches of these two major companies are all shut down by now. They are literally just not that big a deal in Japan.
-Also, personal headcanon to why G-Dimension doesn't have a Histoire: Histoire is created by Planeptune's founding CPU, and in VII, Neptune said that her name was "SG or SC something", so she's probably based on the SG-1000. The original SG-1000 is never released in America, so Histoire's creator just doesn't exist, and Planeptune's first CPU in this NA industry based dimension will probably be representing the Sega Master System instead.
Now, a complaint: I'm...not exactly satisfied with how Victory translated the Great Video Game Crash of '83. It's a very complicated event with many causes—the overproduction of cartridges by Atari and other third-party publishers, the rise of the home computer market, and the overordering of cartridges by retailers.
-Contradictory to popular beliefs, the Crash wasn't caused by consumers losing faith in games, because 1) back then, most consumers were little kids who had to play whatever their parents brought home for Christmas, and 2) even if every single game Atari and other third-party developers put on the market was the best fucking game ever, the sheer amount of cartridges they produced still far exceeded the existing market size for games.
-Which brings me to the next point: it wasn't actually Atari's power of monopoly that caused the Crash. Rather, Atari's inability to control the third-party publishers and the large amount of software they produced, after Activision's success, was a major contribution to the Crash. Still, Ray Kassar was kind of a micromanager and pure businessman who alienated a lot of Atari's engineers, so the "tyrannical" part wasn't exactly wrong.
-It's just that Atari was not the sole culprit to blame—countless retailers and third-party developers played a part too, as well as the notion that home computers would be the future of gaming (hint: they wouldn't), which resulted in a lot of ill-conceived attempts at making home computers (Mattel Aquarius, Coleco Adam, etc.) that distracted the console manufacturers from their video game business.
-And it's definitely not a "we know we are going down, so we are taking everyone with us" scenario. Rather, it is more like a story of blind optimism and arrogance, of people believing that even though the signs of trouble were already surfacing, it would take a long, long time for things to actually start going downhill, so there's no need to panic.
-This opinion was not limited to Atari, but shared by the rest of the industry. In one of the 1983 interviews I read for a school paper, Activision's president, Jim Levy, predicted that the industry would only grow from now onwards, and that was after Warner announced the large disparity between Atari's actual and expected profit growth at the end of 1982 (the first sign of the Crash).
-There were general nervousness and talks about a bigger shakeout, sure. But people still thought this financial upheaval might be limited to specific companies, and wouldn't affect the entire industry; at the beginning of 1983, the Consumer Electronic Show was still pretty full of game products. It took several months for the true impact to hit.
-Thus, G-Dimension's Great Tari Shock was a disaster created by Rei's misguided vision of a best future for Tari: If she levitated the entire nation into the air, no one could leave the nation, and the many new enemies that popped up—from the rebels to the hostile neighboring nations to the raiding fleets of the PC Continent—would never be able to touch them. And it backfired horribly. And her successors had to live with the consequences.
-Fun fact: "Cyan Heart" seemed to be one of the slightly more popular fan titles for Rei's HDD Form. But do you know that Atari's R&D division, which created the VCS/2600, is named "Cyan Engineering"? They came up with that name because cyan is negative red on the color chart, and the company, prior to its merger with Atari, didn't want to be "in the red" anymore.
(In hindsight, this was almost unintentionally prophetic, seeing how the Lynx and Jaguar had all these red colors on them, and both were market failures that couldn't compete with rival consoles...)
More Atari history lessons: the VCS/2600 really didn't do well during its first year on the market. There was a serious production problem, retailers were burnt by consoles in general after the Pong console market came crashing down, and lots of unsold VCSs were sitting in warehouses.
-This wouldn't be the first time Atari, as a company, had faced a financial crisis. In 1974, Nolan Bushnell's unsuccessful attempt at introducing new management to the company, combined with the rampant cloning of Pong arcades and an ill-advised international expansion plan, had pushed Atari to the brink of bankruptcy; they were only saved by Kee Games, a fake rival company used as a front to sell more Atari arcade machines to distributors.
