The Nintendo GameCube - What Happened?

[Music] let's see [Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome back to another Indigo huge episode of what happened the show that deep dives into Games movies and consoles that absolutely went through it and out of the many pieces of Hardware that Nintendo has released over the decades their Plucky lunchbox shape machine is certainly one such console we'll look back upon much more fondly nowadays Nintendo's sixth generation Contender had been seen by many as a bit of a joke at the time for a variety of reasons and no amount of celebrities awkwardly holding the machine was going to change that so grab the nearest handle you know whatever's at Arm's Reach and turn your waybirds to channel 3 or uh four wait a minute okay there as I answer the question what happened to the Nintendo GameCube [Music] it's a pretty well known fact but the big n gave up a lot of market share a lot of quickly during its battle with the original PlayStation Sony's machine beat the N64 to Market by almost two years and was able to move a staggering 102 million consoles through the late 90s and early 2000s via its contemporary marketing campaigns a perfect read on the future being disc based which led to massive third-party support and you know just being the cool new kid on the Block meanwhile the Nintendo Ultra 64 put a lot of emphasis on multiplayer fun via its native four-player support and a smaller but nonetheless still Stellar selection of exclusives developed mainly by rare and Nintendo's own internal teams despite providing radically different gameplay experiences from what was available on the SNES and laying the groundwork for so many 3D gameplay conventions the N64 sold a good deal less than its 16-bit predecessor 32.9 million consoles against 49.1 now the Game Boy line was doing incredibly well but still Nintendo's piece of the overall video game pie was getting smaller and smaller so they were well aware they were going to have to seriously address their missteps if they wanted to keep you know existing in the Home console Space by far the biggest of these missteps was their continued commitment to cartridges aside from certain technical advantages like faster data read speeds and more durability compared to the oh so scratchable 90s era CD the lower storage capacity and the high manufacturing costs of cartridges unfortunately ostracized Nintendo from third-party support in an era where developers were itching to implement CD quality soundtracks tons of voice acting an elaborate CGI cutscenes and of course cheesy FM these that I still love to put it all in perspective on just how bad this problem became the n64's other main competitor the Sega Saturn which despite selling far worse had seen over 1 000 games ship worldwide which more than doubled the n64's back catalog which sits at just under 400. up now if I could again pull up the PS1 sales figures he's already dead oh okay yeah you you get the picture so when Nintendo began designing their next machine carts were gone from from like second one but of course this big decision had to be done in the most Nintendo way possible instead of going with a standard or expected format they went with their own proprietary mini disks which offered more space than traditional CD-ROMs but still lag behind the storage capacity of the forthcoming DVD by what most tech journalists and Industry vets described as a huge shitload GameCube game discs could hold roughly 1.4 gigs while the DVD could easily house a girthy 4.7 with later DVD types taking on even heavier loads I I mean you know you do the math why did Nintendo do this well they reportedly didn't have a whole lot of faith in the DVD format as a whole just like they did for CD-ROMs the previous generation didn't want to pay the licensing fees for the technology and most importantly of all they were terrified of the piracy that had been rampant in the CD space even though this decision would generate a lot of long-term negative effects elsewhere down the line it can't be denied that proprietary disks were indeed a good solution to all those pesky piracy problems to make all of this happen though Nintendo naturally needed to seek outside help so the optical drive was designed by Panasonic as Nintendo r d had very little experience in this field after a failed chipset Venture with Samsung Nintendo then partnered with up-and-coming Graphics Company art X were made up of former designers from Silicon Graphics who had worked closely with Nintendo on the would then began working on their new flipper chipset to power Nintendo's new machine flipper provided the backbone of the console's graphical capabilities it even led to the dolphin code name the GameCube went by for a few years Nintendo felt this new chipset would give them the edge they needed as flipper was more powerful and versatile than the competition and cheap to produce to boot Nintendo Engineers knew it was Superior to what was in the Dreamcast and they were confident it would easily outclass whatever Sony could throw at them next kinichiro ashida led the hardware design for the GameCube and he and his team worked tirelessly to deliver a form factor that was visually friendly and particularly compact inspired largely by the small size of the GameCube disks themselves the master stroke of the design however was