Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 155: Nintendo GameCube

Episode Date: June 11, 2018

Nintendo followed up the modest success of the N64 with the GameCube: A small, sleek little system devoted solely to playing games. But in an era where the PlayStation 2's exclusives, backwards compatibility, and DVD playback features obliterated the competition, Nintendo found their nice little piece of hardware unable to gain any true traction. On this episode of Retronauts, join Bob Mackey, Kat Bailey, Jeremy Parish and Dave Rudden as the crew explores the console best known as "half of a Wii but without the duct tape:" the Nintendo GameCube.

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Booster juice, Canadian-born, blending since 1999. This week on Retronauts This week on Retronauts Welcome back once again for yet another episode of Retronauts. I am your host for this one, Bob Mackey. And today's topic is the Nintendo GameCube, which I believe just turned 16 years old today. So it's more than officially old. It's not officially ancient.

And that may disturb some of you. But don't unsubscribe. Let's turn 15 years old today. 16 last month. We're in December now. So yes. Who else is here today with me, Bob Mackey? It is I, Jeremy Parrish, who owned an orange GameCube.

It's called Spike. It is spice. Spice. Spice. I control the spice. The Galaxy. That's how it works in the Dune Universe. Unfortunately, we're on Earth and your Spice GameCube is worthless.

That's actually not true. Oh, the rare. We'll get to the colors. We'll get to the colors. Who else is here today? Kat Bailey and I had a spice controller and I was very proud of the fact that I could do the little alternate sound. I knew how to do that. I did too, but I had no spice.

And I'm Dave Ruddn. I owned a purple GameCube. Me too. And then I owned a black one, so I made up for it. I worked at a GameStop, so I technically owned all. So I technically owned all the colors. Because it was like, you know what I'm tired of the blue one or the purple one? Let me change it to a black.

Let me change it to a spice. Let me change it to this, that, and the other. So we have done a lot of hardware-focused episodes in the past. We've done Nintendo systems in the past, too. I believe we've done N-E-S, Super Nintendo, N-64. We, DS, am I missing anything here? Are there any other ones? Nintendo specifically focused?

Yeah. We haven't done Game Boy somehow. No, but that's your life. I can't believe I'm slacking. That's your project for the next 10 years is to do the Game Boy. Again, I wish. More like 30.

But this is going to be very similar. We're going to talk about the development, the launch, the life cycle, and everything like that. And we've also done episodes on Mario Sunshine and the Wind Waker. So go back to those. I think this episode will add a little more context to those as to what the GameCube was going through at the time. Before I get started, though,

I want to know what everyone's history with the GameCube is. And I'll start with Cat. Talk about your relationship with the Nintendo GameCube or the GCN, as it's officially known, bizarrely. Well, a couple of years before, I had gone back into console games with the PlayStation, and the GameCube came out the year that I started college. And I was a poor college student who could not afford a GameCube. But whenever I saw a GameCube at a friend's house, I was like, wow, what a cool little system. It was this little box. It looks so sleek and neat next to the Xbox, which looked like a gigantuan, gargantuan horror beast.

And I had a friend who would often bring a GameCube over, and we would play Smash Bros. Melee and various other games. And I finally got a GameCube of my very own in 2003 when they cut the price and bundled in one of the games because a friend offered to go in with me to get the bundled in Zelda. Yes, that was a Zelda bundle with what, Ocarina Major's Mass? It had the original Zelda. Zelda 2, it did not have Link to the Past, but it had Okarina and Majora's Mass. I had everything to that point except for Link to the Past, I believe. And or Link's Awakening. Strange emission, but still a lot of good collection for GameCube. I played Soul Calibur 2 with my friends. I really liked my GameCube. I got a lot of use out of it over the years. And I still actually have a couple of my old GameCube games floating around to my game's drawer somewhere.

I still have my old GameCube, but it's very far, far in a storage year. You're always carrying it because of that handle. I have small child hands, by the way, that's case you don't know. Dave, how about you? What's your GameCube relationship like? So the GameCube was the last system that I didn't buy on launch day. I actually waited a month. I worked at a GameStop at the time, and I think I was, like, building up some games to trade in.

And also, like, wasn't super into the launch lineup. But I think Smash Brothers was out within a month or so of the launch, right? It was out, but it was like a couple weeks. Yeah. That had a Pickman. So once that came out, I was like, I was off to the races. I had to have that, that Luigi's Mansion and Super Monkey Ball. And weirdly out of the three, I played Super Monkey Ball way more than the other two.

But, like, yeah, when I got the GameCube, that was all I played for, like, the rest of 2001. Jeremy, how about you? You were entering the press or in the press at the time? On the precipice. I was the precipice, yes. Yes. So I had fallen out of love with Nintendo during the N64 years. The system just didn't communicate to me.

It didn't speak to me. I owned one, but didn't really play it that much compared to PlayStation. But GameCube, the girl I was dating at the time, entered the Jet Program and became a teacher, you know, living in Japan. And I went to visit her for Christmas 2001, and she gave me an orange GameCube, a spice orange GameCube, as my Christmas gift, along with a copy of Pickman and Smash Brothers. And Smash Brothers didn't do anything for me, but the system I loved. And, like, immediately, it just rekindled my interest in Nintendo's games and their platforms. Like, there was just something about the GameCube, the way the controller fit in my hands. I loved the color of the orange system that never came to the U.S.

It was so unique and different. But the compact design of the system, and then later when you could plug this little thing that let you play Game Boy Advance games on it. Oh, yeah. Like, just snap it right onto the bottom. That was so great. It was just such a well-designed, thoughtful little system. It was Nintendo, you know, the last time. they really put out a console whose power was on par with the competition, and I really feel

like they, in a lot of ways, delivered on the promise. You know, as we talked about in the Mario Sunshine and Wind Waker episodes, they kind of rushed things. They were struggling to keep up. Third parties were really peeling away and losing interest in Nintendo at the time. But I don't know, for whatever reason, like, that was just my preferred system for as long as it was around. And whenever a game came out multi-platform, I would always try to play it on GameCube,

like Prince of Persia, Simpsons hit and run, like all these, just like any game beyond good and evil, I always picked up the GameCube version. And I just really, really, I don't know, I liked the system a lot. And then, you know, I did join the press about a little less than two years after that. So that was about midway through the GameCube's life. And I was like, I'm going to be the guy in the press who loves GameCube. And I was, but there weren't really that many opportunities to write. about it. I reviewed like Metroid Prime

to... Someone else did O'Dama. Oh, wow. But I just got to review a handful of GameCube games and then the system was gone and it was on to the Wii. Yeah, it had a short life. As for me, I was also working at a GameStop during the launch and I will tell you the managers at that store

hated the GameCube and they also hated the PS2. I remember my assistant manager at GameStop was a very scary woman who pulled me into the back room and would not let me leave until I admitted that this Dreamcast racing game had better graphics than Grand Tarismo 3. Oh my goodness. She was a

She was a message board in real life. She really was. No, no, you're not even kidding, Jeremy. I know you're not kidding. She called the PS2, the PSPoo. Also, she called the GameCube GamePube? No, GayCube or lame cube. This is not a progressive era for people, by the way.

So, yes, the people at my store hated the GameCube. I think GameCube was the first era in which people on the internet realized game and gay kind of sound like. We hit something, this will never get old. This is funny and smart. Yes.

So it was not a fun place to work as a Nintendo fan. And I was there for the Xbox and the GameCube launch. They were like four days apart. Yeah. For the XQ. I almost called the XQ. The XQ. For the Xbox.

The Oklahoma Gamesphere. That's not real. For the Xbox original launch, they filled the store with green and black balloons. They went all out for it. For the GameCube launch, nothing. And they made fun of me. They couldn't do purple and black balloons. That's like a funeral or a bruise.

Well, I'm sure that Microsoft probably gave them a whole bunch of money to be like, hey, guys. I mean, I remember it was a huge deal when the Xbox came out. In fact, my friend was the first person in Minnesota to get one, and he was in Game Informer, like, with the actual. And where the GameCube, like, just nothing, nothing. I really wouldn't put it past these people to buy their own balloons for the Xbox because they were weird and they didn't like Japanese people very much. So there was something going on there. This was Ohio, everybody, in the year 2001. It was not a progressive time.

but yeah there was a huge bash for the Xbox original nothing for the GameCube and I was made fun of for buying GameCube this is like an abusive workplace now that I think about it I could have sued that company I mean you're kind of made fun of for being a GameCube fan almost from the start especially in college I mean everybody was playing Halo and the game people was like why would you get one of those yes exactly and I was I was anti Xbox like I thought it was too big it was ugly what does Microsoft know about I was I lost my interest in Xbox after Microsoft decided not to go with the big chromed gold X prototype of the show. Like after they dropped that design, I was like, ah, this is a lot. But really,

Xbox fans and GameCube fans should have, like, had common ground with how ugly the controllers were. That's true. That's true. But yeah, and a common ground against the PS2,

which was a juggernaut at the time. We didn't know that. But I had a perfect controller. I bought it at launch. I got Luigi's Mansion. Was kind of underwhelmed by it, but I still liked it. I got Pickman and Smash Brothers

later that December. And I love the GameCube. and I sold it after, you know, the Winemaker came out, and then I bought it again for that bundle with all the nice Zelda games in because I love Majora's Mask, and I still have that GameCube, and I do have a soft spot for it, but it was a troublesome lifespan for the system,

and we'll get into that in a second. So I want to go into the development history of the GameCube. amazing article that I don't know if anyone in this room has read. It's called a Dolphin's Tale. And it is, I seriously spent two days. I have never known more about the GameCube until I read this article, basically. And not only goes really in depth into the system itself, it's really technical. And it's really interesting talking about how the chip set was developed all of the problems that were going on at SGI at the time.

Yeah, I had no idea about any of this stuff. Oh, my God. SG sounds like a nightmare back in the 90s. It seems like an out-of-control tech company while the bubble was bursting, just like, exactly. X just like diving into mountains of cocaine every night and yeah I mean I'm sure it was much worse than that that's like the PG-13 rated version

of what actually happened but yeah Nintendo relied on silicon graphics for the N64 that was their chip it was known as project reality by the time they started development on the next console like Katz said the company was falling apart it was a classic just tech company gone wrong he goes clashing bad decisions happening all that good stuff

and they were not happy that Nintendo dropped the price of the N64 before launch and Nintendo found this unprofessional. I'm sure they were getting yelled at by guys in suits. Like, why did you do this? Because I'm sure they got a cut of every chip that they sold with the N64. It just goes to show how pervasive Nintendo Power was, at least in my life, back in the mid-90s. I knew who Silicon Graphics was because Nintendo Powers had advertisements, essentially, for them in their magazines before the N-64 came out.

Were they not, like, advertised in front of, like, cruising in those other games with the Ultra-S64? Yeah, I think they use the same chip sets or so. They were like Silicon Graphics, synonymous with power. We've got Hollywood-level graphics in our N64. Yeah, they would also feed you the lie like these are going to be, you're going to play Jurassic Park in your living room. You're going to play Toy Story. I think M2 was Toy Story. I thought, oh, was it?

Yeah. The PS2 was Toy Story. Oh, I think PS2 borrowed the M2 Toy Story lie, but that never happened. I don't know if it's in the notes, but like, I remember the tech demos for GameCube being the first tech demos I remember. Like the Luigi's Mansion demo, the Zelda tech demo, the, I don't know. the Mario 128. The Rogue Squadron one. You don't remember the rubber ducky for PS2?

Oh, yeah. I think they kind of turned that into a downloadable game later on. They've had rubber ducks as their thing. Old man faces, right? And then the rubber duck showed up in Metal Gear Solid 2 is like a nod to that. But that's the first one I remember, but I do remember the GameCube, tech demos. I'm still waiting for Mario 128. I want there to be hundreds of Mario's.

That became Picman. There needs to be a Mario mode in Pickman. Just turn them on the tiny Marios. But so Nintendo went to the 3DO company of all people for a chip to power their new system. And astoundingly, they wanted to launch between fall of 99 and holiday of 2000, which obviously is a time they missed time. Yeah, yeah. They would have been directly competing with the Dreamcast. And the N64 would have had like a three to four year lifespan.

I think by 99, the N64 was kind of dead outside of late things like Perfect Dark. And the time was his final salvo, like final real salvo. The final time it really mattered, I think. And I like the N64. I'm not trying to put it down. So, Samsung owned what used to be the 3DO company, which was a company known as Cajent or Cajent. I don't know how you say it. Nintendo couldn't work out a deal with them.