-The initial slump in sales, however, convinced Bushnell that they should just give up on the VCS and focus on creating a new console. But Warner's management believed the VCS still had potential, and enlisted Ray Kassar to help market it. The conflict between Warner and Bushnell would eventually result in Bushnell's replacement by Kassar, after the latter's aggressive advertisement campaign started to take effect, and proved Bushnell's decision wrong.
-In my personal opinion, Ultra Rei's HDD should not be a personality flaw taken to extremes or a simple case of "power corrupts", but a product of the time, an absolute necessity that was crucial to her nation's survival. Sure, the game mentioned the poverty, the thugs, and all that jazz, but her psychotic HDD was painted as abnormal and bad from the get-go, with the bare minimum of positive impacts.
-In real life, Warner and Kassar's refusal to give up on the VCS was what allowed Space Invaders to propel the console to success. Kassar's micromanagement, crappy attitude towards his top programmers, and the sprawling, chaotic sales network he built to get as many VCSs onto store shelves as possible would eventually contribute to the Crash, sure. But if they followed Bushnell's advice and moved on too early, the VCS console, and maybe Atari itself, would be dead in the water.
-I suppose the whole "CPU Memory" concept really made it difficult to explore her people's possible impact on her personality, unlike a regular CPU who was formed from, and influenced by the faith of the people. Is it really so hard to imagine that an economically prosperous, but militarily weak Tari, constantly under threat from its neighbors, would want a terrifying war Goddess, and her HDD made her an excellent wartime leader, but became a source of problems in peacetime?
Even more Atari history lessons: After the Crash, Atari was cut into two halves—the consumer division, responsible for creating consoles/home computers, was taken over by Jack Tramiel (founder of Commodore) and renamed Atari Corp, while the coin-ops division, which was used to doing their own thing and not really affected by the Crash, carried on as Atari Games in the arcades.
-It was Atari Games that created the Tengen brand to make unlicensed NES games and reverse-engineered the NES, though Atari Corp also started an anti-trust lawsuit against Nintendo in 1989, and joined Tengen as a co-plaintiff in their legal battle with Nintendo.
-The new Tari nation in G-Dimension, rebuilt after the Great Shock, is based on Atari Corp, and Atari Games is the "Tenga Corps" mercenaries that were briefly namedropped. In-story, they were not part of the Tari nation, since they were a culturally distinct minority group both during Rei's reign and after, and did not worship the Tari CPUs that succeeded her.
-Also, even though Atari Corp, under Jack Tramiel's leadership, never gave up on the console business, it was considered secondary to their main project, Atari ST, and mostly used as a way to fund their home computer business. Only after Sam Tramiel took over, and Jack stepped into a more advisory role, did consoles become their primary focus. Thus, the internal schism and "sail back to PC Continent" sentiment Maria alluded to, which eventually resulted in a civil war.
A more in-depth talk about the Magnavox-Philips patent lawsuit: Ralph Baer, creator of the first game console, patented the technology that allows you to display a player-controlled object colliding with another machine-controlled one, and bouncing in a different direction. After Magnavox was purchased by Philips, the patent fell into their hands, and Philips sued tons of game developers, claiming they are infringing on the patent, once the Crash wiped out their licensing fee income from console manufacturers.
-And Philips won every single time. They sued Activision in the VCS era, at the height of their success; just as the company was going through a financial decline in the mid 80s, the court ruled in Philips' favor, and the subsequent appeals failed. Philips was very determined to make an example out of Activision/Mediagenic, because they were also going after Nintendo in a similar lawsuit, and the compensation they demanded from Activision/Mediagenic basically pushed the company to the verge of bankruptcy in one go.
-Of course, Activision survived because of Bobby Kotick's takeover, but many other companies who found themselves sued by Philips weren't as lucky. This is the inspiration for Filina's Lifedrain power, and "Nintendo ditching Sony for Philips" is translated as Lowee siccing Filina on Lastation City's civilians out of paranoia. Also? Philips made the CD add-on for Atari Jaguar. That's where the "seeking refuge in Tari after pissing off Lastation City" part comes from.
About Lowee and Nintendo: This story is a love letter to gaming history, but Nintendo history takes the cake. Silver Heart, Lowee's founding Goddess, is the Game & Watch handheld, whose HDD Form is incomplete in the same way that a Candidate's is, because of the nomadic, disunited nature of her people.