of course the handle during the team's research process they found that a lot of 1990s era Gamers regularly move their consoles around to find their ideal play positions given that most controllers were still wired at the time ashida also regarded the handle as an overall aesthetic plus helping to lend the console in even more friendly appearance Miyamoto and his team meanwhile spent a long time in secret developing the gamecube's controller abandoning many ambitious prototypes and other wild ideas until they honed in on something that was both comfortable and functional while still having those oh so distinct Nintendo eccentricities while things are starting to come together Nintendo grabbed Martin Hollis the director of GoldenEye who at that time had just quit from his position at rare and was in the middle of a vacation Nintendo quickly sold him on an advisory job at Nintendo technology development where he worked for about six months helping and Advising Nintendo's designers marketers engineers and even Miyamoto himself on the console its features architecture you know the whole nine yards Hollis would eventually suggest the name star cube which Nintendo would actually go on to copyright as a potential name although it obviously got tweaked in the end in an interview on video games Chronicle Hollis humbly admits that he doesn't know for sure if his initial suggestion led to the word Cube being used or if someone else within the company had come up with it on their own in that same article Hollis also explained how the overall design and look of the GameCube came to be and how Nintendo was looking to position it the the size and the price go together pretty much as you optimize on costs you optimize on the space as well that was Nintendo's concept from the start they had this idea that they wanted a small machine although they weren't explicit about this in public they didn't want to compete on performance or be seen using numbers like polygons in a kind of marketing battle the gamecube's design was complete by early 2000 with the initial plan actually to release it during the holiday season of that year to go toe-to-toe with the PS2 and prevent Sony from taking advantage of another year-long Head Start that they had with the original PlayStation obviously that did not happen due to that really pesky problem of games not even being close to finished the second man in charge of Nintendo at that time Hiroshi imanishi even kind of threw the software teams under the bus a bit in an old article on ZDNet we are targeting a December launch before for the Japanese Christmas season but we have to take many things into consideration for political and strategic reasons so we just cannot tell if the Japanese launch is 100 sure or not it's always the case with Nintendo the hardware is already completed but the software is not eventually Nintendo relented choosing to delay the console's launch all the way to September of 2001 in Japan November of 2001 in North America and March of 2002 for Europe for the very competitive price of 199 US dollars a hundred dollars less than the competition regardless Sony was still getting that head start completely unopposed at sorry Dreamcast an advantage that Miyamoto tried to wave off by claiming that the GameCube software would be so irresistible and Superior that it will become the requisite for everyone even though they already have the PS2 this was a fancy way of saying that even if people shout out 299 dollars for Sony's machine eventually they would all have to buy the GameCube it was just a matter of time no it wasn't yeah [Music] a lot of noise was made about the gamecube's default color scheme which even well into its life cycle and having seen a good number of other color options was a critique it could never really shake before launch Nintendo of America's marketing team were called in to give their input on what would ship to store shelves input which would largely be ignored revisiting that same VGC article from earlier Nintendo's former VP of marketing parent Kaplan stated we were called in to rate which colors we liked there must have been 30 GameCube box samples in there on the colors range from poopy Brown to crazy and striking prime colors I remember some were these dark yellow almost skin tone-like colors and we were like you cannot launch that it's so unattractive Japanese leadership were pretty insistent on purple or more accurately Indigo as the default color but Nintendo of America thought otherwise we actually suggested that the purple was not the best to start with and Japan said no we're going to use that then we pushed for black and silver because I think in the U.S nobody had ever really done the purple color before it wasn't that you couldn't bring out Hardware that was a different color it was just a very female looking color it just didn't feel masculine I think I remember us being very nervous at E3 that we're going to get bad press purely based on the color which they did while it seems silly nowadays as expressing oneself via customization and multiple options is like a really reasonable thing but the early 2000s were a pretty different time anyway after appearing at both the 2001 E3 and space World shows the GameCube released in Japan on September 14 2001. with approximately 500 000 consoles shipped to stores around that same time