It’s October 2002 and you’re at Hollywood’s hottest party. On the left is Paris Hilton dressed in an aqua-and-lime halterneck dress that would make a Depop-er swoon in 2022. To your right is Christina Aguilera, her newsboy hat perched atop her head while her cargo gauchos swing cautiously on her hips. At any other event, these divas would turn heads, but here they are just a few spots among the other Hollywood sparkles of the early 2000s – Leonardo DiCaprio, Alicia Silverstone, the cast of scrubs — all wearing the hottest accessory of the season:
The GameCube.
Much like its successful contemporary, Apple’s clamshell iBook, GameCube was designed with a quirky, tech flair that reigned 2000s, right down to the perfectly ergonomic grip. Both were marketed as equal parts fashion and function, each leveraging (and paying for) the powerful early-kids celebrity engine to garner attention and publicity. It worked for the iBook, but can the same be said for Nintendo’s second best-selling console?
In 1998, Nintendo began work on what it called a top-secret initiative project dolphin. The console later known as the GameCube was Nintendo’s attempt to build a gaming system unlike its competitors: Sony’s long-awaited PlayStation 2 and Microsoft’s newcomer Xbox. Nintendo Japan wanted to build something for friends to play together that emphasized fun and whimsy – and distanced itself from the fancier lineups on PS2 and Xbox.
As part of this, Nintendo would need to convince players to embrace a radical concept:
Violet.
“It wasn’t that you couldn’t put hardware out in a different color, it was just a very… ‘feminine’ looking color. It just didn’t feel manly,” said Perrin Kaplan, former vice president of marketing and corporate affairs at Nintendo of America, in one 2021 Interview with Video Games Chronicle.
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Kaplan went on to say that many in Nintendo’s western division tried to persuade Nintendo Japan to go in a different direction – but their concerns went unheard. After extensive market research, with Kaplan saying that every color from “poopy brown” to hot pink was considered for the console, Nintendo launched the GameCube in its trademark indigo alongside black, platinum and spice orange versions.
many gamers, Millions of them had already secured their sleek PlayStation 2s, more or less scoffed at the quirky purple box. Aesthetics aside, the GameCube has been criticized for its lack of adult games (see: violent games), lack of a DVD slot, and lack of an internet connection. Nintendo was prepared for this criticism; It was always aimed at creating something functionally different from its competitors. But many at Nintendo felt that the console’s design kept it from being taken seriously by “real gamers”. According to Shelly Pearce, former public relations director at Nintendo of Europe, the GameCube was outfitted with tiny discs and colorful controllers that enhanced the console’s cuteness and gave it a “Fisher-Price” aesthetic. also in conversation with Video Games Chronicle. To a certain extent, this “cuteness factor” overly associated the console with children, but Nintendo faced a larger demographic challenge:
Girl.
By Numbers from a poll conducted by Nintendo Released at Nintendo’s E3 press conference in 2007, 42% of GameCube users were female – compared to 32% on PlayStation 2 and 11% on PlayStation 3. This statistic was easy to observe growing up in my middle-class neighborhood. Using my GameCube’s iconic purse-like handle, I carried the console from sleepover to sleepover, my tangled cables and controllers banging about in my Vera Bradley travel bag. As the nights wore on, older brothers could be heard screaming through their Xbox headsets while their sisters and I played through Mary-Kate and Ashley: Sweet 16 – driver’s license. From time to time, these brothers would make their way to the kitchen or bathroom, stop to taunt us, or pop onto the easy-to-reach reset button to see their sisters cry.
As a kid, I never made a connection between these brothers’ vitriol for GameCube and the joy I felt when I slipped the console onto my child-sized wrist and paraded it all the way to my mom’s minivan the next morning. But now it seems clear: As much as the older brothers loved Smash Bros. and Mario Kart, there still had to be a distinction between them, the real gamers, and us, the fake gamer girls. As gamer culture evolved, the emerging idea that we should only use games to accessorize ourselves and our personalities made it obvious that GameCube, with its social games, high cuteness factor, and darn purse handle, was our go-to accessory .
Fortunately for Nintendo, GameCube would be a short-lived failure for the company. In 2006, Nintendo released the Wii, which sold 101 million units over its lifetime, compared to GameCube’s 21 million. Nintendo learned from its mistakes and mainly offered Wii in a sleek white with occasional limited edition colors, positioning the console not just for girls but for everyone. With its dainty sensor bar, the Wii was hardly a portable console, so it mostly sat atop our entertainment center, merging with my brother’s equally sleek PS3. When I went to my friends’ houses to play Wii, their older brothers would struggle to take advantage of the new gaming technology – although they later returned to their shooters on Xbox, leaving us with our toys.
I, too, was impressed by the Wii’s capabilities, but I didn’t feel like I really owned it. For me, the Wii was just part of the TV. My GameCube, which color I chose and which controller colors were shared among friends in whatever internal hierarchy this week, felt more personal, more like me.
And like my beloved Vera Bradley travel bag, I continued to lug my GameCube to sleepovers, then to college, and finally to a drawer in my full grown-up apartment.
My brother sold his three PlayStations and all their games to GameStop for $78.
So it’s easy to say that GameCube failed. And financially, that’s hard to argue with. But for those of us who were drawn to it for more personal reasons, it became a symbol I will hold onto for years to come. The purple color choice may not have convinced the market, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
