How Nintendo Killed the GameCube

[Music] the gamecube is one of the best remembered consoles of all time and yet it was a commercial failure so what happened let's find out [Music] it's 1999. the spice girls are at the peak of their powers vladimir putin has just been made acting president of russia and the total human population has just surpassed 6 billion for the first time in may of that year nintendo announced that they were working on a new console codenamed project dolphin it was due to be released the next year just in time to compete with sony's playstation 2. the first playstation had beaten nintendo's n64 to market and rapidly outsold it the famously unreliable cartridge system and its stomach stabbing controller looked like relics from another era sony's new kid on the block became an instant market leader and microsoft's new fetus on the block was looking threatening nintendo were in danger of looking old-fashioned and this was reflected in their upper management by the turn of the millennium hiroshi yamauchi had served as nintendo's president for over 50 years despite leading the company through its golden age yamauchi's leadership was starting to look a little bit rusty especially after his support of the migraine inducing virtual boy and nintendo had reason to worry in 1998 veteran developer sega had died on their ass with the release of the dreamcast a device named after the deep permanent sleep you entered after playing more than two minutes of shenmue good that's it next press the accelerator the dreamcast sold fewer than 10 million units and the company hemorrhaged money harder than their spiky blue mascot keen to avoid sega's ring-spewing fate nintendo were determined to beat sony to market and position project dolphin as the future of gaming they unveiled the blurple lunchbox in 2000 at nintendo space world they also teased a cluster of high profile games with recognizable characters like luigi's mansion metroid prime and more importantly something called meowth's dance party meowf himself even made an appearance at the event yeah meow oh god yeah i'm so excited meowth but someone was missing a certain mustachioed pipe pounder was conspicuously absent from promotional material only appearing in super smash brothers melee and that meowf's dance party game was actually a technical demo that would never see release no meowth this is [ __ ] by the time of this announcement the gamecube was basically finished but game development was lagging behind forcing the company to delay the release until late 2001 and allowing sony to beat them to market once again sony's shock and awe campaign successfully presented the ps2 as some kind of holy relic that had somehow been flushed down the toilet of an alien mothership the playstation 2 was bigger than the beatles and jesus combined and the people promptly arrived to worship their new god with one tokyo store recording over 5 000 people waiting outside his door on the first night of sale not only had sony spectacularly beaten nintendo out of the starting gate they'd also successfully promoted their product as the more powerful device after witnessing playstation mania nintendo refused to delay any longer and released the gamecube without its full roster of release titles it arrived in japan in september 2001 and launched two months later in the states with a 75 million dollar marketing campaign [Music] but that was lunch money compared to the 500 million dollar marketing campaign that launched the xbox i mean the rock doesn't impress easily bill you know that but i'm pretty damn impressed with what we're seeing here today rock that is impressive but they were nintendo damn it they didn't need to spend loads of money telling people who they were because they already had legions of loyal fans who were willing to wait all night just to sniff a pair of wario's overalls it's very realistic it's better than any other system that i played before in a launch promotion called what would you do for a gamecube nintendo encouraged their fans to publicly humiliate themselves to prove that they wanted the gamecube the mostest one woman ate a gamecube made entirely of cat food this guy attempted and failed to juggle a load of old nintendo consoles an imagination starved cosplay couple went with the awkward public proposal and this kid painted himself blue and ate a load of worm-filled dirt in an apparent ode to the yet unreleased pikmin game he won but despite the fervor of nintendo's worm eating fans the gamecube underwhelmed at launch the games it arrived with just weren't good enough and considering microsoft's battle briefcase premiered with the greatest launch title of all time yeah i might want to use that sometime though nintendo was looking worse for wear they did have luigi's mansion which people were excited about at the time but looking back it was nothing more than a glorified tech demo where you ran around a dilapidated building sucking off ghosts there was also the forgettable wave race blue storm and rogue squadron rogue leader a game that was about as repetitive as its own title but the one thing it did do it did good but then there was also simeon sphere simulator better known as super monkey ball a terrific game where you'd guide a bubble-bound chimp around pieces of an exploded mini golf course and a series of japanese karaoke backgrounds i guess it was simple but brilliant hiding genius design behind its