This Week In Retro: Nintendo GameCube

September 14, 2001: Nintendo squares off against PlayStation and Xbox with a cube

by Diamond Feit

On occasion when writing this column, I've had to argue defensively to support my position that a relic from the past is worth remembering. There have also been circumstances where a popular anniversary arrives and I must reluctantly admit that I personally struggled to enjoy the work in question.

This week, I must somehow do the opposite of both these things: The Nintendo GameCube just turned 20 years old and while everyone in 2021 seems to love it, I'm here to report that it was the laughing stock of 2001 when it was new.

I know remembering the year 2001 is emotionally trying, but let's stick to the specific topic of video games as the medium was experiencing quite the sea change. Sega's Dreamcast had struggled despite an incredible software lineup and the company took the loss hard, discontinuing the console and declaring it their last piece of hardware. Sony's PlayStation did so well, on the other hand, that its successor was flying off store shelves on the strength of its legacy and its built-in DVD drive. Making matters ever more muddled, Microsoft was spending millions to launch their first game console in the fall.

Mired in this battlefield stood Nintendo, the former undisputed champion, looking tired but not yet gasping for air. Nintendo's reputation as a game developer was still strong, but their restrictive publishing habits had tarnished their relationship with many partner companies. Nintendo had Mario, Zelda, and a surprise global phenomenon in Pokémon, but former friendly franchises such as Mega Man, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Metal Gear had all jumped ship to disc-based competitors. By 2001, Nintendo's reliance on cartridge-based storage looked years out of date.

Nintendo knew its next home console would face the toughest odds in the company's history, even tougher than the NES did when it had to resuscitate the entire industry from a massive crash. The Nintendo 64 failed to capture the public's attention like the NES or SNES had done in the 1980s and 1990s. The system had a solid library of games, with several N64 titles topping year-end "Best Of" lists, but during its lifespan it could not match the sheer number of best-selling PlayStation exclusives. In order to outdo the N64, Nintendo's newest machine (codenamed "Dolphin") would have to appeal to children as well as young adults who grew up on 8 & 16-bit games but now hungered for new material.

The evolution of home consoles from dedicated game machines to multimedia devices gave Nintendo another design wrinkle to consider. Both the Sony PlayStation and Sega Saturn played music CDs, and in the year 2000 the PlayStation 2's DVD drive mattered to consumers more than its launch lineup. Internet connectivity also loomed over all tech products but especially video games; the Dreamcast, PS2, and Microsoft's first Xbox could all access the information superhighway and select software even supported online play. The Cable Guy's vision of the future seemed close at hand and only Nintendo could decide when (not if) to embrace it.

Nintendo executives knew all of these issues and, considering every angle, elected to redub "Dolphin" as the GameCube. Though not a literal cube, the system came close with its square sides, unlike the rectangular competition. The GameCube matched the Nintendo 64's standard of four controller ports, but it also sported a small black handle to make transporting the hardware less clumsy. Regarding this feature, Nintendo's Kenichiro Ashida said "I discovered a lot of players actually moved the console away from the television and closer to themselves while playing games. Adding a handle to the system makes it easier for players to do this, and it also gives the system a friendly look."

The GameCube did not rely on cartridges but neither did it embrace DVDs, instead utilizing a proprietary 8cm miniature disc format. While these discs held up to 1.5 gigabytes of data, more than 20 times the size of the largest N64 game, they could not match the standard DVD storage capacity of 8.5 gigabytes. That disparity did not concern Shigeru Miyamoto, who saw the DVD format as an invitation to overstuff games with higher-resolution graphics, inflating development costs. "The smaller disc is a message from Nintendo that you don't need to fill out the capacity of a normal sized DVD disc," he said. "If we want to make larger software, then we just make the game on two or three discs."

Another major difference between the GameCube and the other consoles was its laid-back approach to online play. The console launched without any means to access the internet, and Nintendo never announced any online games. Consumers could buy a modem as an expansion module, and third-parties were free to develop their own online software, but from the top-down Nintendo did not consider the omission a dealbreaker due to limited broadband availability. Months prior to the GameCube's launch, company president Hiroshi Yamauchi told the Nikkei Shimbun: "The Internet games available today are for hard-core gamers. I don't believe the general public is going to be very interested in them. And I doubt that Net games will turn out to be profitable."

All this means that the Nintendo GameCube arrived in stores in the fall of 2001 next to the already-popular PlayStation 2 (just as some of its biggest games were released) and Microsoft's Xbox, a newcomer but one backed by a $500 million marketing campaign. The GameCube launched at a low price point of $199 US, a full $100 cheaper than either Sony or Microsoft's machines, but it also lacked those consoles' broad range of features.

The GameCube had one more albatoss to contend with at launch, one that no amount of foresight or advertising could possibly shake: The people who buy games and the people who made them decided that Nintendo made consoles for children, while Sony and Microsoft made consoles for adults. Even though the system arrived alongside an array of sports and racing titles, this perception became the online talking point for the entire generation. Video game forum users derided the console with nicknames like "Kiddiecube" and "Lunchbox" (the latter a reaction to the conspicuous handle on the machine). Even the price point was seen as evidence that Nintendo had made a toy, as if spending more money on a console made it more grown-up.

The GameCube's image problems became a sore point for Nintendo's best and brightest. Satoru Iwata, president of Nintendo from 2002 until his death in 2015, never understood why inviting kids to play bothered people: "This criticism has always confused us for a couple of reasons. First, youngsters are the people with the most time to play the games, and often the most passionate. The fact is that Nintendo is the only manufacturer who seriously targets this market. Second, young people are important for another reason. They are the purest and truest indicator of game quality."

There's little point in playing Armchair Executive 20 years later, pointing out how many of Nintendo's choices led the GameCube to underperform at retail. There's a logic to all these decisions, be it piracy concerns or manufacturing costs or feature creep. Nintendo had a long history of making toys, so the company wasn't about to pivot to cutting edge technology overnight. For better or for worse, the GameCube took the best qualities of the Nintendo 64 and improved upon them, and it did so at a lower cost.

I'm over 1000 words into this column and I haven't dedicated many of them to GameCube's actual video games. Yet there's no reason to do so, given that the quality of Nintendo's software was never in question. Anyone who owned a GameCube (or had a friend with one) had access to plenty of top-notch games, including "mature" titles like Eternal Darkness and Killer 7. Hence the curious current state of affairs where Nintendo's least popular system is seen in a positive light. It's not rose-colored glasses or nostalgia clouding our memories; GameCube was always a great console, it just didn't have as many advocates then as it does now.

The controller, on the other hand...look, I know Nintendo still sells them and many games were specifically designed around its unique properties, but at this point I'd rather go back to The Duke than that asymmetrical oddity.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.