Nintendo of America were originally scheduled to hold an early star our studded pre-launch event but uh they obviously decided to delay that a little bit until October because yeah I think the vibe would have been a little off if these now legendary photos have been taken immediately under the shadow of 9 11. the November 18th North American launch of the GameCube went relatively well but it can't be denied that it lacked the killer app that Nintendo's previous consoles had all enjoyed absolutely no disrespect to it but Luigi vacuuming up a storm in a haunted mansion didn't quite have the same impact as his brother's swinging Bowser around in 3D for the very first time about fortunately Luigi wasn't alone as he was also backed up by ryoto hayami and Luke Skywalker Wave Race blue Storm's gorgeous water effects and Rogue leaders stunning dub everything made for an incredibly solid exclusive Trio with miyamoto's charming Pikmin hitting store shelves less than a month later all four were Financial successes but if you craned your neck just a bit to the side you'd be able to see a Final Fantasy 10 in its natural habitat as it absolutely crushed everything at retail that same month miyamoto's wild theory about PS2 users jumping aboard GameCube looked all the Wilder as the days passed as far as other key titles went new Mario Zelda and Metroid titles were still about a year away and their absence absolutely hurt the Cube's very important first holiday season and first year on the market thankfully there was one little understated release which sprang up about a month after launch to help the GameCube ship whether these early Rough Waters Brothers melee would wind up being arguably the gamecube's most important game selling over 600 000 units across its first few weeks in Japan and North America combined and continuing to sell well and consistently over the course of the console's entire life cycle clearing 7 million units until the cube was eventually retired while it Remains the console's most successful title financially smashing and or wave dashing didn't pry away the millions and millions more who were all glued to their ps2s or Xboxes in fact no matter the game price drop or marketing tactic that was something Nintendo would never be able to do [Applause] [Music] that demographic the fabled hardcore gamer was the main group the GameCube regularly tried targeting and failed to attract even when Nintendo made a lot of big money moves to try to do just that I went pretty in depth on this in my Resident Evil 4 video but Nintendo snagging re exclusivity for a number of years was an incredibly lucky break and while it produced some great games capcom's shareholders were disappointed at the lackluster sales in comparison to the earlier PlayStation entries this concern bled over into the once GameCube exclusive Capcom 5 for 4 which all got PS2 ports sometimes with extra content except for my beloved piano 3 of course Eternal Darkness a psychological survival horror gem that Nintendo funded and published despite its very strong critical reception failed to sell even half a million copies at least according to a claim by Eurogamer then when Nintendo announced they had secured an exclusive remake of Metal Gear Solid there was much rejoicing from the GameCube faithful uh before the twin Snakes would reportedly post some of the lowest sales figures of the entire franchise I tried and failed to find concrete numbers for North America and Europe but in Japan it shifted only 71 000 copies in total according to NPD group numbers archived in various places twin Snakes sold over 148 000 units in its first two months on sale in North America while in Japan it shifted only 71 000 copies across its entire life so it's very possible that it never even broke 300K a depressingly low Bar for a series as revered as Metal Gear mature rated and third-party content rarely if ever sold Blockbuster numbers on the GameCube something that I CEO Mike McGarvey pointed out when his company announced they were abandoning support for the cube as early as 2003. the GameCube is a declining business if other companies follow us Nintendo will have a hard battle to fight can you imagine how bad things must be going when third parties start recommending that other third parties stop supporting you after that idos only ship three titles on the GameCube by development teams who already had them in the pipeline while PS2 and Xbox saw over 20 idos published games released within that same time period the slumping sales numbers were publicly waved Away by Nintendo higher ups though in a rare bit of transparency Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi went so far as to theorize that the massive disparity between the cube and its competition was due to the popularity of violent games on other consoles implicitly acknowledging that title is like Grand Theft Auto we're Far and Away the biggest success story of the sixth generation there were some extremely vague rumors that Rockstar had been planning to bring GTA to the GameCube in some form but those seem to be pretty unsubstantiated aside from their lone Cube title Smuggler's run War zones the GameCube evidently failed to rise up Rockstar as the kids would say the same story played out for a number of other Publishers and franchises where both the Xbox or PS2 saw some fairly big