cutesy aesthetic much like the gamecube itself to understand the cultish appeal of the gamecube you only have to spend a little bit of time with one everything about it is designed to make you fall in love the unique shape the inviting indigo color and the satisfying buttons listen to that it sounds good from here it's good yeah even the controller ports and the card reader were designed to look like cute little faces which was only slightly undercut when you jammed a memory card in this little mouth hole yeah it didn't just look friendly either friendliness was built into its very function its small size lightweight and much mocked back handle made it uniquely portable it was designed to be taken to a friend's house and played together the gamecube controller 2 was a work of art it was a reimagining of the n64 controller if it had been designed for human hands losing the stomach stabbing middle prong and attaching the nipple-like c-stick for 3-d directional movement although it wasn't perfect the z-trigger on the right side was a welcome addition but there wasn't a corresponding one on the left side which wrecked the controller's symmetry it's free real estate nintendo also sold the first first party wireless controller the wave bird controller finally allowing gamers to lay far back from the television and twiddle their c-stick as they fell into a blissful vegetative state unless of course you were playing smash super smash bros melee was annoying to say but brilliant to play it's fast paced roster of recognizable characters blistering orchestral score and the way the announcer guy said game yeah like that it's certainly the title with the most lasting appeal retaining a large famously stinky fan base to this day the only thing that it was missing was meowth aside smash was one of the greatest multiplayer games of all time forging as many friendships as it inspired rage induced controller wire strangulations over your friend's overuse of kirby's pound move it's not fair it's too good it shifted 7.4 million copies over the console's lifespan which was incredible but necessary you see nintendo were intentionally losing 20 for every console they sold the idea being that nintendo would shift more units under the cheaper price and would then make the money back selling their own self-produced games their italian stallion finally squirted his way onto the gamecube in summer 2002 in the breezy super mario sunshine which was objectively the worst 3d mario game just saying still good but it was the worst one the life simulator [ __ ] cutesy soap opera antics of animal crossing arrived in september of the same year with metroid prime following a month later but ultimately their releases would end up being too few and far between the gamecube just lacked the enormous libraries offered by their competitors and this was down to its biggest little weakness its tiny discs these three-inch wonders were a smart bit of design they helped prevent piracy drop production costs and reduce load times but they were only able to hold about 1.4 gigabytes of data which was about a quarter of what competing disks could offer the gamecube and its tiny discs are sobering proof that no matter how clever or innovative you think you are size still matters because it was hard to stuff a whole game on one of its discs many third-party developers didn't bother porting their games to nintendo's system and those that did make it across were often ugly buggy or just unnecessary like the dual-wielding drudgery of die-hard vendetta a game whose major innovation was letting you take and murder hostages as the hero of the film series john mcclane yeah weird hey pal what happened that bite might sack will ya get out of here major studios like acclaim and edios jumped ship and in 2002 nintendo lost the legendary british developer rare also known as rareware and this was really bad because rare despite also making a load of child-friendly collectaphones they also made stuff like the n64's classic golden eye or the less good but still relevant perfect dark die hard vendetta's next snapping orphan making action aside there just weren't many games for the older greasier gamer the gamecube didn't release in europe until may 2002 and by that time nintendo were aware of the problem they were having with older consumers so they launched in europe with a spruced up marketing campaign directed at the gaming industries and the catholic church's favorite demographic young males aged 13 to 17. the centerpiece of which was a series of edgy commercials featuring ninjas trapped in a pretentious performance art piece and this one that looked more like a deodorant advert for date rapists my favorite one though featured this gamer in an apparent cube based psychotic episode lobotomized by the sight of roaming pikmin but this was all part of a larger identity crisis at nintendo as they poured cash into things like cube club nights and the nintendo fusion tour a video game music festival that ran for three years these teen and adult-focused campaigns completely flopped and it was all because they alienated nintendo's real core demographic the parents who actually buy the console this was 2002 grand theft auto vice city's hooker murdering antics had caused a tsunami of mainstream media hysteria skittish conservative parents were looking for the family friendly console and nintendo were telling them that they weren't it this was a