TECHNOLOGY
A NINTENDO GAMECUBE?
WHAT’S INSIDE...
The ‘purple lunchbox’ wasn’t as successful as the PlayStation 2 or Xbox, but Nintendo played the long game with the GameCube’s hardware
WORDSBEN BIGGS
I n 2001, Nintendo revealed its highly anticipated fourth home video games console at the E3 press conference in Los Angeles, just prior to the September launch in Japan. Championing the console with the slogan, ‘the Nintendo difference’, Nintendo walked a packed auditorium through its sixth-generation hardware in an exhibition that sometimes felt like it was designed to appeal to corporates: the GameCube’s discs could not be pirated, it had an inbuilt calendar, there would also be a hybrid GameCube with a DVD player, which was exclusive to Japan. After a showreel of launch titles that included Luigi’s Mansion and