releases that just skipped the cube altogether the suffering blood rain 2 psyops The Punisher Max Payne Silent Hill Castlevania Contra King of Fighters onamusha Fatal Frame the list goes on and on while it's true Nintendo burned a few Bridges during the life of the N64 the relationship with third parties was at an all all-time low being only perhaps by the woeful final years of the Wii U Nintendo's play for the core audience had completely whiffed and everyone knew it the lunchbox's troubles came to a head when at the start of 2003 Nintendo actually had to Halt the console's entire production line to save money from overstocking warehouses with unsold machines for around nine months no new cubes were manufactured the polar opposite of what you usually see from major Hardware launches once production picked back up again in September Nintendo smartly dropped the price of the cube down to 99 the same MSRP as the Game Boy Advance I ain't gonna front though that's a pretty fire deal this coincided with the 2003 holiday shopping season which did provide a nice boost in sales but it wasn't momentum that was retained now while it's been a good bit of gloom and doom up to this point keep in mind for the majority of the console's life it was actually profitable for Nintendo this was due to their aggressive cost-saving measures which we've already touched on no DVD drive proprietary disks and the inexpensive custom flipper chipset regardless of the bump the PS2 would still firmly Remain the market leader and realistically there was no way Nintendo would ever catch up the gamecube's design and Nintendo's philosophy behind it was locked in mostly due to Hiroshi yamauchi's extremely strict management style nowadays if Nintendo of America pushed back against something there's a decent chance plans could change but not during the iron reign of Yamauchi while he stepped down from his position as Nintendo president six months into the gamecube's life it was too late to Pivot from the course launch was a bus tall Nintendo's internal teams were already committed to their projects and only so much course correction could realistically be done by the new president the late great satoru Iwata during all of this the Game Boy Advance was the one big bright spot for Nintendo selling over 81 million units throughout its life where it operated with next to no competition it was a huge success that Nintendo hoped to capitalize on in a few different ways with the GameCube GBA to cube connectivity was touted as the main selling point for releases like four Swords Adventures Animal Crossing and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles along with full compatibility with the entire game boy lineage via the Game Boy Player these were a fairly novel features but if the goal was to get new butts and seats they maybe weren't as flashy or as sexy as Nintendo thought they were simply put the game YouTube lacked The X Factor it desperately needed to break out and appeal to the non or lapse the Nintendo fan yeah you could easily carry the console around but unlike the PS2 or Xbox which allowed DVD and CD playback and online multiplayer something the GameCube completely lacked dude dude that's almost completely lacked functionality and feature wise the cube didn't offer much more than the N64 did unless you were a massive Game Boy Chad who demanded their handheld experiences must be on Console it was admirable that Nintendo stuck to their guns by delivering a pure dedicated video game system but technology and Trends were rapidly changing around this time and the bets they placed on the Cube's features were obviously not panning out even big Innovations like the ever wonderful wavebird controller were somewhat muted as it wasn't there at launch or was made the standard for the console as the pack-in if it had Nintendo might have been able to Levy it as even the slightest Edge over the competition although that still probably wouldn't have moved the needle all that much this was a sentiment shared by Martin Hollis who if you recall helped Nintendo with the cube overall design in order for a console to win you need to do everything right and then you need to have one more thing a killer feature that nobody else has Nintendo had suffered quite a punishing defeat with the N64 they made nice money but they lost the majority market share and the reason was because they didn't have a CD drive really it's as simple as that so that's something they got right on GameCube and was also a lovely machine to develop for but that wasn't enough it didn't have that one more thing it didn't have a gimmick a secret weapon or that one sizable feature that nobody else had the handle and the idea of carrying it from house to house I think could have been great but we just couldn't think of a way to make that a big deal I never really felt like we made a success out of the handle it was just nice to have and that's it as we are winding down I will take a minute talk about one aspect of the GameCube that Nintendo had apparently poured a bunch of money into that unfortunately never even released an official 3D LCD screen add-on yes more than a decade before the 3DS would hit shelves Nintendo was fist deep into making their cubic console even more three-dimensional for many years this information has mostly been forgotten but recent developments