And Samsung eventually sold that company to Microsoft. So that was off the table. So they couldn't rely on Silicon Graphics. They couldn't rely on the 3DO company. Then they turned to ArtX, a company made up of former Silicon Graphics engineers. And by mid-1988, sorry, by mid-1998, ArtX and Nintendo had signed an agreement and began development of the flipper chip. All of this shit is dolphin-themed, okay?

It gets a bit obnoxious. But yes, the flipper chip is what powers the GameCube. And unfortunately, there were some issues in that Silicon Graphics were going to sue ArtX over stealing secrets. That never happened because Silicon Graphics was like, maybe we could still work with Nintendo on something. So they didn't want to burn that bridge. And the GameCube was announced at E3 of 1999 under the code name Dolphin.

They announced this, like, right as I said, the N64 was no longer a thing. It was no longer a thing that really mattered anymore. I mean, there were things on the horizon, but ultimately, post-Occarina LeCat said, it was just sort of like, okay, let's move on to the next thing. Yeah, there was a real sort of lull for Nintendo right around this time. They had Game Boy Color, which was performing reliably outside of Pokemon. Pokemon was the thing. Yeah, but that was like the one thing they had. N64 was dying.

The Game Boy family was fading away except for Pokemon. Game Boy Advance hadn't launched yet. GameCube hadn't launched yet. They're really lucky. Yeah, this sort of lacuna where they... GBA... Things could have gone really badly. GBA and GameCube came out at the same year, 2001,

and so that was kind of Nintendo's next foray into the future. And Pokemon really carried them through the N-64 and GameCube generations. I mean, it was what they made the most money off of after the hype was gone from the N-64 and after the GameCube underperformed. Yeah, I was saying that Ocruin of Time was their last salvo. There was also Pokemon Stadium and Pokemon Snap and a lot of those things, which obviously weren't full-blown. on games, but they were selling bundles.

They had the Pikachu-themed N64. Oh, we had several thousand with those in our back room. I would like to get one of those things, RGBMata, just for the novelty of them. The cheeks light up when you turn it on. It's so great. It's really great. So Nintendo missed their ultimate goal of launching in the fall of 2000. But that year, at Space World, we talked about that in the Wind Waker episode.

They debuted a bunch of demos. They had, you know, link fighting Gannon. They had Miaoth's Dance Party, which never became a real thing. They had the Hunter Mario's thing. basically a lot of promises, including the Zelda thing which would explode next year into something that they didn't expect. So go back to the Windmaker episode to hear more about

that. And unlike the Wii, the physical appearance of the GameCube was designed to look as much like a gaming system as possible. If you compare that to the PS2 and the Xbox, they're just these ubiquitous tech boxes that could be a VCR, they could be a DVD player. I mean, the other two things were DVD

players, but Nintendo was like, we want this to look as much like a game console as possible, which is the exact opposite thing they did with the Wii. Yeah, the PS2, oh, sorry. Would you attribute this to Iwada coming in and taking over for Yamuchi? Because Iwada... He stepped in... It's too soon for that.

He stepped in towards, I think, 2002-2003 maybe. It was a little later. Yeah. The balls were rolling at that point. Yeah, Yamu Chu's about to leave, but he wanted to launch the GameCube before he left the company. I find the juxtaposition really interesting because the original NES, as you'll recall, was an expandable system. And they were doing things like, we want to put a modem in this thing, right? so that we can have connecting to the bank software and that kind of thing.

They wanted it to be a do-everything box, which really kind of brings to mind the PS2 and much later things like the Xbox 360, but the GameCube especially was kind of the beginning of Nintendo saying, no, this is a game console. We do games, and we don't care about this online crap, we don't care about this DVD crap, and it was really to their detriment. Yeah, and in gaming culture, this will be a through line, I think, in this episode.

Gaming culture at this time, there was something happening that we might forget about, and I talked about it in the Winwaker episode, it's that kids who grew up in the NES era were becoming adults. And in this era, still, gaming was looked down upon. I think it kind of still is now, but back in 2001, it was just like games are for kids. And there was nothing more heartbreaking to me than when my friends would grow out of gaming. Like, when I was 10 years old or 12, I'm like, oh, we'll just do this forever. But then 14, 15, those, games are gay. Games are so gay now. And like, okay, I'll just play games by myself then.

everyone was so insecure about being a gamer, being associated with games, and this is the worst possible time to make a game machine that looked like a game machine. It was embarrassing to admit that you liked video games if you were in high school in the 1990s, even though everybody played them. Yeah, I mean, it is a very generational thing. I don't think this will happen anymore, but it was the NES kids coming of age and being like, oh, God, I am a child, but I still want to be one, but everyone around me is just like scoffing at me and looking down at me. Yeah, I had a different experience than you guys being a few years older than you because, I don't know, like, As I came of age, it was really hard to find people in college and high school who even acknowledged the existence of video games. I had like two or three friends in college that I'd hang out with and we'd rent Super NAS and in 64 games. But that was about it. And then like once I got into the working world until I joined the gaming press, like you just didn't talk about video games.

Now it seems like the shame was even deeper for your kind. It wasn't it wasn't shame. It was just like, yeah, my elderly people. It wasn't even shame. It was just like it never occurred to people that they would be playing video games. But now like everyone I meet, every young adult like 25 to 35, they just play video games. They're like, Call of Duty, whatever. I'm glad it's accepted now, but this is an ugly, weird time.

The guy who cuts my hair, like, every time he's like, what you've been playing lately? I've been playing more Call of Duty. Yeah. Look at him up. Think about Battlefront. I see people at my local bar with the Switch, like propping the switch up on the bar and playing. I'm like, you're awesome. You're more brave than me, sir.

But yes, so ultimately And the Game Boy Micro paved the way Sure, sure You can think that if you want to That was their pitch Okay, I didn't realize that Yeah, they were like You know, Game Boy Advance

You wouldn't want to play that in public But Game Boy Micro is cool and sleek You could pull it out of your pocket At the bar and play it It just screams I have a girlfriend I remember it being compared to like the iPod Like, yeah I just take it out

I mean it was cool on it Anyway, that was kind of a side track I think the real failure of the GameCube was that it was designed just for Japanese consumers in mind. A lot of these things are very focused on a Japanese household. In fact, the handle was added so people could transport their console from room to room. Japanese people have much smaller living spaces, so they're like, what if you want to move it to a quieter area

of your space? So that's why I was added and to carry it around. But I will say that handle is made for Japanese hands, not big white people meat hooks. Like, I think I have slender hands, but I can't comfortably stick my hand through that GameCube handle. Can anyone in this room comfortably do that? Okay. Yeah, me. Okay, I have like... You're just too tall, Bob. I know.

I have like... You're like wilt a stilt for video games. Giantism or something. Meanwhile, compare this to the Xbox, which was the opposite of... It was too big for Japanese households. Yes. And this controller was gigantic. You had American hands.

The original controller was just like, I looked at that thing and I was like, I can't hold that controller. I'm sorry. And also, that's why the, yeah, in Japan, the Xbox, the original Xbox launched with the controller, the smaller ones. Oh, you're ready. No one's going to want the Duke. as they call it, like that giant monstrosity.

It signaled a changing of the guard because this was a time when Microsoft was invading and it was saying, nope, Western development is here. We are not focusing on a Japanese audience first. We're focusing on a Western and European audience first. And that was the beginning of where we are today. Yes, totally true. And the handle also, this is a very Japanese household thing, it was because they noticed people would play with their consoles next to them on the ground. That never happened with me. But whenever you see like a Japanese, like, gamer,

house or whatever, like, it's just a stereotype of the person on the ground sitting next to their console with, like, their legs crossed or whatever. That is totally, like, American living rooms are huge. They have entertainment centers. They are just, like, far too big. And I mean, the NES would be on the ground sometimes, but I would never be, like, right next to it,

you know? So I mentioned that my friend would bring over a GameCube. Like, he actually did transport it, and he used that handle. So it was used by at least a one American. We have one on record, so God bless you. Yeah, Miyamoto wanted to name the GameCube the Dolphin.

This could have been the Nintendo Dolphin. In fact, the code for the game is, if you look at the spines of GameCube games, it says DOL than a number, so it's Dolphin, whatever. Yeah, every console had its own code, so there was like N-A-V or something? Yeah, Revolution, yeah. So N-E-S was N-8, Super N-E-S was S-N-S, and then N-64 was U-4, I think. So, yeah, it wasn't called the dolphin, obviously, but they were kicking around the name StarCube.

and the online service It was my favorite Battlestar Galactic A character Oh god And the online service Was going to be called Star Road They're going for like a A Mario theme

But I remember there being a mock-up of Like our You know A concept Mockup of the GameCube Before it came out And one of them was just like a giant star button on it No that was the Wii

Oh that was Okay So they still wanted that star idea So yes They eventually settled on GameCube And in America Nintendo wanted us to

abbreviated as GCN because NGC was the abbreviation for National Geographic. So I'm totally serious. I did not realize that. Yeah. So whenever we got games in at GameStop, the code would be GCN. We put that on the board, GameCube Nintendo. So we're a not national geographic company. Like that one they just called the GC.

GC. Hmm. And we stuck because three letters are better. I don't know. You want to represent Nintendo in that name. Let people know who makes it. P.S.2, GCN. Xbox. Yeah. Yeah, like two syllables is a more Japanese abbreviation. like, you know, Street Fighter 2 is Suto, but here, for whatever reason, we like our three, three together, like the Trinity, like Jesus and God and the Holy Ghost. I choose to make that a Triforce reference. So this is something I completely forgot about.

Sometime during the development of the GameCube, Microsoft approached Nintendo and wanted to buy them for $25 billion and get them to be like the main Xbox developers because Nintendo had a history with games, obviously. The N64 was underperforming. They thought they could scoop them up and, you know, absorb them. And Nintendo of America actually was interested in this a bit, but eventually Yamuchi shut it down. I can't imagine. I want to go to that timeline where Microsoft, I mean, I don't want to stay there, but I want to know what they would do just to see. Can you imagine what would have happened to like the Mario and Zelda franchises by the time? Mario X-Zero?

By the time of that Xbox One reveal where they were like, we're pivoting to entertainment. Halo the TV series. Come on and watch it. You saw what they did to retro, and they would have done the same thing to Nintendo. They were like, okay, you're the kid-focused developer. Sorry, rare. Yes, yes. That's exactly what they did to Rare, actually.

But, yeah, thankfully it didn't happen. Nintendo still had confidence, and I feel like they're very... But rumors were swirling at that time that Microsoft was going to do it. Yeah, yeah, they had several meetings about this. This was all on the record. So this could have happened, but it didn't, thankfully. And thanks to the N64, Nintendo was having a lot of problems getting third parties on board. In a lot of interviews, I really recommend you go back to these interviews with Miyamoto, Iwada, and Yamauchi, because of course Yamato is going to spit fire.

But Miyamoto and Awada were not so cute and cuddly back in these times. Like, 15 years ago, they were kind of sassy in interviews because they were pretty defensive about people thinking the game was for kids, thinking it was underpowered and things like that. So they are trying to spend all of these poor qualities into a good thing. So they're like, no, no, no, we want quality over quantity. You know, everyone else is going to have games. We're going to have the best games. You know what? We don't want just your ports of games.

Get your ports out of here. You make games just for us. So I wish they had applied that strategy with a Wii. Yeah. Let's be honest. Nintendo's anti-competitive strategies continued to bite them in the ass. And the PlayStation came in and swiped up all of the developers. And they were like, well, we got a productive relationship with Sony.

And the PlayStation was very successful. There's no reason to believe the PS2 won't also be successful. Why would we go back to you? Yeah. And so they basically had to create developers in order to make more games for the GameCube. So they founded NST, Nintendo Software Technologies. I think now they mostly make Mario versus GameCube. NST was already around.

They had developed some games for Game Boy Color by the time GameCube launched. They did Bionic Commando Elite Forces and the Crystallis remake. I think they were founded with GameCube in mind, though, but while was in development. So NST, I think they just make those Donkey Kong versus Mario games now, right? They kind of fallen off the map. They've thrown in their hat to some other things, but I can't think of what they're. They were at the top of my head. But they, like, pitch in on other projects now.

Okay. And they, so Retro Studios was an existing studio at the time. They were going through a lot of Silicon graphic style issues with executives. And Nintendo got them for a cool $1 million. So they became the Metroid Prime developers. I love, I love their story of Miyamoto coming over to Retro and looking at their games and how nervous they were that this living legend of game development was taking a look and going, no. Yes. I would just quit on the spot.

