Nintendo GameCube


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    The little lunchbox that could (and eventually did when you duct-taped two of them together).

    Who Are You?

    The Nintendo GameCube (officially abbreviated as GCN), Nintendo's entry into the sixth generation of the Console Wars, was released in late 2001. It marked Nintendo's shift from cartridges to optical discs in response to third parties being driven away by the Nintendo 64's continued use of cartridges, using miniature proprietary discs. The graphical capabilities were better than the PlayStation 2, and in some cases, on par with those of the Xbox. Star Wars: Rogue Squadron III actually holds the sixth-gen record for polygon count, at 20 million polygons. The only aspect that held the GameCube back was Nintendo's use of a proprietary DVD-based format which could only hold 1.2GB of data, leading to some games either removing content or compressing assets such as movies, audio and/or textures to fit in such a small amount of disc space, which is especially evident in ports of Need for Speed where road textures look muddy and barely recognisable. Other games such as Resident Evil 4, Baten Kaitos, Tales of Symphonia and later instalments of Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell spanned two discs. This was chosen no thanks to the Big N's paranoia towards piracy, and also largely for them to avoid paying royalties to the DVD Forum.

    The GameCube was the first Nintendo console to have fewer buttons on its controller than its predecessor; this was due to the introduction of a second analog stick, though this C-stick was smaller than the primary analog stick.

    Nintendo offered many of its properties to other developers. Namco ran around with Donkey Kong and made the Donkey Konga series, Dolled Up Installments of the Taiko no Tatsujin series of drumming games. Namco and Rare (under the company's last days with Nintendo before getting bought out by Microsoft) both had Star FOX-based games (although Rare's was too a Dolled Up Installment, this one born out of Nintendo meddling with the would-have-been Nintendo 64 game Dinosaur Planet.) Most famously, Retro Studios rose to fame with the smash hit Metroid Prime. Capcom was working on The Legend of Zelda and liked the 'Cube so much they promised a few exclusive games for it, dubbed the "Capcom 5":

    Oh, and this thing is tough, as in physically. There are stories of people having dropped GameCubes off the top of tall buildings and them still being perfectly intact. It's gotten a reputation for being damn near indestructible; someone once fended off a mugger with a knife with his Gamecube and it wasn't even damaged. Intentionally trying to break it is just about the only way to go. Considering Nintendo's history of making their products Tonka Tough, there might be a reason for that.

    Its codename during development was "Project Dolphin" and there are often little nods to this throughout early Gamecube games, such as Super Mario Sunshine being set on "Isle Delfino" (Italian for dolphin). An early rumoured release name for the console was "Starcube", which was apparently dropped for copyright reasons.

    There was a stylish-looking variant of the GCN that plays DVD movies and contained other multimedia functionality called the Panasonic Q, but only in Japan and only for those who care not about the health of their wallet.

    Oh, and the slow, haunting theme that plays when you turn on the thing? It's the start-up theme for the old Famicom Disk System, slowed down a whole bunch. Pretty neat.

    Followed by the Wii, which mostly maintained backwards compatibility depending on the model, and is commonly seen as an iteration on the GameCube technically, which would further iterate into the Wii U before the Nintendo Switch would start again with a clean slate. Officially the GameCube's controller received support long after the system was discontinued - an officially supported adapter for Super Smash Bros. players was released on the Wii U, and this was extended to the Switch for players of Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, including newly manufactured controllers with some slight differences. The system itself is somewhat of a Cult Classic among Nintendo fans, given a number of significant titles were released for the system.

    GameCube games and series include:

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