have brought some new info to light and then Iwata asks article on the subject of the Nintendo 3DS I want to share that the GameCube actually has the necessary Hardware to display 3D images even sharing that they had a version of Luigi's Mansion that played out in full 3d directly on the GameCube hardware and that the LCD screen that they had showed off at E3 2002 actually secretly supported this feature wait Nintendo showed this thing off yes although E3 2000 0002 was just before everything went digital so video or images of the device are extremely rare awada also revealed that Miyamoto and future criminal Yuji Naka collaborated on a version of Fantasy Star online 3 that allowed for two GameCubes to be hooked up and using the LCD screen attachment would allow users to enjoy card battles without being able to see each other's hands ultimately what sealed the add-on's Fate was of course the price as Nintendo never found a way to make it affordable which was kind of the point of the Gamecube if the screen had been released in yujinaka and miyamoto's ps03 collab had been a blockbuster things might have been very different although on second thought this might have messed with naca's recent Canon event these expensive slash unreleased Innovations and with coming in third and Home console sales during the entire generation aside Perrin Kaplan looked back on this time at Nintendo with a positive outlook with Gamecube we made money and it was profitable and that's something I think is sometimes really missed by the public the others were bleeding and we were so profitable one of the challenges that we always had with Gamecube is the Nintendo has always been an incredibly profitable company and we saw ourselves as different from Microsoft and Sony but externally we would still be judged in a lineup but it was the popularity of the GBA a platform that was still offering comparatively simple games which gave way to the Nintendo DS which proved to be fairly successful during its initial 2005 launch before the clean Sleek lines of the DS Lite really pushed the hardware into the stratosphere it's quite possible that the game gamecube's lack of meaningful Innovations led directly into the DS being arguably the most different Thing released at that time clearly Paving its own way forward with a variety of unique features Nintendo actually looked back to an earlier GameCube controller prototype and decided that it would be that X Factor that killer new feature that they would entirely base their next Home console around at the same time as GameCube Nintendo is secretly working on a revolutionary controller sensor idea that was very time consuming work that ultimately never got filtered into our GameCube development but after several years this did produce the Wii remote the Wii is essentially a GameCube with some numbers doubled but in a different colored box but it's the Wii remote that brought the extra thing that won Nintendo the market that's how fine the margins are sometimes satoru Iwata had told investors to expect the GameCube to sell 50 million consoles by March of 2005 and while we can all appreciate the man's legendary positivity he was a little off on that estimate by the time the console was discontinued in 2007 it had moved 21 million units placing it firmly below the N64 or would remain until eventually be invested by the was you hey all these plummeting sales were ultimately the thing that let a massive fire under Nintendo's red race track ass and got them to refocus their Vision on where they thought the industry should head they put all their bets on the Wii and its motion controller and while it still couldn't Dethrone Sony's original PlayStation in terms of worldwide sales numbers the Wii came pretty damn close but many Nintendo fans still hold the GameCube incredibly near and dear to their hearts whether it's the legions of melee players who still use actual hardware for tournament setups the psychos who salivated the mention of Custom Robo or Kirby air ride or the Litany of players who discover the console through the incredible Dolphin Emulator the GameCube is still more than just a fond memory for many a gamer while it's been a bit of a bumpy ride since then it's unmistakable that the many mistakes of the GameCube are an indelible part of what made Nintendo into the company it is today so good job you weird geometric shaped Indigo son of a if you know of any other games movies or consoles that had a weird or confusing development Journey do let me know in the comments below or over on my Twitter a really good example of one such project would be Star Fox Grand Prix a long rumored but never confirmed entry in the series allegedly developed by Retro Studios if you head on over to did you know gaming and check out their newest video which I narrated you'll find out if this space animal racing game actually existed at some point Link in the description and in the pin comment below see you next time and thanks for watching [Music] thank you [Music] [Music]

Channel: Matt McMuscles

Views: 642,163

Keywords: matt mcmuscles, GameCube, Nintendo GameCube, Nintendo Video Game Consoles, Video Game Documentaries, what went wrong GameCube, What Happened to Nintendo, what happened?, Wha Happun?

Id: WJ414dB2Jzw

Length: 30min 48sec (1848 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 17 2023