Or cry, immediately burst into tears. But they were trusted with Metroid and they did a heck of a job, which I will get to in a bit. I believe Tanabe, Kinske Tanabe, was the, he was there from the beginning, right, overseeing development of Metroid Prime. I believe so, yes. Factor 5 came over from the N64, having done Rogue Squadron. Right. They were able to hold on Factor 5. In fact, there was going to be some sort of motion control over the GameCube 2.

Very Wii-style motion controls, which Factor 5 was developing, what, Rogue Squadron? Is that the GameCube one? It was Rogue Leader. They were developing Rogue Leader with that in mind, but it never came into being. I'm glad they didn't because Rogue Leader is one of the greatest Starfighter shooters I've ever played. And I would have hated for them to ruin it with motion controls. We're going to say, Jeremy? Just there were a lot of interesting ideas that never came to fruition with the GameCube, like the 3D screen.

Like Luigi's Mansion was developed as a diorama because they were going to have a 3D screen for that. They were going to sell a separate LCD screen just for 3D gameplay. That's so Nintendo. I'm sorry. I love it. That is so Nintendo. like the frigging Kid Icarus uprising game 3DS easel you put it on just like this very very limited tech I mean this very interesting technology it's limited to one thing the toy developer

mentality yeah for sure for sure yeah but someone did eventually I think Madcats came out with a screen that worked like that like it wasn't 3D but it was like a clamshell that it snapped out on top of the game cube but it was terrible I bought it I was like yes I can play this anywhere and the screen was awful like the resolution was off I remember that I was going to buy one Nintendo would have done that screen concept justice, whereas the third party did not. The Sony PS1-O-N-E was the good one, right? Yeah. You built-in screen.

Those are cool. So Nintendo was fighting the whole kiddie image right from the get-go, even from other developers. So the consumer reception was Nintendo is for kids, but other developers thought the same way. Like, there were interviews in this piece from Hideo Kojima, who's like, why would I put Metal Gear Solid 2 on the GameCube? This game is for adults. That system is for children.

And, like, all of these developers are on the record saying, like, I don't want to put this mature game on a kid's console. That'll make me look bad. It'll make my company look bad. So, Nintendo just like, God, come on, we're a family console, and families include adults. So please develop adult games for us. It didn't help that. Their flagship game, from the start, was Luigi's Mansion. And we all know that that's a good game.

And we can go, ha, ha. I mean, people of all ages can enjoy this. This is like a Pixar thing. But, I mean, it was Luigi going. Yeah, like humming and whistling. As opposed to a green armored space marine. The master of all chiefs. I always felt like the biggest problem that Luigi's Mansion had was not that it was, you know, all ages,

but that it was not a new revolutionary Mario game. And we'd been spoiled. Super Mario Brothers launched with NES. Super Mario World launched with Super NES. And Mario 64 launched with N.64. So when GameCube came around and it didn't have a game that changed everything with Mario, but instead a cute little adventure with his brother. People were like, what the hell is this?

This is stupid. This system was a failure. It looked like a dumb spinoff, to be honest. And people are going, this isn't a full-blooded Mario game. This is just some experimental spinoff. You're leading with this? We were very, very spoiled. And of course, oh, go ahead, Dave.

Has there been a Nintendo console since or portable since that's launched with a new Mario game? Wii U, the best Mario game ever, right, Jeremy? That's correct. Objectively. I hear you guys laughing. That's really weird. We're going to talk about this later. So, yes.

And of course, you know, they're fighting the kiddie image. the Winwaker's debut at Space World 2001 did not help that at all. We talked about that a lot in the Windmaker episode, but yes, it's like, no, no, no, we are not for kids. Oh, by the way, here's the most cartoony version of Link you've seen in your life. And before that, like, before that demo, they had shown that, you know, concepts where it's like Lincoln and... Gannon fighting, yeah, which could have been like, hey, Smash Brothers, you know. I mean, I told, I talked about this in the Winwaker episode. I'm in high school at the time.

I'm a senior in high school, and my friends, have you seen the new Zelda? and I just see this really blurry still of this cupy, like puppy, or not puppy, this puppet-like cupid doll kind of link. And I'm going, what the heck is going on? Because you can't even imagine. It looks so bad. Most people who hated it did not see it in motion. Exactly. They just saw the pictures of it.

This was 2001. You had to download movies. Yeah. With your IGN Insider program. A 180 resolution. Yeah. I don't know. I saw that the first shots of Windwaker and I was like, Nintendo's back baby.

This is it. This is Nintendo. Well, when you saw an emotion, it looked incredible. Yeah, yeah. It looked like a cartoon, yeah. And as an anime fan, I was not offended by how Link looked, but I was looked down upon for that, too, in the early thousands. But it was considered a huge disaster. It was, yeah.

Yeah. So, yeah, go back to that Windmaker episode if you want to learn more about that. And eventually it overcame, you know, its bad reputation. And it was like, it wanted to be a beloved game, a very well-remembered game. Absolutely. Oh, but now the pendulums come back around and people think it's overrated. So, you just got to keep up with the trends, man. As long as Skyward Sword is now.

never loved by anyone. I'll be happy. So here's some stats for you, the most boring part of this GameCube exploration. It ran on the, the CPU ran on the IBM PowerPC Gecko, which is a 486 megahertz chip. And in comparison, the PS2 ran at 300 megahertz, and the Xbox ran at 733. There are a lot of factors that can affect this. There's like video RAM and other RAM and buses and crap. I just have the main CPU GPU comparisons. They had an MX ship, right? Sorry. A what chip? An MX chip? MX.

Yeah, this is when graphic cards were becoming very much in vogue. I don't know that. This did kind of mark the beginning of this very brief period where IBM Motorola PowerPC chips were used in consoles because Xbox 360 also used one. And then, of course, we used one. And we used one. So for this brief period of time, I guess like a decade, this was like a thing that all of a sudden made the jump from Macintoshes to more like embedded systems, even as Apple was moving away from the power. RPC. I forgot about that. Yeah.

So, yeah, the GPU is the flipper chip we talked about before developed by R-Tex. Not to be mistaken for the clipper chip, which is also very kids-oriented. Is that what you used to ride Bart? Local reference, everybody. The card. Yeah, okay. Clipper chip was the, like, the V-chip, the censorship chip. They called it the clipper chip?

Pretty sure that's, huh. Maybe I'm thinking of something else. I'm pretty sure that's right. We'll figure it out. So it was the flipper chip. It ran at 162 megahertz. The PS2's GPU ran at 150, and the Xboxes ran at 233. And I do want to talk about the media format, which is bizarre.

It is the mini DVD weighing in at a huge 1.5 gigabytes of potential information compared to a normal DVD, which has 4.7. That's a pretty big reduction in size. Okay, the Clipper chip was actually an NSA developed spy chip. Oh, nice. I'm sure it's good for everybody then. There's probably one of those in the GameCube too. And in all of our phones. Smaller space than a DVD, but presumably harder to pirate.

I think that was the intention. Did it actually work? I don't think so. I mean, everything is cracked eventually, but... I've never seen pirated GameCube games. I have because I've downloaded that to play. But not on the discs. Not pressed to the discs.

The idea was like this would make it harder to do burned discs. Right, right. Like that was a standard format, that size, but it was not like a consumer level technology. Whereas DVDs and CD-ROMs, like, those were a huge thing for PlayStation owners. Sorry, Dave God. I mean, I assume that this, like, with the N64, a lot of developers hated the added cost. of, you know, making cartridges or, you know, the technology for that, not using DVDs, I imagine, like, at least with it being a disc that there wasn't a big cost factor in the

development. Yeah, I wonder if they had to pay a DVD licensing fee for using that technology. They did, okay. I know they slashed the prices on how much people would have to pay for licenses just to get people on board. But, yeah, a much smaller amount of size. I presume there was some piracy, but not as widespread as like PS2 and Xbox piracy. But it's funny again. I mean, Xbox had a built-in hard drive.

And so when people wanted to pirate Xbox games, they hacked their system to put the games on the hard drive. They put Super Mario Brothers on it. It was next gen right there. It was great. I had a friend who just bought an Xbox original and it had like every ROM on it and a bunch of new games on it. It's a piracy machine.

That's because the Xbox One was basically a PC. It was off-the-shelf parts. Xbox Original Cat. We have to make that distinction now. My apologies. It really was forward thinking in a lot of ways, but it also made it an amazing pirating machine. Let's be honest.

And prior to this, we saw. on Nintendo spin these somewhat lackluster features into good things. And this one is even funnier because I believe it was Miyamoto was like, we believe developers will have to try harder and only include the essential content in their GameCube games. So this smaller size is actually a good thing. And, you know, you laugh, but Nintendo game ROMs, like Breath of the Wild, Mario Odyssey, they're so tiny.

Then you look at like Xenoblig Chronicles or Skyrim or L.A. Noir that requires you to download an additional 14 gigabytes. And you're like, oh, Nintendo really does mean it. But nobody was downloading GameCube games in 2001. And I don't recall that many, like, multi-disc game cube games that, or even developers saying, like, we can't make this for the GameCube because of St. There were a few. Resident Evil 4 was one of them. And, like, I think, yeah, it definitely was.

And one of the Buy Ten Kytos games, I don't know. There weren't many, Dave. I think they were like five or six. But, yeah, it was not a huge issue. Yeah. You know, I'm talking about how the Xbox was basically a PC turned down. into a game console, the GameCube, like I mentioned, you know, had that commonality with Apple systems. It was basically like the weird cousin of a Macintosh. And like the two years

before, I think the GameCube launched, or Apple launched the G4Cube, which was like the same size, same form factor. It was like a Kleenex box with a console or with a computer inside. And this was like the point, which I was like, Nintendo really likes Apple's design approach, huh? I was thinking of the IMac when thinking about GameCube. If you don't remember that, those were the candy-colored computers. No, that was the N-64. They did the candy-colored, you know,

after Apple did the candy-colored iMacs, Nintendo did the candy-colored N-64s. It wasn't just Pikachu. The exact same five colors as Apple. And Game Boy colors came in a bunch of different colors, too. And then the Wii came out, and it looked like Apple. Game Boy Advance was initially shown

in two colors. There was a translucent orange and a translucent blue turquoise, which was exactly with white highlights or white accents. Was that art? Which was exactly the same two colors that Nintendo or that Apple released, I keep mixing this up, released its iBooks in. There was like a turquoise and an orange. So then you got the GameCube that looked exactly, or like, not exactly, but was very

spiritually similar to the G4 cube. And at that point, you're like, really? Maybe Nintendo you could come up with some new design ideas. Did Apple ever try to buy Nintendo? I don't believe so. I'm surprised that never happened. It seems like it would be like... They would have been...

At this point, they could. They definitely could. So let's talk about the wacky-ass controller on the GameCube. I like it, but it's an odd controller. So Miyamoto is sort of, I mean, he's not an engineer, but he is sort of the guy who spearhead's development of the controllers. He is the guy who finalizes the controllers from what I've read in all these interviews. And he spent, I think, to that point, the most time designing the GameCube controller. He ultimately wanted a controller that anyone in the family could use, which seems insane to me, because if you show the GameCoop controller to someone who doesn't play games, they will just like shake their head at it.

It's way more intuitive than the N64 controller, though. I'm not saying the N64 one is good either. It might be the most kid's toy element of the system. It looks like something that you would put in like a colorful buttons. Yeah, like a baby's like piano or whatever where you just hit all the buttons and then like a trap. And then Fred Flintstone talks to you when you hit the A button. Yeah, it's so, so I think, like, he was being iconoclastic in a way where in one of these interviews, he states that other consoles borrowed his S&S controller design. So this is a quote from Miyamoto.

I don't want to state that they copied from us, but it is obvious that the four buttons became a standard. Now I have decided to renounce this shape. I invented it and I can afford to renounce it. I renounce you four buttons. I spit on your grave. I mean, the four button became the standard because it showed up on PlayStation, which was derived from the super NES. So, yeah, like, there's a natural evolution there. But I feel like...

Hey, he said it, not me. I know. I'm just saying, like, I feel like this is one of those cases where pride goes before a fall. Like, you know, they created something good, and that's great. But they felt like they had to do something new and different to stand apart. But it's actually okay to just go with what works. It's fine. Yeah, there are so many buttons on this thing.