-Rubis/Ruby Heart is Nintendo of the Famicom/NES era: her human form is polite and feminine and tactful, whereas her HDD is this harsh, self-righteous matron who won't stop nagging until you agree with her, but both are equally controlling. Much like how Nintendo's "family friendly" image was a stark contrast to their draconian control over third-party developers, yet these were two halves of an inseparable whole.
-Dameko/Mauve Heart is Nintendo of the Super Famicom/SNES era. Her love for invention, drawing and robots reflects how Nintendo's marketing started emphasizing graphics and hardware specs when it comes to the Super Famicom/SNES—a deviation from their philosophy of "good games over cutting-edge technology".
-She also never had enough chances or incentives to make the reforms she wanted, to break free of her sister's control and become an independent ruler in her own rights, just like how the IRL console is often remembered as "Famicom/NES, but better". To my very limited knowledge, most fanfiction writers don't even personify SFC/SNES as a separate CPU.
-Rokushi/Onyx Heart is Nintendo of the N64 era. She's one messed-up kid, who made a 180-degree shift from her timid, unconfident demeanor as a Candidate after being guilt-tripped into taking up the mantle of CPU, and doubled down on Rubis's traditionalism, driven by a constant rage in her human form that terrified many of her Basilicom staff into quitting their jobs.
-Nintendo's insistence of sticking to the cartridge format had driven most major third-party developers into Sony's arms in the N64 era, and although the console itself was not exactly a flop, with many excellent games released on it, it was not enough to fight Sony's dominance. The negative impact of sticking to cartridges would only hit in full force later, which brings us to...
-Delphinus/Lavender Heart. The personification of Nintendo's identity crisis in the GameCube era, torn between two conflicting groups of citizens whom she could never seem to please, and suffered from some serious self-esteem issues as a result.
-Nintendo's "kiddy game maker" image has become so ingrained that, even though they tried to catch up to Sony and Microsoft's trend of creating more "mature" games, the reception was mixed at best. Combined with the lack of commitment from third-party developers, and a sparse number of mega-hit first-party games on the console, it was of no surprise that people thought the company might end up like Sega, before Wii came along...
About Venus: Her name came from both the Planeptune tradition of naming CPUs after planets, and the Genesis's codename in development, Mark V. (Tangentially related: the Sega Nomad handheld's codename in development is actually "Project Venus", and the Nomad is basically a portable Genesis, so eh...not too off in terms of historical accuracy, I guess?)
-She has this sparkly Michael Jackson fashion style, because both Michael Katz and Tom Kalinske's marketing strategy put a heavy emphasis on securing celebrity-endorsed licensed games for the Genesis, and Sega of America had a longstanding partnership with Michael Jackson in particular. Also, Sega's advertisements in America were heavily inspired by the style of popular MVs.
-At the risk of revealing too much, G-Dimension is also a timeline in which SoA triumphed over SoJ. That's why Rubis mentioned a Venus existing in Hyperdimension's past, but she spent too much time squabbling with Histy and her own Basilicom (SoJ wins, basically, just like in real life) to make her aggressive expansionist ambitions come true.
One last bit of personal musing: I find it very hard to buy into the idea that, just because a CPU is born from the people's collective "hope and dreams", sustained by positive emotions, and should ideally serve these hopes and dreams, she is guaranteed to be on the good side by default, and if she does horrible things, she must've rejected her people, failed at fulfilling her duties, or been consumed by negative emotions.
-Like, ultranationalism is love. Personality cult is love. So is religious fanaticism. They are just very selective about who "deserves" to be loved.
-And the people's hopes and dreams can be one of conquest, retribution for past wrongs, survival at all costs, restoration of past glories, and pig-headed conservatism, can they not? Who says that love and faith is always based on truth, concerned with long-term consequences or morally right, that they cannot stem from ignorance or prejudice? In fact, the fervent love spawned by nationalism frequently depends on the presence of an "other", an enemy to fight against and differentiate one's own group from.
-Love is stronger than hatred, which is not necessarily a good thing, and love can be fueled by equally strong hatred towards a perceived "evil"; a CPU can be the most benevolent ruler to HER people, the greatest champion of HER nation's progress, at the expense of everyone else. Just some food for thought.