A personal account of the genesis, library, and failure of Nintendo's little purple 'Cube.
On Getting A Job for a GameCube
When my 16-year-old self needed a boot up the backside - one that would propel me kicking and screaming into the working world - she's what did it. I kid you not. I took one look at the flimsy, pied cardboard sleeve she was draped in (she, in turn, concealed in a box, like a perfectly naughty Fabergé egg) and with a fevered chill, I knew I had to have her - wholly.
She had an unorthodox way of communicating with me, too. On the reverse-side of miniature postcards, in purple letters, she'd leave furtive two-worded messages: "Animal Crossing", "Chibi Robo", "Wind Waker", "Metroid Prime". Inexplicably, I'd find these missives wedged inside of article columns when browsing magazine racks in my free time.
It took setting eyes on her for the first time, though, for the concept of economy to reify itself in my mind, to light the dynamo that would see me go out to work. Yes, the alienating adult world, the netherrealm dominated by the towering abacus, by the profile of my father’s face (partially illuminated by the sideways glow of stock-market charts emanating from the blue tube) it suddenly made cosmic sense. Those undulating frequencies, those saucy peaks and troughs, those libidinous ciphers the TV screen would occasionally beam back at me ('Nasdaq', 'Dow Jones', "up three points"), they were the swelling cursives of passion - tumescence in stenographic form.
The monetary machinations of the world were no longer an indecipherable frieze on a monitor, a back-lit message that might as well have been spelled out in cuneiform. No, the winking cherub in the frieze's corner had somehow conspired to wink money's true meaning across space and time and right at me: "Money (noun). Definition: Well-lubricated engine; delivers one’s passions into one’s orbit."
She was a purple Fischer Price-looking thing with a black handle. A prism of unfettered joy. An object that contained multitudes. I wasn’t looking for love; she came to me. In a shop window. On a busy Main Street. The crucible, it turned out, into which my fevered dreams would be poured and smelted; her voice the languid coda that would fill the nighttime air of my bedroom as each back-breaking day of waiting tables at ritzy restaurants played out.
My Lolita. My GameCube.
I had to have her.
Under the Hood
It certainly doesn't hurt that the GameCube's outward aesthetics invite play even at a pre-AV level. With it's kiddy yet timeless trappings, it still elicits the curiosity of house guests to this day, long before the component tethers have been plugged into the back of the TV.
There's something ceremonial, too, about unpacking the first electronic entertainment product bought with your first paycheck. The radiant, unbridled glow of first-time ownership is such that when the object of your desire emerges into the light of day, it goes beyond plain optics; you've gone interstellar, into the realm of the olfactory and the tactile.
I wouldn't go as far as to say I've tasted my purple 'Cube (which received a 2001 release) at any point during my tenure, but I'd be lying if the smell of its components weren't the source of a huge sense of pride. Or that I didn't press the button that popped the lid open several times over. If you did so yourself for the first time in the early noughties, you would have needed to be ready to gawk at the spinning nub, the gyrating vessel that receives the GameCube's proprietary discs (a mere 6 cm in diameter). This component was and still is mind-blowing to me. How entire virtual worlds could be unspooled on this plate, via CDs of such a dinky form factor - through the unblinking gimlet eye of the disc reader, no less - is positively wonder-inducing to me, on par with a stylus reading a piece of vinyl.
Yes, placing a videogame disc on that magical spindle was paradigm-shifting. The pre-release screenshots I had salivated over for summers on end somehow brute-forced into vivid life by the Flipper ATI processor: a tip of the hat to the console's development code name: Dolphin. Among the fondest artifacts in my now-failing memory one will find Super Mario Sunshine's heat shimmer effects, Resident Evil 4's rust-brown environs and the glow ring around Samus Aran's Arm Cannon in Metroid Prime.
Extending your reach into the GameCube's virtual worlds, meanwhile, was the console's dedicated analogue controller. For my outsized hands, it's curves and cambers were the perfect, coziest fit. Its showstoppers - mechanically-speaking - were the attention-grabbing A-button, the guiding notches etched into the bezel surrounding the analogue stick (without which Super Monkey Ball may have never existed), and the satisfying click-clack of the shoulder buttons. Taken as a whole - from the colour-coding on the game boxes' spines to the Easter eggs hidden in the console's boot-up sequence - everything about the GameCube seemed thoughtfully designed; not in the focus-tested sense, mind - it all had a pleasing, cottage industry feel.