But... I do wish for an alternate history where the Genesis 6 button controller that they were released later in the lifespan, like if that became the standard, maybe because I was playing a lot of fun. fighting games back then. There you go. So you didn't always have to map the freaking high kicks to the shoulder buttons. Yeah, I would always put the weak attacks on shoulder buttons because I can just play King of Fighters games and you only need the four buttons.

People love the Saturn controller, but I don't like it very much. Yeah, I'm in the same boat. This is a period of transition for controllers because we forget about this, but dual analog controls were just finally coming into style and Halo really popularized it. And so you said this in your notes, Bob, like the C-State. was kind of an afterthought in this thing. Yeah, actually, in 2000, that was the first year a system launched with two analog sticks. Dreamcast a year before, one analog stick, which seems insane to me.

We should have known better. But, yeah, this was a fairly new idea in our minds, like controlling a camera while we play. Well, there was this great review, I think, from GameSpot that was going, these dual analog controls are just terrible. And what a dumb idea and everything. People like to trot it out every once in a while on Reddit. So Jeremy was talking about pride going before the fall. Here's another prideful quote for Miyamoto. He says, I had some confidence with the N64 controller, too.

However, when I compare the two, I can tell that the GameCube controller is better designed for gameplay. What I really want to say is get accustomed to the game cube controller because 10 years from now, this controller will be the standard. Oh. It may not be a standard, but it still can be used. Isn't there, like, on the Wii, there's the things built right in. But I think on the Wii U, yeah, it was an adapter. It is the standard for Smash Brothers. People who play Smash Brothers, including me, not competitively, of course, they love the GameCube controller.

It really feels perfect for that game. Smash Brothers feels wrong on any other controller, let's be honest. You know, even though some of the specifics of the GameCube controller went away, like the oversized button with the things surrounding it, the overall layout of the stick, the controller, is still active with the Switch with the Pro Controller. you have the the left analog stick high with a D-pad below it and then you have buttons on the right side

above a lower analog stick so yeah like that part they got right like that works really well it's comfortable and it's intuitive I don't know if you could say maybe the dual shock invented this but like the concept of having

bumpers in front of triggers on the top of the controller yeah yeah that was on the original PlayStation controller yeah L1 or 2 R1 or 2 I just can't remember if those like back ones are they're kind of just

buttons too but the whole they were oh they were bigger triggers okay yeah they're a bit bigger actually I think the first dual shock they were just buttons and then on PS2 they turn into triggers yeah I'm pretty sure that's how it works no they were buttons I'd like they didn't have the the analog functionality right yes to every single freaking button had analog sensitivity yeah and they really wanted to they were trigger they were trigger sized on the original i must remember and I'm thinking of the dual shock four which is great right am I wrong for thinking that the shoulder buttons are pressure sensitive they are they are yeah I like, I hate that.

And then they click in for additional functionality. It's actually kind of annoying because it feels like it loses a little bit of precision and because you have to do the extra click. I never liked that. So, yeah, let's talk about the button layout. It was designed around one big button that's fun to press. So the A button's in the middle. Jolly candy-like button.

It really is. It's a history-erasing button. That's what I think of every time I press that button. Fun. This is fun. I love hitting A. I'm going to hit it all the time. These other buttons. Not as fun.

I thought N64 was the fun machine. but no, the GameCube. Has a jolly candy-like button in the center. So, yes, with smaller buttons surrounding the A button. So this is the one controller I can think of that has kidney-shaped buttons on it. The X and the Y button sort of like hover around the periphery of the A button. And the B buttons is a little tiny guy. The kidney buttons are not actually a bad idea.

Like, those are fine, but that tiny little chicklet B button, the little tiny red button is so bad. And the D-PAD is abominably small. It is so tiny. It's an afterthought. Did you ever press it? Yes, I had used it to play, like, Game Boy Advance Games with the Game Boy player. You play games with that thing? Because it was better than the analog stick.

Wow. Slightly. The flaws in the GameCube controller button layout really become obvious when you play Mega Man Legacy Collection on GameCube. Because they reverse the A and B functionality. So you're using that tiny little chicklet red B button to jump. Someone to go to jail for that. It was actually unplayable for me. It was terrible.

I tried it out. It's like, I can't play this. I have to get the PS2 version. I gave it like a 7 in my review because, hey, these are good games. But oh my God, it was so infuriating to try to play. It really was. And so Miamoto's thoughts in retrospect, he was not so proud of the GameCube Controller. He says, the GameCube Controller is a product of us feeling that without this or that people wouldn't be able to play the games we make.

But then we realized that was a problem that we were thinking based on the controller as the premise. So they were thinking with the controller first and not the games, I believe is what he's trying to say here. Is that what I'm interpreting correctly? Yeah, they were working, you know, the opposite direction. Instead of thinking, like, what makes a good game? They were thinking, like, what, you know, interface standards do we need to set up so people can play games? What will people be doing in games? Not like, let's think of games first.

Whereas, you know, whatever flaws the N64 controller had, it was built around the idea of playing Mario 64. And some good things came out of that, like the analog stick. I guess that's about it. But, you know, like they did at least kind of think, well, yeah, you have the C-Barranted. buttons, the camera buttons. The big old trigger. That would have been better as a right analog stick, but that idea was still a few years out. So, you know, they did develop the N64 controller based on the needs of a game.

A single game, yes, but still a game. Whereas GameCube, I guess it's like the Pikmin controller. Yeah, kind of. I mean, I want to say that back during the N64's development, they did not envision a world where you would have to constantly control a camera. And I believe, I want to believe that's how people who can't handle 3D games. That's what they don't like about it. I know people that play 2D games, but they can't wrap their mind around.

Like, I have to constantly control this camera. Like, that is just second nature to me as a person who plays a lot of games. But people who have never played a 3D game are like, I have to constantly, like, babysit this camera while I'm moving a character. But it's just something that's second nature to a lot of people that play games. Speaking as a voyeur, I really love moving the camera around. This is natural for me. It really infuriated me at that time playing games like Devil May Cry and Final Fantasy 10 because even at that time, I was thinking, God, if I could only just reposition this camera just a little bit better. It was really annoying in Final Fantasy 10 because finally they got rid of the pre-rendered backgrounds.

But, oh, it's still a fixed camera. It's all diorama. You can't move the camera. I assume they're thinking of those, like, no, cinematic angles. We're going to make movies people. We will control the angles at all times, even in 3D. So, yeah, the C-Stick is kind of nice. I like how it has, like, a little, like, what's that the hexagon around it?

It's just like a little, like, clicky shape around it. Does the other analog stick have that, too? Which one? The other analog stick on the controller? I mean, it's clicky because it, like, it's kind of. segmented, like the outer rim of it. If you like clicks, like the GameCube is the console for you.

Those triggers clicked. Not quite as good as the NeoGeo Pocket color, but close. But it really is remarkable that this thing endures to this day, that I still have all of my GameCube controllers from my original GameCube just in case I want to break out some Smash Brothers with some friends because why would you play with anything else? I mean, that is such an odd historical. oddity, I've got to say.

I also like, I'm remembering now that they have the ridges on the analog stick. And the PS4 was the first Dual Shock to add those. Like, the Dual Shock 3 does not have the ridges. The Dual Shock 4 has the ridges, which I think is a great feature. What a funky controller. Really funky. Do you keep a Wavebird controller? I never got a Wavebird.

I mean, my friend... You call yourself a Smash Bros. My friend had a Wavebird, and I loved it. It was an amazing controller. We'll get to it. Yes. So, yeah, we're going to take a break right now. We'll get back to the GameCube launch when we come back.

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Discount not available in all stages situations. So, I'm going to be able to be. So we are back and I want to talk about the GameCubes launch. So it launched on September 14th, 2001 in Japan, and it launched on November 19th, 2001 in the United States. And there are a few contextual things I want to go into just to add more, shed more light on the situation because if you were much younger in the early 2000s or just not paying attention, you might not know the full score. So it cannot be understated how much Sony was just dominant. eliminating the market. Absolutely. The PlayStation 2 is still the best-selling console of all time. Nothing will ever beat it. Put that on my grave, everybody. I'm saying this right now. Nothing will ever beat the PS2 just because of... About the PS4. What? PS4 is doing extremely well.

Yeah. Nothing. It's not going to get up there. Nothing will beat the PS2. How close does the week come? It is like maybe 20 mil... I don't know offhand. Maybe someone can look it up, but it's number three, I believe, and PS2 is number one. But yeah. I think PS4 would have to more than double its current install base to match the PS2 or the PS2, yeah. Yes. And, okay, so to put this in time, set this in time, the PS2 had a mediocre launch lineup. No real killer apps. I believe SSX was the best game, which is a fun game. But it was a DVD player at a time when DVD players were expensive, but also the hottest entertainment thing you could possibly own. And at the time, a DVD player cost about as much as a PS2 at retail, which was $2.99. I bought a refurbished one a few months before the PS2 launched for about the same price.

So DVD players were not these like $30 things at Target. They were pricey. Sorry, Dave, go ahead. Oh, now I was just going to say like, I mean the PS2 was also, and not to make this PS2 episode, but it was also a reliable DVD player. I mean, you would get the blue. There was that problem with black discs on the PS2 for a while. But like every DVD player I bought seemed like besides, you know, ones that are consoles too. Like they seem to like have issues within a couple months.

Yeah, DVD was a weird technology at the very beginning. I jumped on right away because I had, I don't know, I watched a lot of anime and owned a bunch of VHS and was like, this stuff sucks. I want a better format. So I jumped on DVD and like very early DVDs were extremely unreliable. I remember the very first anime to come out on DVD in America was bubble gum crisis collection. Came in a PC box. It came in a PC box. And the discs did not work on DVD players.

Like I had to send it back in and have to be like a CD-ROM. drive or DVD-ROM drive to play it or something? They worked in DVD-ROM drives, like, as disks, but not to play the video. It was, they were just, like, mismastered. So, yeah. So, yeah, like, it was a really rough and shaky technology. So, PS2 coming in and just being this thing that worked. Yeah.

Like, that was big. If you look back also that the PlayStation was just a dominate. It destroyed Sega. It owned Nintendo. Sony owned the market in a way that Nintendo. owned the market in the 80s, frankly. Yeah, yeah. All of the big players were on it.

And when the PS2 came out, first of all, the graphical leap was just incredible from the original PlayStation. The first time I ever saw a PS2 game, my mind was blown. And then, not only that. Really? Like, you hadn't seen a Dreamcast at that point? I had seen a Dreamcast. You hadn't played Soul Calibur? I had played Soul Calibur, but I don't know.

I think it's because I didn't get a Dreamcast at launch. I didn't either. And the PlayStation 2, when they were. rolled out Metal Gear Solid 2's first trailer. Oh, well, yeah. I mean, that was the hottest thing, so immediately I mean, and Metal Gear Solid was the best

game on the original PlayStation by far, in my opinion. I mean, it was very forward thinking in the way that it was a AAA. It was a AAA experience on the original PlayStation in 1999. Yeah, I got to agree with kind of, like, when I saw

like the first PS2 games, I remember actually stupidly thinking, well, games cannot look better than this. Like, I thought if that was. I thought that was like humans now. I thought that was a RE4 on the GameCube. But yeah, the DVD thing, again, it is so

important to this era and I feel like part of the GameCube's failure or most of the GameCube's failure came from not playing DVDs. I feel like that was such an important part of functionality at this time. It was also a perfect storm though of the Sony was already owning the market. It had all the best games. It was

a DVD player. And maybe this is a thing, but the Xbox and the GameCube came out a couple months after 9-11 when people weren't spending money. People still spent money on Xbox. George Bush told us to go out and shop. To show the terrorists. Right? Am I right?

I mean, it was a very weird time at the end of 2001. It's strange to say for me, but people were afraid. It was a depressed Christmas climate. Actually, the PS2 was able to weather the storm of, what were they saying, like, Saddam Hussein was like making a cluster of them? Yeah, creating this for guidance systems. People who were talking about things like, don't go to the mall because Al-Qaeda might get your mall. That's what they were saying. They were saying Minnesota, Mall of America is a target.

Watch out Christmas shoppers. They're going to blow up pretzel time. No. But, yeah, I mean, actually, KAD, 9-11 was good for retail. It was very, very good for retail. In fact, there was an awkward quote by Yamauchi saying, people said 9-11 would hurt us. Actually, 9-11 was great for us. Like, whoa, dude, like, step it back a bit.