major marketing misfire because it was completely ill-suited for the cute kawawi device that they were actually selling and nintendo themselves admitted that they didn't really understand or approve of western appetites for violent games with one nintendo executive quoted as saying consumers don't want fun anymore they just want to kill people in hd the only other vaguely adult games that were available on the gamecube were things like bmx triple x also known as tony hawk's hoe skater and the psychological horror masterpiece eternal darkness sanity's requiem oh scary eternal darkness was a genuinely creepy experimental game it's all about an ancient power struggle between god-like creatures including this pus monster from outer space and their impact on 12 ordinary humans it all takes place over 12 non-chronological levels including one set in medieval cambodia name literally anything else set then the disorientating camera angles and spooktacular coral score actually got you wrapped up in the lovecraft fan fiction storyline but it's best remembered for its sanity meter and the trippy effects that tried to convince you that your console had disconnected or erased your save files it actively tried to [ __ ] with you and you've got to respect that by 2003 the playstation 2 was well on its way to becoming the best selling console of all time in reaction nintendo reduced the price of the gamecube to a pretty extraordinary 99 and with not many big titles on the horizon and with third party developers jumping off their sinking ship nintendo had no choice but to focus on their loyal fans and sell them as much cheap plastic crap as possible [Music] like the dk bongos which could only be really used for this tedious rhythm game called donkey konger made with basement level production costs it arrived just in time for the holidays but there were other add-ons that actually made sense there was the console's 35 broadband adapter that took the gamecube online you plugged it into the serial port here which i have instead filled with cereal which is probably a better use for it because the gamecube only actually had four games that were online one of which was only released in japan and the other three were all part of sega's fantasy star online series at this time nintendo just weren't that interested in the online world they were more interested in creating unique multiplayer experiences that happened right here in meat space like this special cable that turned the game boy advance into a screen having controller predictive of what they would later do with the switch you plug the adapter into this high-speed port here which i've instead filled with several grams of high quality speed but by 2004 it was pretty clear that the future of gaming wasn't young and local it was older and online halo 2 released on the xbox selling over 8 million copies with an impressive but short campaign but the real draw was xbox live which microsoft promoted with the help of these spiky-haired simpletons i've gotta get this in my house how do you do it all about broadband my man you gotta have a high-speed internet service like dsl what i love about these commercials is the complete contempt that the advertisers clearly have for the targeted audience portraying them as monster energy adult man children with anger issues i can feel the energy flowing through the high-speed ethernet cables dude who are you talking to or are we going to play or what but then again they were probably spot-on considering the main activities that took place on xbox live were simulating the sexual assault of the war dead or calling a 14 year old boy on the other side of the world a [ __ ] truly a golden age for gaming one must learn before one can dominate forget that let's play the xbox overtook the gamecube in sales and by christmas 2004 nintendo were losing 180 million dollars a year in hardware sales hiroshi yamauchi retired and was replaced by satoru iwata who had been instrumental in bringing meowf and all the other inferior pokemon to western markets under his leadership the company restructured becoming more collaborative and experimental but sales dwindled further in the console's twilight years with very few titles getting an exclusive release resident evil 4 was a notable one but i never played it and so i don't really care nintendo moved on to developing games for the wii and in 2007 they discontinued the console for good it only sold 22 million units through its lifespan which sounds like a lot but it was far short of the 50 million projected in many ways the gamecube was the last true home console meant to be played in shoulder bashing screen jumping proximity with your friends it was old-fashioned but it was also ahead of its time in ways that wouldn't become obvious until years later and that's why it's so fondly remembered and certainly why i've spent the better part of two weeks writing a love letter to this decades old console i i filled the disk drive with beans yes for a limited time buy the super nes superset and get five complete mario games standard

Channel: Ordinary Things

Views: 1,342,777

Keywords: GameCube History, GameCube Games, Best gamecube games, super mario sunshine, Nintendo, console wars, gaming history, eternal darkness, super smash bros melee, smash, memes, Mario, Luigi's Mansion, History

Id: kBhCVay5CKE

Length: 17min 5sec (1025 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2020