Nintendo's Blue Ocean Strategy
The new millennium seemed like a time when Nintendo's employees were given free and complete license to indulge their collective imagination. Nothing was left to the cutting room floor - it all coalesced into a well-rounded package, emerging fully-formed, without any fat. This free-wheeling - some would say catch-all - ethos was also extended to first-party game development. A Luigi Ghostbusters mash-up? A water-squirting 3D Mario title? A cel-shaded Zelda? Why not?
The world didn't deserve something as perfect as the GameCube, and its denizens certainly didn't know they wanted it. Going by official data, it sold a measly 27.4 million units during its lifespan - a drop in the ocean compared to the PlayStation 2.
On the surface, though, the sky was bluer than ever and the only sign of Nintendo being beholden to old ways was a graphics processer that was competitive with that of its contemporaries. This would spell the last time the Kyoto-based company would try to match, or at the very least ape, its peers in the graphical department. Was this the sign of a company in stridently good health, or an act of desperation - throwing everything they had at it to see what would stick? How else would the concept of Super Mario Sunshine have been sold to a boardroom of company directors, after all? How else do you dream up a console with a dedicated handle just to have it carried around by the faithful?
The Big Metroid Prime Gamble
On recently booting up the GameCube I currently own* - kindly donated by a friend who no longer had any use for it, I was surprised to see the level of forward-facing groundwork Nintendo had baked into its hardware and software - throwaway or speculative ideas which would eventually be fleshed out (in typical Nintendo fashion) in future consoles and their respective games.
*My brother 'killed' my first 'Cube. Apparently, it was a botched attempt at replacing the 'Nintendo GameCube' foil (located under the transparent cover that crowned the exterior of the lid) with a tacky Need For Speed replacement strip that came packed in with a gaming magazine. He ended cutting through the entire inner circumference of the lid - dust would clog the disc reader and over extended use render it, and my first GameCube, unusable.
The first harbinger of things to come in later years - most notably with the 3DS and Switch - is the erstwhile card-manufacturer-turned-videogame-publisher's courtship of Western developers. Yes, they would eventually part ways with Rare (which would join the ranks of Microsoft across the pond) but the bold move on Nintendo's part to entrust the Texas-based Retro Studios with its flagship but flagging Metroid series was a brazen choice.
The uproar on the part of the Nintendo faithful - especially when the news broke out that the series would shift to a first-person perspective - had the same gravitas of a flock turning its back on its shepherd. The resulting game silenced everyone, down to the sourest, acid-tongued critic. A Metroid Prime-emboldened Nintendo would in more recent years entrust Next Level and Brace Yourself Games with the Luigi's Mansion series and a rhythm-based The Legend of Zelda spin-off respectively. Retro Studios, in turn, would be redeployed on a further two Metroid Prime deep-space sorties (and a third one, currently in development) while also taking on full stewardship of a Donkey Kong Country 2D revival.
A Company in Flux
The most telling aspect of this new direction is not only the matter of entrusting Western developers with hallowed Nintendo-owned IPs. It's rather the willingness to embrace Western videogame mechanics in its inimitable way. Perhaps it was timely. The PlayStation brand had done an excellent job of moving games into a brave new world - 'gritty', 'art-house' and 'cool' fast-becoming the order of the day. From the Wipeout series to Ico to Metal Gear Solid, Nintendo's hold on the market had been dealt a serious blow. If you wanted to be generous, you could say its share of the market had been halved over the course of just two console cycles. Looking over its other shoulder, Microsoft's experiment with the Xbox must have looked ominous.
The result was Nintendo dipping it's toe for the first meaningful time in the Atlantic. The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, released a shade over a year after the GameCube's 2001 release (Dec. 2022), was its first attempt at an open-world game on a scale much grander than Hyrule Field, and Pikmin, whose concept allegedly came to Shigeru Miyamoto while pottering away in his back garden, was the company's cutesy take on RTS-games. Yes, it was all very twee and oh-so-very Nintendo but it made for a welcome sea change. One imagines an alternative future were Nintendo grows fat, complacent and unchallenged, and goes on to give the New Super Mario Bros. treatment to all of its IPs. Anyone would be glad from that perspective to concede that the new kids on the block - Sony, and to a lesser extent Microsoft - made for a hungrier, less risk-averse Nintendo.