Let's figure out a way to say that. Slow your role, buddy. And your GameStop manager really hated that. Yes, yes. Oh, yes. I think she said some things about that. But yes, people were afraid, and when we're afraid, as Americans, we buy things to forget because we don't want to think about anything. And that's why these game consoles coming out in this season was actually a good thing for these companies. I'm not saying 9-11 was good, but I'm saying 9-11 helped retail. 9-11 was, sorry, retail was therapy for us. Like, we buy our way out of sadness. And that's exactly what happened. It was such an interesting and particular time, I suppose, when these games came out. And no one blowed up my GameStop, so I was safe. So can we talk about the GameCube's launch lineup at this time?

We will get to that. I want to add more context to this whole stew. So in the fall of 2001, Microsoft was gearing up to launch the Xbox with lots of hype behind it. It didn't have a great launch library. Sorry, it had an okay launch library, but it didn't feature many known brands. No one knew what a Halo was. Lots of hype was behind it, but Halo would soon become the standard for console first-person

shooters and the standard multiplayer couch game. blowing like golden eye out of the water was now Halo. It was very. Fusion frenzy came up. No, no, no. Not even cell damage. Sorry.

Go ahead. I mean, I'd have to go back to the N64 to think of another launch lineup that was based on one great game and everything else just being okay. Halo, I mean, Dead or Alive? Was it three? It was okay.

It was like a month later, I think. I think it was Dead or Alive too. How different would history have been? No, I'm sorry. You're right. How different would history have been if Microsoft hadn't gone out, got Bungie, got Halo.

It's their killer app right out of the gate. Because there was nothing on that system. Azurik or whatever. And people... I remember reading a magazine... I remember reading a magazine at the time that was... I think it was IGN saying, look at this. Microsoft's Halo is destroying all of Nintendo's franchises of one game.

The Smash Brothers Mailie can't even compete. Oh my gosh. That was probably EGM, actually. And the Xbox launched four days before the game. GameCube, which is a huge advantage when you're talking about new consoles. And it had a $500 million marketing budget behind it. Good God. And the marketing was all about, this is an adult system for all of your large sons. It has huge controllers. You are not a child. If you play this, you are a man. And we are the system for men. It was all geared towards combating that

anxiety that people were feeling as gamers becoming adults. I feel like the size of the system, the games on the system, it was all marketed towards that combating that anxiety. And Microsoft just, they wanted to make a splash, and they were like, we are going to get into the game system industry. We are going to make the Xbox success. We have all of the money in the universe. And we are going to spend that money to make it happen because they were used to just moving into a space and taking it over. This was like the post Windows boom, too. Well, this is Microsoft at its absolute most powerful.

Oh, yeah. This was Apple still wasn't quite a thing at that time. Internet Explorer had just just to finish defeating Netflix. skate navigator. This was when they were talking about splitting up Microsoft because it was such a juggernaut at that time.

This was Apple's first year with iPod as a product. Steve Jobs had just said, I'm going to sell you music the size of pack of cards for $500 and you're going to love it. So, yeah, they still had a long way to go. I know that we keep going back

to the Xbox, but I think it's just really useful to draw the contrast because they were really a study in opposites and told you where Nintendo thought the games industry was and where Microsoft that the games industry was. And in a way, they were kind of both right. It was really interesting, actually.

Dave, you got cut off? Did you have something to sell? I always just wonder when consoles are released so closely, how big of a factor that is, because the PS4 did come out like a week before the Xbox one, but there were many other reasons that it's been outselling. I forgot the timing on that. Yeah, you're right. So the Xbox original also

played DVDs, but you needed a $30 remote control to unlock full functionality of that DVD player, which was hilarious. I remember so many angry people being like, I got to buy what? And 30 bucks was pretty pricey just for a remote to play DVDs. But yeah, you needed that. But the important thing was it still played DVDs, which was a big thing.

I wish that was more of a success, and we still today wouldn't be using Xbox 1 controllers and PS4 controllers to play Blu-Race. I have less shame about that now. It's pretty remarkable that what Microsoft was able to accomplish because there were so many people who are actively hostile to Xbox coming into the market. And, yes, I'm a little biased in this, but PC gamers hated Microsoft. Traditional console gamers are like, oh, my God, Microsoft's moving in here. I remember Penny Arcade, which was popular at the time, was posting really nasty comics about Microsoft.

They would call it Microsoft with a dollar sign. Yeah, exactly. They didn't stoop that low. That's modern Penny Arcade. Let's move on. So, I mean, and Nintendo, I mean, they were still a beloved brand, so they had a natural advantage over Microsoft. And, well, the GameCube. really stumbled out of the gate, didn't there?

Yes, so we're still in 2001 before the GameCube's launch. So the PS2 library was really taking off in the fall of 2001. We have the killer app, Grand Theft Auto 3. That's all you need in your life in 2001. But it wasn't a killer app when it came out. It's true. It took a few weeks. Nobody took it seriously and then it blew up.

But by the time the GameCube launched, it was. And that's the important thing. And so Grand Theft Auto 3, huge. Silent Hill 2, not as huge, but still an interesting showpiece for the PS2's graphics. and, you know, new ways of storytelling and things like that. Metal Gear Solid 2, absolutely huge, even though it was disappointing to some people. And Final Fantasy 10 would come out that December. So all the biggest games for the PS2 are hitting in the fall of 2001.

Yes. A lot of competition. So with all of this in mind, the GameCube had a ton going against it, given the expectations at the time. So number one, it had the nerve to be small and cute, again, at a time when the people growing up were like, I don't want this to be what games are anymore. I don't want this, I don't want to be identified with this, this purple box with a handle on it. I don't want that.

Again, no DVD capability. It launched on promises. So, Luigi's Mansion is a good game, but it was also a Resident Evil parody. So maybe not the best foot forward. Pickman and Smash Brothers were two weeks after launch. That really hurt the launch. If they were there day one, I'm sure it would have been a huge boost in sales. And Mario and Zelda were expected, but neither one was there at launch.

And they were both rushed, and they became kind of, lesser games because of how they were rushed. It also had Rogue Squadron, which was a great technical showpiece. And at that time, as a Star Wars fan, it really blew me away in the way that it, the run into the trench, because that was a tech nemo that they built in 19 days to highlight how easy it was to develop for this thing. They showed an amazing Death Star battle. The first time you see the X-Wings heading toward the Death Star, it looked just like the Star Wars Special Edition. the way that it was shot and everything. It was really incredible to look at.

And even to this day, Roak Squadron still looks really good. It was a phenomenal technical showpiece on the GameCube. Had the perfect soundtrack and everything. It was a great game. So this next section is what I like to call the Troubles, which is sort of what we will call the lifespan of the GameCube. So let's go over a few things that happened during the GameCube's development and launch. So there was lots of turnover at Nintendo of America and Nintendo,

Japan during this period. Lots of executive stepping down, moving to other companies. Yamauchi stepped down. He was president of Nintendo since when? The 50s? The 60s? It was a long. It was at least the 60s. And having a leader of that caliber step down requires a lot of getting used to, a lot of corporate culture changing. So that certainly didn't help. Another thing that hurt Nintendo was they owned half of Rare. And Rare was vital during the N64 period. They made things like, you know, Diddy Kong Racing, Banjo Cazooie, Donkey Kong 64, laugh if you must. People do like that game. I don't, but it sold a lot of copies.

It sold so many copies. So much yellow plastic. So much yellow plastic. That's now in landfills. Nintendo and half of Rare, as I said, if they didn't buy the other half within a certain period of time, Rare had the option to find a buyer for Nintendo's half, and that's what they did. And there was an intense bidding war between Activision and Microsoft. Microsoft won, and they purchased Rare in its entirety for $375 million.

That's a lot of money for what I were going to want to do after this. One of the games in production came out for the GameCube. That was Star Fox Adventures. The best Star Fox, and by best, I mean, not very good at all. Not a Star Fox game at all. But it had amazing fur physics. Yes. It looked amazing.

The fur on Fox looked incredible. And Crystal did a lot for young men at the time, I'm guessing. I was so mad at that game because all I wanted was a Star Fox shooter. I just wanted a sequel to Star Fox 64. and then I would be very disappointed for many, many years to follow. There are two bad Star Fox Games for the GameCube. StarFoss Command, I believe, is the assault assaults, right. And they start farming it out, and it's a whole different story.

So all these games that are in development for the GameCube went on to different systems. So Perfect Dark Zero would be a bad Xbox 360 launch game. Cameo would make it to the, was it 360 game? That was also a 360 launch game. Okay, wow. So these games. Grabbed by the gooies. That was Xbox One, a pun on being grabbed by your testicles.

And Perfect Dark Zero would be a 360 launch game. So a lot of these were just stewing development for another five years. I think Eurogamer has a really phenomenal look back on the history of rare. And I think that some of the key leadership left right around the time that Microsoft ended up buying them. The Stamper Brothers. Yeah. And they were a huge part of the creative drive behind that studio. And when they left, they kind of lost something unfortunate.

Yeah, I mean, Microsoft was like, okay, you guys make our kids games. And to be fair, they made a few good ones. I think Viva Penaata's fine, and Banja Cazoo Guts and bolts is a cool idea. I mean, forgetting that Rare was a technical driver in the Super Nintendo with Donkey Kong country. I mean, just, yeah, it was a huge missed opportunity for them. But then they were sent to live in, like, Connect hell, making all this Connect games. I'm sure made tons of money, but were just creatively bankrupt and just stealing the ideas. Do you think they did?

I mean, Microsoft is basically abandoned Connect. I mean, if you look at, like, for two years, Connect was huge. but that was it. They were like, it burned hot and it burned fast, but it was a huge seller for Microsoft. So like HeroClicks. I think they were also like the lead developer of avatars. Yeah, you're right. They did do the avatars, which are they still on the Xbox One?

Yes. Yes. When it launched, they actually de-emphasized it and now it's kind of brought back. Okay, weird. I've got like a cartoon bird picture. And they're supposedly updating them. Oh, thank God. I haven't seen that in a while.

All those costumes you bought in 2008 are finally here and back. When Microsoft stole rare, people said that's it. that Nintendo's done. Yeah. This is it. People were talking about Nintendo in 2002, like it was on its last legs, which, I mean, it was clearly silly and it shows the level of the commentary about it. But, I mean, it just goes to show how far Nintendo had really sunk by that time.

Rare had to make games for kids, and they clearly wanted to do other things. I mean, they were good at making games for kids, but I'm sure people on staff wanted to, you know, experiment and make things adult games or maybe games for, you know, an older audience. But by 2003, many of the major third-party publishers had just stopped making things for GameCube. In fact, many ports were canceled around this time, kind of signaling the death of the GameCube around 2003. What kind of ports were canceled? I don't remember any of those. I looked at the list, but a lot of third-party games had ports that never made it to the GameCube.

Splinter Cell had ports. Actually, I was looking back at old GameCube games, circa 2003, and I was actually kind of surprised at the number of third-party games that made it over the GameCube. The big problem that third-party games had on the GamePube wasn't that they were technically inferior, even though it had a reputation for that. It was actually better than the PS2. It was that they didn't have online play. And that was the thing starting in 2002. I think the GameCube has a modem in there, but it's the dial-up, but you can switch it for broadband? I remember switching something on the bottom of that.

It has an empty, like an empty bay on the bottom that you have to plug something into. You can buy a modem or you can buy a broadband. That's it, yeah. It was good for two games. PSO and what? One other game? Well, also PSO Episode 3, Card Revolution. That's two PSO games.

Shane Bechhaus is going to come busting this door, and if you talk about this any longer. Sorry, but when I think of third-party games that I like enjoy it on the GameCube, a lot of it was, and Nintendo, I feel like this is where they started to do it, where they would goose a third-party game by saying, hey, put Mario in it, put this guy in it. Like, there was Knockout Kings, which had Little Mac, the NBA Street games where you could play as a team of Mario Luigi and Peach. And, of course, Soul Calibur 2. That was a big deal. Soul Calibur 2 sold pretty well. I think it sold best on GameCube. Yeah, I prefer the Xbox version starring NECRid and Spawn.

Yes. Actually, they all had NECRid. And the PS2 version, sadly, had Hay Hachi from Tech. Who doesn't even own a weapon. He would use his gauntlets on his arms. It's like that's... I didn't even know who that was because I didn't like Tekken,

but I sure heck knew who Link was. Yeah, yeah, I played a bit of that. So, yeah, as we were saying, from the beginning, Nintendo had no interest in online functionality and would really downplay the importance in interviews. Like, no one wants to play games like this. Like, that's for PC gamers.

