This week marks the 25th anniversary of the Nintendo GameCube, the first console I ever bought with my own money. I vividly remember getting on the bus after school with a year’s worth of savings safely zipped into the pocket of my bag and going to a branch of Currys, where I dumped a bunch of notes, coins and vouchers on the counter to collect my pre-order. (It turned out that some of the vouchers from the previous Christmas had expired, but the guy at the checkout clearly felt so sorry for me that he redeemed them anyway. If you’re out there, Currys guy: thank you for taking pity on a desperate 13-year-old.) If it hadn’t been for the ill-fated Wii U console, whose failure to take off in 2012 resulted in the first unprofitable periods in Nintendo’s game-making history, the GameCube would be remembered as the company’s biggest flop aside from the infamous Virtual Boy, from 1995.
Released in Japan this week in 2001 (and in May 2002 in Europe), this surprisingly powerful purple cube sold less than the Xbox and the PlayStation 2. With its squat, colourful form and unusual controller, arranged around a big traffic-light-green A button and small analogue sticks designed for small hands, it had a hint of Fisher-Price about it. I didn’t know anyone else who had one.
But despite being mocked at the time, the GameCube is now revered, fondly remembered as an uncomplicated box of fun at a time when video games were in their performatively adult stage. The charts in the early 00s were dominated by Grand Theft Auto and Gran Turismo, and yet the GameCube launched with a cartoon haunted-house caper (Luigi’s Mansion) and a game where you rolled monkeys around inside transparent spheres (Sega’s Super Monkey Ball). The idea of a Nintendo console launching with a Sega game was unconscionable to any child of the 90s, but the Cube ended up carrying the torch for that nostalgic flavour of Japanese development into the early 00s, with Sega out of the market and western-made games becoming dominant.
Luigi’s Mansion was a strange choice of launch game – really, no Mario? – but it was delightful. The vivacious animation of the ghosts, the diorama-like detail of the haunted mansion and Luigi’s adorable cowardly voice and body language showed how extra power could infuse games with extra personality. Super Smash Bros Melee, with its cast of newly higher-definition Nintendo legends, was inordinately exciting.
The GameCube was home to two excellent Zelda games, the whimsical Wind Waker and emo-tinged Twilight Princess. Metroid Prime remains an unimprovable atmospheric classic. It had plenty of more experimental games, too: Eternal Darkness kept track of your character’s sanity and started to show you weird visions or glitch out on you if you let your character spiral into madness.
The lavishly animated brawler Viewtiful Joe looked like nothing I’d ever seen. And then there was that Donkey Kong game that you played with a controller shaped like bongo drums. Because I was a teenager in the 00s, I was deeply sensitive to the perception of video games as childish.
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