Reactions to the GCN's Library: Old vs. New Guard
Although I can count myself lucky to have been exposed to the original Mario Bros. for the NES at quite a young age (my parents ran a stationery that had a demo kiosk set up at one point that would let you have a go on one - a NES, that is) perhaps my passion for the GameCube is coloured by having had very little prior exposure to the Nintendo consoles that would follow the NES. Life had somehow conspired to make me miss out on the seismic big-hitters of their time - The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's and the Super Mario 64's of this world.
In other words, when it came to the Wind Waker and Super Mario Sunshine, it was as if I was mining pure gaming gold; at one remove from those who had experienced 'the real deal' in the halcyon days of the Nintendo 64, granted, but I had no way of telling that. Both SMS and WW stand toweringly tall in my personal memories precisely because there was no revolutionary precedent (a criticism often lodged by N64 veterans) to compare them to. Better still, their predecessors' giant leaps were amplified here by period-correct technology: modern chipsets and full Dolby Surround sound. The case of anachronistic graphics or a "this-isn't-quite-the-revolution-Ocarina-was" reaction couldn't be lodged against either of the two - at least from my end. If this was a case of missing out on Woodstock, there was no better after-party. Had I got on one train later, rival developers would have already cracked the code.
What Nintendo achieved would - and did - become industry conventions. For people like me - experiencing 3D Zelda and Mario for the first time - it would have fully taken the sheen off appreciating first-hand just how revolutionary Nintendo had been in its transition to three dimensionality. Through WW and SMS I did so - not vicariously; not through the accounts of others, because 'they were there, man' - but because I and others like me were 'there too...man.'
Not everyone saw it the same way I did. Some people, especially N64 veterans, would be left exasperated at how Super Mario Sunshine, the sequel to one of the most revered games of all time, was in some ways a step back for the series. There were times when the camera played coy, getting stuck on pieces of scenery, areas and missions that felt rushed, and NPCs that, to their minds, weren't exactly on par with what had come before. This N64-precious mentality is also what contributed to the backlash that met the Wind Waker on the reveal of its wide-eyed, cel-shaded look as well as the uproar that met Metroid Prime's first-person unveiling. Sometimes it just smacked of nostalgia-fueled contrarianism for its own sake - I invite you to set your rose-tinted specs to one side and play both 64 and Sunshine side-by-side - there's something quite special about the latter's C-stick-controlled camera, with pans, zooms and panoramic scenes that more than make up for its misgivings.
Whilst some pointed out these setbacks as a sign of an ailing, outmoded Nintendo, others - a precious few judging by sales figures, alone - were genuinely excited by the swash-buckling approach. Most reassuringly (and this can be qualified through the console successes and failures that would follow the GameCube), left-field experiments like the ones outlined above illustrated how Nintendo was still, for better or for worse, different. And this extended to its hardware concepts.
Consider, for example, the GameCube Advance Link Cable. Connect one end to your GameCube and the other end to your GameBoy Advance and watch as a second screen springs into life. It may have seemed like a cash-grabbing novelty at the time - with four GBAs required to experience titles like The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords and Pac-Man Vs. to their full extent - but the experiment foreshadowed future consoles and gameplay ideas, including the Nintendo DS, Wii U and Switch, and Nintendo Land's asynchronous multiplayer shenanigans.
Why Did the GameCube Fail?
Perhaps it was the PlayStations 2's significant head-start (released March 4, 2000), or maybe it was the GC's software library that made the GameCube project stutter and eventually fail. Another significant factor may have been the number of in-house staff required to develop first-party games, a reality that would return to haunt Nintendo over future console cycles. A marketing approach that seemed at odds with the console's identity certainly didn't help matters, either.
What matters, however, is that Nintendo pulled the plug on the GameCube 6 years into its lifespan, announcing it had effectively ceased console production in February of 2007 (the console had made its debut in Japan on September 14, 2001). The GameCube was to all intents and purposes an unmitigated failure - not quite on the scale of the Wii U, perhaps, but the financial loss mixed in with future anxiety over what would happen next must have smarted and troubled Nintendo executives and stakeholders.
For pure, unadulterated gaming joy, though, alongside Dreamcast owners, there was no better time to be alive. As proof of concept of what would come next for the Japanese console-maker, it's an invaluable history lesson and one I look back on fondly - a snapshot of where gaming once stood.
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