Who cares? Xbox Live would launch in 2002, and the PS2 would have a network adapter by 2002 with a lot more compatibility with games than GameCube would ever have. They would eventually have their own network adapter, but it would only support eight games, and three of them were land play only.

So only five games were online. Socom was PS2. Yeah. Yeah. And some of the stuff like Ratcheting Clank and other things like that were PS2 online games. The Xbox had the flying game. Crimson Skinsk Skies. Crimson Skies.

And, of course, Halo 2 in 2004 was the killer app for Xbox. Not Meg Warrior. Meck something, I forget. Mech assaults. Mega salts. Yeah. I mean, it was just, it was the functionality on the Xbox was really cool. And, I mean, it's so annoying on the GameCube that the broadband adapter, I mean, that they made it and then that it was a total afterthought and nothing supported it.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, they just made it because there was demand, but there was no follow-up, really, from Nintendo. That's a stupid decision by Nintendo. It really is. It really was. Yeah, the best use of the broadband adapter was warp pipe, which wasn't Nintendo. That was something people hacked together to allow you to play Mario Kart Double Dash online with other people. because you could play on a local network,

but you couldn't go online. So Warpipe was basically like Duango, but for GameCube. I prefer heat or battle.net. So, yeah, there was also, this is an impossibility for the GameCube, but also no backwards compatibility. That's one of those things that made the PS2 just this perfect system at the perfect time.

Like you had all these PS1 games. You maybe had DVDs. You could buy PS2 games. It just did everything. And it made your PS1 games look better with the texture smoothing, the fast loading. That is, yeah. So, yeah, the older games got a boost.

And it's like Final Fantasy 9 came out in 2000, and a lot of people were going, oh, wow, it definitely looks better on the PS2. And that just immediately gives the PS2 another boost because it's like, oh, I might as well get a PS2 and a copy of Final Fantasy 9. I played more PS1 games in the first year of the PS2 than I played PS2 games. Yeah, Mega Man Legends 2 came out the day PS2 launched, and it was a perfect game for the enhancements that the PS2 offered. Yes, it did. Not a great day for new games to come. So, yeah, so by 2003, as I said, the third parties had gone. And by 2003, there wasn't much to look forward to.

2002 and 2003 gave us a new Mario, a new Zelda, a new Metroid. After that, there was no big first party stuff on the horizon. There was stuff like Pickman 2, but that was sort of a niche game. Of course, Twilight Princess would eventually come out in 2006. But I played the GameCube 1. I think most people think that as a, I think most people think of that as a Wii game. And the GameCube 1 came out a month later. Breath of the Wild, it was the same day for both versions.

They made you weigh on it. It was weird. It was. And they made you wait. They made you wait for the GameCube version. I got the GameCube version when I came out. Because I couldn't find a Wii. I got it because dang it, I've been waiting on it for two years at that point.

Also, I didn't have a Wii, so I asked my friend to send it to me. Yeah, it was a highly delay game. I mean, it's the preferred version for most people, right? It's the one that they made into the GameCube version. And it became rare. Or three, or, sorry. So can we talk? Talk about E3, 2003 really quickly.

Yeah, what happened? That might have been, I mean, that was kind of the nade dear for Nintendo. Because that was when Xbox and Sony were rolling out all of their online stuff. This was, it was all online all the time at E3, 2003. And Nintendo was like, we got Game Boy Advance connectivity, folks. Check it out, Pac-Man versus. That game is on. It is great, though.

It is great. I will say that was a cool idea, and Pac-Man versus is great. That is not a good thing to show up. I did not say that it was bad. No, no, no. I know. They had no games. They had nothing to show.

This is also around the time where Nintendo was saying like, Squares back with us again, and they got a found fantasy game. Crystal Chronicles. Your buckets, kids. The bucket of truth. Yeah. Yeah, the connectivity was a great idea that created some really good games, but it was too early.

The technology was not there to make it convenient and usable. Like, that needed to be wireless, not for people to have four games. or four Game Boy advances plus a GameCube plus a controller, plus a ton of link cables. That was a disaster. I managed to find two other friends I could do this with, but that was it. There was no fourth player in any of these games. All my friends knew, all my friends own GBAs. They did not all own the cords.

Yeah. That was the problem. They weren't expensive, but it was still another thing you had to buy for one game or two games. To be able to play Pac-Man versus. And then it also didn't help that a lot of the best games for it were like Four Swords Adventure. a game that was a port of an add-on from the GBA. It was an entirely new game. And looked like a Super Nintendo game.

So I was like, sweet, I'm playing a GBA game. That's what I meant. It was an update of a GBA game. But it's like, oh, cool, I'm playing a GBA game on my GameCube. All right. That was a lot of fun, too. I will say, but you can never revisit it. And I wish they would release it for modern consoles without any of that bullshit necessary.

So I did have a GBA connectivity cord because I had Pokemon Coliseum. And the way that Pokemon Coliseum worked was, it was actually pretty interesting. It was one of the first instances I can think of of a pre-order bonus because you could get a special disc that had a Jarachi on it that you could then transfer over to your GBA. And at this time, Pokemon Ruby and Sapphire had come out. And it was bad because they had locked 186 monsters behind. They had locked them away. You just could not get them. So what did you have to do?

You had to buy Pokemon Coliseum on the GameCube where you would play through the adventure. And this was a big deal at the time because it was a solo. game, you would play through the adventure, you'd be purifying the monsters, and once you finished it, you could connect your GBA version, and you could transfer them through the GBA link over to your Game Boy Advance. And that was like, that was how I got a lot of the Golden Silver monsters, and it was super rad, but also super cumbersome, super annoying. And also, once I got a Wii, all the monsters on Coliseum were stuck on there forever

because it wasn't compatible. Kat, you are anti-high-hachi, but pro-Jarachi. Pretty much, yes. I just want to make sure that's clear. They also had Pokemon Box, which was an app that you could buy for the GameCube, which as like a retail boxed copy, it would be an app now. In fact, they have it. It's called whatever Pokemon thingy.

You like, do you buy a subscription to it or something? No, you would just, yeah, you buy a subscription, Pokemon Bank, sorry. You buy Pokemon Box as a retail thing, and then you would plug it in, and then you could transfer all your monsters and store them. on your GameCube memory card, which was very convenient at that time, and you got a lot of cool extras and bonuses, but... We didn't mention the fact that GameCube had region-locked memory card, which was the stupidest, most annoying thing, because I ended up... I never ran into that. I both... I owned a Japanese GameCube, because it was given to me, and then had it region-moded, which was very simple.

They just installed a button in the back, and you'd press it, and it would switch to a different region. Cool. But I had to buy multiple memory cards because they were region locked for some stupid reason. So you could only store games from a single region on the cards. Like, what a weird choice. Why would they do that? Who's ideal is that? How dare you?

Well, and, you know, the Animal Crossing, the original Animal Crossing or the GameCube version, came with a memory card that had all kinds of stuff saved on it. So I guess that was a concern, but still weird. I think that also the Animal Crossing memory card, it was bigger than the older memory card that launched with the system. It was the memory card 151 or whatever it was called. Yeah. And the GameCube kind of trained the world to have to update their storage for their consoles multiple times. Like I had to do with Xbox 1 and PS4, but like they started out with, I forget it was 59. 59, yeah. And then like the 150.

The black card. And then at the end they had one that was a thousand blocks. Really? Yeah. Like anyone had that many safe files. So many Animal Crossing towns. So to give you an idea of how Nintendo regarded the GameCube, at E3-2004, less than three years after the launch, they announced the next console. They announced a revolution at E3-2004.

I thought it was 05 because in 2004 they announced Twyley Princess. It was 2004. Okay. I swear. I swear. I unless my sources failed me in 2004. But in the Andy Wada, Saturi-Wada, RIP, told investors the GameCube would sell 50 million units by 2005 by 2006 and it had sold 21. So they couldn't even have half of the projected sales goals.

Yeah, it was not a good start for Iwada's tenure, although it was not his fault. No, it was not. He was just inheriting a mess. A time when, so the GameCube was doing horribly, it was by far the worst selling Nintendo console at that time. And the GBA was much better. It was very successful, but compared to the Game Boy, it didn't even come close to touch in the Game Boy. I think the GBA sold like $48 million or something like that. It had a very short life, too.

If you mark the life by when the next thing comes out, it was like three years. And that's where we got our rise to heaven or sink to hell thing in the DS because it was basically their Hail Mary after just an atrocious three years. So we spent like over an hour talking about problems. Let's talk about the good things about the GameCube. And we like the GameCube here, of course. And one of the cooler things about it was the Wavebird. I feel like this was the preview of the next generation of controllers. It was the first wireless controller that actually worked.

It was Bluetooth, right? It was a radio signal. That's why you had that little dial on it. Yeah. But you could take it in other rooms. Yes. The range was incredible at the time. The one problem was I liked to play at the time with my knees tucked up and the controller on my knees.

It could not go through my knees. What kind of weird bionic implants do you have? I don't know. I'm part cyborg, but it could never travel through my knees. This is like an RPG where you discover I'm actually the robot boy who is the destroyer of the world or something. I've got to get some x-rays done here. So some cool stuff I picked out, just looking at trivia, is the ambient sound that plays in the background. This was discovered a while ago.

It's actually the Famicom Disc System startup theme slowed down really slow. So it's just a tribute to their past baked to the GameCube. And kind of alluded to this earlier, but there were different startup noises you could do. If you had one controller and you held the Z button, you'd get like monkeys. It was like baby noises, which did not help the GameCube reputation. like, I'm going to make a baby noise. But if you had four controllers and you held down Z on all four of them, it would sound like this weird samurai chant.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, and also if you held down the B button at startup, you would launch into progressive mode. If you had the GameCube official component cables, which are now extremely expensive, you could get 480P output, non-interlaced. Progressive scan. Which looked really good if you had a TV that could support it.

and unfortunately those cables now sell for like three or four hundred dollars because the the RGB or the like the component encoder is actually inside the cable not inside the system so the cable is like you can't just make a cable that will work with the GameCube because it has digital circuits inside that you can't just copy like you can't wire something like that so there were some okay go ahead well getting back to the Wavebird I this was a period I think this was 2002 because I remember that summer of 2002, I was staying with a friend who owned a GameCube and we had a Wave Bird. But this was a period when Nintendo was trying to make the Nintendo GameCube cool again.

The Wavebird was kind of a push toward that. And they also released the Silver GameCube, which that was kind of their one-two punch. And people went, oh, yeah, these look way cooler than before. That's almost as cool as Orange. But the Wave Bird, I remember everybody loved the Wave Bird. I mean, just the fact that it was wireless was so awesome. It was good wireless, too. It was not just like, oh, something walked in front of me and I died.

And those GameCube chords were short. I know because I still use them periodically. I'm like, oh, my God, these are really, really short. It was a practice run for the Enes mini. Oh, God. Let's forget about that. So even though a lot of third parties left Nintendo, they managed to get some on board for some big exclusives. Capcom, of course, was a huge GameCube booster, even though most of these games went to other systems.

They had the Capcom 5. Yeah, so that including my favorite game, Dead Phoenix. Dead Phoenix is actually dead on arrival. So, yeah, Dead Phoenix, Resident Evil 4, Beautiful Joe, Killer 7, and then P&O3. Is that all of them? Yes, that's correct. Yeah, PNO3 is the only one that is GameCube only. It's all about a butt.

It's all about watching a butt. So if you like butts, play that game. All of them run by Shinchimikami. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, RE4, Resident Evil 4, the biggest exclusive. It was exclusive for like nine months. And there's a joke somewhere, like Shinji Mi Kamiami. Macami, the creator of the series, is like, if you see this anywhere else, I'll cut my own head off.

So it went somewhere else. I believe there's like an in joke in one of the games where you see his head somewhere. Now it's on everything. Yeah, you can play this on anything now. But it was a huge game. It hit with Megatun impact. It was a big deal. I remember people like Matt Leone who were like GameCube, I don't have time for that, playing that game and just being like, I can't get enough.

Yeah. Because it was an incredible game. Yeah. Amir only now just sort of realizing just the impact RE4 had on the third person shooter genre. sort of just what, and like, this is how this game should, this is how this kind of game should be forever, make games like this, and everyone did. Gears of War, Evil Within, everybody's doing the RE4 thing way after the fact. But when they were teasing it in 2004 and you were watching, they did it in the village,

right? Right. And they had the whole thing with the chainsaw guy and everything. And it was one of the most intense. And please forgive me for using this word, one of the most cinematic things that you would ever experience in a video game at that point. And visceral. It was how I felt when I played the original Metal Gear Solid on the PlayStation, just putting me in the moment in a way that games really hadn't at that time.

It was gorgeous. What a beautiful game. When I played RE4 at a GameStop, like the demo, I'm like, okay, I had that moment. Like, we all had, like, games will never look better than this. Yeah. Now try to look at those textures on the HDTV. Kind of hard. And the controls.

Oh, my gosh. Yeah, it took some getting used to. They weren't quite standardized yet. But RE4, huge game, huge for GameCube, only exclusive for like less than a year. It had a chainsaw controller thing that you could get. Oh, God, yuck. But before the PC version, before the PS3, Xbox 360 version, the GameCube 1 was the best. The PS2 one was a step down, had some reduced features.

But it also had an extra. It had the Code Valentine? It had, like, costumes, and I believe... No, there was an extra episode in the PS2 version. I believe the one with Ato-O-Wong was in the GameCube version. I forget what the extra content was in the PS2. 2-1 though. But we also have the Resident Evil remake. It did not perform very well

but it was also the definitive version of that game. And it was gorgeous. It was really pretty and it only recently came out like in 2015 for other systems. They were able to find those resources somehow and salvage them. Resident Evil Zero also debuted on GameCube, didn't it? It did, but I don't want to talk about that.

It's not a good game. So my buddy, Dennis Dyack, we talk all the time. He made a few games. How did that debate go? Never happens. I'm way bigger than him now, by the way. Metal Gear Solid Oh, look, listen, look at the numbers his podcast gets. They're nothing, Dennis, I challenge you to nothing.

Okay, so Metal Gear Solid the Twin Snakes, I'm cutting that out. Metal Gear Solid the Twin Snakes is a polarizing remake of the first Metal Gear Solid game. Amazingly enough, this was only six years after the game released, the original game released. I still think it's interesting. There are things in the game that break the game, including you can go into the first person mode and shoot when you couldn't do that at any point in the first game. Which ruins the Revolver Ocelot. It really does. It's like, I'll just track you while I stand still.

And also, like, someone at Silicon Knights or Konami or Nintendo was super into, like, the Matrix and other action movies. So, like, all these cut scenes were like... I think that was the director. Yeah. What did he direct? Battle Royale or something like that? Or he was a famous director. They were doing the bullet time thing.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Oh, that was a thing in 2003 when this game came out. But... Yes. And also, we have Eternal Dark. I've never seen anywhere else but the GameCube. Dennis Dyck cannot kickstart a sequel.

Keep trying, buddy. It'll happen one day. But yeah, it was a very acclaimed, you know, survival horror game with all of the psychological effects, which every magazine ruined ahead of time. So they wouldn't work on anybody. Thanks, magazines. I mean, I didn't know about that because I guess I didn't read magazines. I read every magazine and he was like, here are all the fun things that will happen to you. But my friend brought it over and it's like, check this game out.

And I was like, okay. So I started playing it, and I was like going, what the heck is going on? What? My save's been deleted. Yeah, it was really cool. And, like, this was made to counter the kiddie reputation of Nintendo. Jeremy, you wouldn't know this better. Is this really the first example of a game being aware of kind of the medium that it's in and taking advantage of that in the sense of kind of having a meta aspect?

Sons of Liberty was the year before. That's true. Yeah, okay, that's fair. I see you like Sweak it in. Obviously. What about that moon RPG remix game? Duh. We were talking about Metal Gear Solid so much in this.

Of course, we have to remember that. I mean, even to a certain degree, Earthbound did that. The idea had been kicking around, but this was the first game that was, like, built around it in its totality. Using it to mess with your head. It was a major feature.

Yeah. Dave, sorry. I was going to say there was the X-Men Genesis game where she reset the computer in the game he had it reset, which made it impossible to do on the Sega Nomad. So all 12 nomad owners were our own thing. What will I do now?

What else? So GameCube had a lot of weird peripherals. Let's talk about the e-reader, which is, dear God, does that seem like the Stone Age of DLC? I think that more as a GBA peripheral. But I know it did connect to Animal Crossing. Before Animal Crossing amoebo cards, there were Animal Crossing e-reader cards. But you had another connectivity thing. You had to plug in your Game Boy Advance, then plug in the E-reader to.

your Game Boy Advance, through the link cable, slide paper cards that had barcodes, tiny dot matrix barcodes that it would read and then give you content in the game. And it's also worth mentioning that like a lot of games, such as Wind Waker, Animal Crossing had GBA sort of remote play, where you could go to an island. Cap'n would take you to an island and you could play around. And that's just become a part of Animal Crossing game since then. But in the original GameCube version, or original GameCube version, you had to use the GBA to do that. You could also download your NES games to your Game Boy Advance and play them out, except for, like, punchout you couldn't do it with.

Right, it was probably too much rail. Yeah, something like that. But you could also buy those games as e-reader cards and just play them directly in the Game Boy Advance e-reader. Scan 10 cards and play pinball. Yeah, God forbid, one of your cards gets like bent or something and you can't scan anymore, like an old computer program where one thing out of place is just missing. everything up. Could you pirate e-reader cards? I took a photo of the e-reader cards for

NES works, the book, and that is piracy right there. Oh, my God. You can see... Fan gamers going down for this. They're in trouble. I think you could, if you had a high enough resolution scanner and printer,

pirate e-reader cards, but who the hell wanted to... What a sad piracy operation. You got special Super Mario Bros. 3 levels. That was pretty rad. That is true. And there were some exclusive ones. I'm going to put this out here, guys.

The Animal Crossing booster packs, those were the first loopboxes ever, ever in a game. Do not use that term with me right now. Loopboxes are taking the world by storm. Speaking of which, Animal Crossing, it really got it start on the GameCube because, I mean, it came on the N64 first, but I remember... In Japan. The GameCube really popularized it in a lot of ways. And, of course, it really became huge on the DS. Well, it was never localized for America on the N64.

It started in America. on the GameCube in 2002. Yeah. And like we were talking about earlier, it came with a memory card because it's like this town is going to be huge. But that game is the reason why I can never play Animal Crossing again because I played that game to death. And every time I play a new Animal Crossing game, I can feel my own mortality slipping away. Like, I'm not doing anything meaningful. It only really worked on me once.

Well, to me, Animal Crossing on GameCube was the, in my head, it was the beginning of Nintendo starting to, oh, we can re-release these old games in some weird form. And, yeah, the weirdest form is being able to just play games in your house. But then, like, after this, there was, like, the collection of NES games on the Game Boy Advance. And then the virtual console sort of already. Yeah, this is sort of, like, the first virtual console existed within Animal Crossing before Nintendo realized, like, oh, shit, we can charge money for this. What are we doing? Am I wrong for feeling like there was some kind of online aspect to the original Animal Crossing for GameCube? There was not.

Okay. Because I was like, you could have people coming into your town, right? You could have multiple houses within a town. Sure. And I believe if you borrowed someone's memory card, you could visit their town. In fact, my town was ruined because I gave my memory card to a friend that had an action replay. I'm like, give me all of the Nintendo games. Oh, no.

And he did, but his clock was set wrong. So by the time I got my town back, I had technically not visited it in a year because of how his clock was set. So it ruined my entire town. I had some black mirror stuff right there. It really is. So there was an online aspect to Animal Crossing in a sort of makeshift kind of way in that you could trade, you could get codes and then trade that stuff with people. And I still owe Tom Hewlett, the man who destroyed Silent Hill, lots of Animal Crossing furniture.

I'm kidding Tom. He's going to be on a future episode of Retronauts, actually, that I'm recording this week. Oh, wait, he is? He is. Okay. Down in L.A. Oh, damn it. Sorry, that way forward.

but yeah yeah like you could trade with people and I forgot to send him codes that I promised him but there was that element and yeah you could have like multiple people within a town on the same same save card or memory card so yeah there was there was a social aspect to it I played with my girlfriend at the time we both had our houses into town and uh likewise yeah and uh and it horribly and I stole all our stuff so the game boy player it's like the super game boy but better there's it's not as quirky, I don't think, but it's still really functional. It's actually not better. It's not better?

No, the video quality is kind of poor. Oh, I guess. It upscales and does a really, like, weird, blurry job of it, so it makes the games look worse. The last time I played it. Game Boy player was like true resolution with a frame. Did it come out at the same time as Metroid Fusion? No, it came out later. Okay.

I know this because I really wanted to play Game Boy Advance games on my TV. So that thing, that thing didn't exist. So I actually paid like $100 for a device that you could have plugged into your Game Boy advance and would output to a TV. And it was clumsy, clumsy and terrible, but it did the trick. And then Game Boy player came along and was better, even if it's not perfect. And the Hory GameCube controller for Hori, the D-Pad, that came out, and that was very, very good. But now it sells for like $200 because collectors are insane. That was another time I experienced abuse from GameStop employees.

When I wasn't working there, I remember going in, like, 2006, to go find a Game Boy player. I wanted one. I went to one store. They'll, like, go to this store. And I went to that store. And I was like, hey, they said you had a Game Boy player. And the guy was like, what, you really want that? And I was like, really?

And you gave me shit until I was like, listen, I have money. I want to buy the thing. Let me buy it. GameStop employees in the 2000s were freaking awful. They're still mean to me. I don't like going into game stops. They're always judging me. The Gameboy player only came out in one color.

right. So unless you, I think you had the black GameCube. Oh, it did come out in multiple colors. Boy. It came out of purple. Black, purple. Okay. And in Japan. Thank God. Orange. Well, I played my Game Boy player on an SDTV last time, so I didn't realize it was upscaling properly. I may have bought a Game Boy player used, and that's why I had like the two-tone system.

Yeah. Well, I mean, you can, you know, if you have the orange, the Spice Orange GameCube and you buy the black Game Boy Advance player, all of a sudden, it's Halloween every day. Thank God. Awesome. We've got to go through these rest of this stuff really quick.

So the D.K. Bongo's everybody. Everybody loves that. You know what? The system is not for kids, but have this toy drum sets and smack it. People still use them to beat Dark Souls. And that was another example of Nintendo reaching into its past as a toy maker for inspiration because it was based on the Elikanga. Oh, really? Okay.

An instrument toy that they created in the 70s. It was an electronic drum set that you could play. So this was like based on that. I mean, Donkey Konga was not. a good thing. I don't want to smack bongos to happy birthday, but I think it's a Nintendo songs in there. They did, but they didn't bother to license any good music. There was a platformer for it, too, and it was actually pretty good. Jungle Beat. Jungle Beat was made by the team that would eventually make Mario Galaxy.

The AD, Tokyo. Yes, and I really want to get around to playing this, but I don't want to buy bongos for a GameCube. How about a nice pair of on? This is a period of peripherals in general, because, I mean, remember, the Dreamcast had the Samba de Amigo thing. And the fishing controller. bought the Maracas for $80 in 2000. So again, I was shamed by a GameStop employee. There was a trend in my life right now. You should have worked at my GameStop because like half of the staff there were like Nintendo

diehard fans and we would actually play Donkey Konga on the weekend. I missed out. I missed out. I would say how long after Donkey Konga did Guitar Hero come out? I would say probably two years. One to two years later. Yeah, yeah. Because it was 05 the first year that came out.

But one was guitar freaks, 2000. 2001. Yeah, something like that. Other things, the Nintendo GameCube microphone, everybody. All you O'Dama fans just gave a hoot about that. That was an idea that every, not everyone, but different

publishers experimented to do that because that was the same time that Lifeline came out for PS2. Do you remember that game? Yes. It was like a survival horror where you didn't control it, but you use the microphone to tell this woman who was trapped in like a space station what she should do. Yes, it was like the

first Siri, almost. But, uh, Odoma was the pinball war game. But, yeah, but yeah, the, um, everyone had the headsets from the, the PS2 network adapter. So they're like, let's build games around using this microphone. Clearly that didn't work.

Clearly, I didn't play O'Dama. I'm sure it's fine. But they're, Mario Party 6 and 7 and O'Dama are the only three games that support this GameCube microphone. And then, like, it mounts to your controller. It's so weird. It's like a big microphone. Um, I want to run over just a few,

of the super cool games for the GameCube because we spent a long time in this episode talking about problems. I love Pickman. I want to do an episode about Pickman. Unfortunately, it has now gone to Arzest Hell where it's like, we don't want this anymore.

You develop this game. What, no. Picman 4 is still in the works. Miyamoto's been talking about it for a long time. Yeah. He's been talking about how they would have the news soon. And it'll be incredible on the switch. I feel like that is something

that's going to be announced within the next six months. Did the 3DS Pikmin come out yet? That's the RZSS one. I'm sure. it's fine. I'm sure it's fine. But you're actually, Jeremy, I think you're right, because Pickman 3 was something you talked about for like a decade before it happens. So, yes, I love Pickman. We'll do an episode about it soon. Um, Cubivore. I want to mention Cubivore. Very rare. I played this after a horrible breakup and Cubivore got me through it. So thank you

all the love. The love cubes, the love pieces, what they called? I forget, but this is like sort of like a, I mean, it played nothing like Katamari Damashi, but it's, it reminds me a lot of that, like very simple graphics. It was actually kind of like a proto minecube or Minecraft in the visual style. Everything was cubic. Very cuby and you just ate a bunch of things to breed. Yeah, it had this like weird sense of humor and there was this kind of undercurrent of sexuality to it, but not in like an enticing, sexy way. It's like cheeky. It was just like, yeah, it was like this is, you know, primal survival you're eating and you're having sex to procreate because you are a crazy animal made of blocks. Like Tokyo Jungle. I think that's a spiritual

sequel. Before we go, any other notable games you want to talk about while we're on the subject of the GameCube. I've already talked enough about the ones I like everybody else want to jump in with something

they want to highlight. I feel like no conversation about the GameCube is complete without basically saying, wow,

Smash Brothers Melee, who would have ever thought that it would end up being just having this long

lasting impact that it ultimately did because when it came out, it was seen as almost kind of as an

afterthought. People were going, this is not a flagship game. But it was so much better

than the original Smash Brothers, I mean, first of all, it looked way better, had that orchestrated

score. It had a much larger roster. It had the museum with all the figures in it you could buy. That was so cool. It was like Nintendo reflecting on 15 years of history at that point. In summer 2002, I had basically nothing better to do but play video games and work. And I

went and did every single one of the challenges on Smash Brothers melee. And I had a blast because they were like tributes to Nintendo history. But also they were really interesting challenges because, I mean, the final one, you had to beat Gandy MUTU and Gigabowser all at the same time, which was really, I spent months working on that.

And when I finally beat it, I felt so accomplished. But of course, Smash Brothers Mealy was so much fun to play. It was the perfect couch game that it, of course, developed a tournament scene that developed and developed and developed and developed. And people were traveling around to get to them. And that endured into the Wii. And now, of course, it's an e-sports. People consider this the definitive version of the game and they want it on Switch. Well, that's because people got so used to it, right?

I mean, and no, like, people like Smash Brothers for the Wii U, but, I mean, no Smash Brothers has come out in a way that say, I don't know, a new street fighter has come out to really supplant melee. So people will play the new one, but in conjunction with Smash Brothers' relay. Anybody else, any GameCube games you want to hire them before we go? We touched on it briefly, but Metroid Prime. That was the breakout title for the system. That was the point at which people who had been poo-pooing the system for a year stopped and said, whoa, this thing can put out some great-looking graphics. This is a really fresh take on the FPS.

Also, I love Metroid. It sounds great. What is going on here? There was also a lot of pedantic weirdos who would be like, it's not a first-person shooter. It's a first-person adventure. I think the pedantic weirdos were at Nintendo, weren't they? I don't know, but I heard a lot of people being, like, angry that people were calling it an FPS.

Yes, I don't know why. But the things that you could do in it... Mostly, I heard people talk about being an FP, you know, first-person adventure in, like, a positive way, like saying this isn't just a shooter. There's more to it than that. So I guess we were having different experiences. I mean, from a graphical standpoint, being able to look at Samis's hand and see the bones inside. See the reflection of her face when you fired. I mean, that was so cool.

And it always really rankled me because later on in the GameCube's life, you had a lot more budget software for. for it. And that led to the reputation that it was underpowered. And I was like, that's insane. Have you seen Metroid Prime? It's one of the most beautiful games of this generation. It was very pretty. And also the weight that you had in between Super Metroid and Metroid Prime, that like it still delivered on all of that hype. I think eight years between the two. Dave, do you have a game you want to mention before we go? I mentioned it briefly at the beginning. I mean, I played a ton of Smash Brothers and Metro Prime. But like at launch, like my saving grace was Super Monkey Ball, which, yeah.

I played a lot of both of those games. I still consider that series synonymous with GameCube, even though it's come out on plenty of other things. It's just, and thank you for bringing this spread of dull bananas. I'm not being paid by them, but weirdly enough, the monkey ball guy became the Yakuza guy, so I don't know how that happened. He's as orange as ever. Yes, he is.

You know, we didn't really touch on it, but a lot of Nintendo franchises, long-running franchises, kind of came into their own on GameCuber during this era. Fire Emblem didn't really, It hadn't come to the U.S. And then they kind of put it out there, Path of Radiance on, was that the one? Yeah, it was Path of Radiance.

Yeah, on GameCube and then Shadow Dragon on GBA. And all of a sudden people were like, hmm, what is this? And then there was Battalion Wars, the really weird advance wars spin on. I bought that and I beat it. And actually it was pretty fun. No, because you're commanding an army from a 3D perspective.

And I thought that was really cool. You could switch between them. So I always commanded the tank. and the amount of setup that it required was really tough because the AI was pretty finicky, but when you got it just right and all of your characters were running in and doing all the things, yeah, it was fun.

Are we forgetting any other series that started? They did some interesting weird things with their sports games like Mario Strikers. Yeah, that was like the sort of hard-edged take on Mario sports playing with my soccer. While Luigi doing the suckers, like he did a cross shop and all the sports games were coming out for it, which is more than to be said for the Wii U. I did go to a press event up at Nintendo's headquarters in Seattle for a baseball game that never came out.

We went up to the Mariner Stadium, like to the press box and took a tour of the stadium and played the game for like 10 minutes and then like a month later they canceled the game. Was it a Mario baseball game? No, it was I think Ken Griffey or something. Oh, okay. It was some sort of like licensed MLB game. Yeah, Nintendo did have, they did publish one or two of those like Penn and Ray. I forget it was called, but it was like, yeah. It was such an afterthought compared to, like, the Xbox and PS2.

That might have been at Pinnett Chase. I don't know. It's been a while, and I just remember, like, that was my first, you know, kind of, I'm in the press and this is my insider tour. How weird. But you mentioned mentioning Fire Emblem. That did pop in my head like this chicken and egg situation. I've always considered, like, did all those Fire Emblem games come out because people saw Martha and Roy in Melee? Or was it the, or were they prepping for all those?

They weren't even, no, they weren't even going to put in Martha and Roy. And then they needed a last-minute decision. And Martha Roy, of course, immediately became one of the most popular characters. And they went, all right, let's pour it over Fire Emblem on the GBA. And that was a hit. And then they were like, okay, and now put out the GameCube one. And Dave mentioned chicken and egg. How about Billy Hatcher for as a killer app?

That's a horrible note on this episode on. Not that a great a game, but the soundtrack is so good. I don't know how. I love the music in that game. It's crazy. No sequel, sadly. So yes, that was our. Also, sorry, one last thing.

The GameCube ended up being kind of like the, the, I don't even know how to describe it, but like the Dreamcast trickle down. When Sega killed Dreamcast, the Unthinkable happened, the Unthink, I reviewed that. Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. The Unthinkable happened, and Sega was like, let's team up with Nintendo. And they put stuff on PlayStation 2, but that was through a claim, I think. Yeah. Whereas Sega published on GameCube, so Sonic Adventure 2. Battle.

And you mentioned, yeah, you mentioned Billy Hatcher and Monkey Ball, but then there were some other games. Sky's Arcadia was a big one. Sonic Heroes. Yep, Sonic Heroes. Did Sonic 06 come out on GameCube? No, but they did. That was an Xbox 360 launch. Yeah, yeah.

That was Shadow the Hedgehog. They did put out a Sonic mega, they put out a Sonic collection on the GameCube. That was the, yeah. Like, a Sonic game on a Nintendo system was, like, insane for old people like us. It freaked me out. I'm not going to lie. Like, the first time I saw it at Toys R Us, I was like, I knew. This is happening, but this is still so weird.

So, yes, this is the end of our GameCube exploration. A lot to go over. It was only around for like four or five years. So unfortunately, not a big success for Nintendo. They've bounced back. I feel like the GameCube sort of had a Wii U lifespan. It was practice for Wii U. Yeah.

We used to fail. But, I mean, way more finally remembered than Wii U. We just named a ton of really great games for the GameCube, and it was a little more robust than we remember. But at the same time, there were such huge gaps between good games coming out on that thing. I mean, just compared to what PS2 was doing at that point, it just paled in comparison. And I really liked GameCube. Like I said, whenever it came to a multi-platform release, I always picked it up on GameCube.

But, you know, despite that, it's just really hard to make a case that it's an essential system. There's some really good stuff there. But, you know, if you're going to create a cannon of like five essential consoles or something, you just, I, I, I can't say, unless you're a Smash Brothers fan, that GameCube needs to be on there. Smash Brothers has lived on through other means. It's transcended the system. Yeah, I mean, plus, you know, you can play GameCube games on Wii, so why would you own a GameCube? And also, this was the last traditional game system from Nintendo.

I don't think I said this. Like, 16 years ago was the last time they made a traditional game system. That was just a controller in a console. Yeah, yeah, no gimmicks, just, you know, play the games in that sense. Well, they just realized that I think they must have looked at the competition they were getting from Microsoft and Sony and going, I mean, there's not enough space in the market for three high-end consoles, at least at this time. And we can't compete with them on their own terms. And that's when we started to get the Blue Ocean stuff. And I ended up being the right approach for them.

They had to outsmart everybody, which worked with the Wii and is working with the Switch. We won't talk about the Wii. Maybe in five years we will. Let's get around to that then. So to wrap up, I've been your host, Bob Mackie. You can find me on Twitter as Bob Servo. And you can find us online as Retronauts. Go to Twitter.com slash Retronauts to read all of our tweets.

We always tweet about where we're going, what we're doing. We've got a Facebook group. You should join that. You should review us on iTunes. Get our name out there. We're still growing. We're doing well. So, yes, check us out there.

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Look for Talking Simpsons in your podcast. Catcher every Wednesday, it's a new episode of The Simpsons in-depth, explored in detail. Kat's been on it. Dave's been on it. Jeremy has not been on it. And I think he's more of a family guy man. You're just cringed. He just cringed.

I'm out of here. He's more of a capital critters guy, I think. I like Simpsons. I just, you're past the point in the show where I'm familiar with the series. We're still in the good years, still in really good years. So, also we've got a Patreon there. That's patreon.com. So I've got so many bonus things.

Too much to talk about here. We've done all of the critics. So if you like our treatment of the Simpsons, we've done all 23 episodes of the critic on our Patreon. So that's five bucks a month for a ton of extra stuff. I'm out of breath. I'm out of plugs. Someone else. Tell me what you do and who you are.

Okay. I do all that stuff. Bob talked about minus the Simpsons stuff. You can find me at Retronauts.com where I'm writing daily doing the podcast. Also, my video series, multiple series, what's the plural of series? Siri. Oh, no, my phone's going off.

NES works, Super NES works, Game Boy Works, chronological viewpoints and retrospectives, very in-depth about Nintendo's console libraries, game by game. Chris Kohler and I are going to be teaming up to do Virtual Boy. works covering that entire system and its entirety. Because you asked for it. You did not ask for it. Someone's got to do it and I'm going to take the bullet. So please look forward to that.

Yes, that's me. And you can follow me on Twitter as GameCube fan number, no wait, no. GameSpite, yes. Kat, how about you? Hi, I'm Kat Bailey. Please check out my day job. That's usgamer.net and of course our podcast. That would be Axis of the Blood God where I get together with Nadia Oxford

every week to talk about RPGs. We are in the midst of a deep dive into Final Fantasy 9. We're going to be wrapping that up pretty soon. And also, we've been doing a secret of mono deep dive as well. So that's been pretty fun. And of course, check out our flagship podcast, the US Gamer podcast. I'm at Dave Rodden on Twitter. So thanks so much for listening, folks. We will see you next Monday with a brand new episode. See you then. You know, The all-new Toyota RAV-4 asks, what if?

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JBL and Clarifier registered trademarks of Harmon International Industries Incorporated. The Mueller Report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand,

that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine, Susan Collins, says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a The police detective, killed by friendly fire, was among the mourners attending his funeral.

Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police, they acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.