With the GameCube celebrating its 10-year anniversary, I started thinking back to my time with the little purple box. I soon realized that I actually had some GameCube stuff that may be interesting to show/talk about.

Firstly, the GameCube launched in Australia on May 17, 2002. We were the last major region to receive it, and the wait between the U.S and local release was hard, to say the least. I did manage to play it early at a store that imported a unit though.

Nintendo Australia eventually began giving details about the Cube’s launch here, and one of the cool little bonuses was that when you pre-ordered a system, you would receive a disk, which contained trailers, wallpapers, etc. on it. From what I can remember, I didn’t actually receive the disk until either close to launch, or when I actually picked up the system.

Anyway, the disk itself is fairly basic, but it did at least have a proper case. The disk only plays on computers despite actually being the size of a Cube disk. The disk launched a front-end interface when inserted, but nowadays I can only access the files directly, as it doesn’t work under OS X. I remember watching the Super Smash Bros Melee trailer a lot, which was probably the highlight of the disk. That, and it had some cool Pikmin wallpapers. (Check out the picture gallery to see the wallpapers from the launch CD.)

So tiny

The next thing that I acquired by chance was a GameCube demo disk for Star Wars Rogue Leader III. Because Nintendo didn’t allow demo disks to be included in magazines at the time, the only places that had any were stores that actually had GameCubes setup. One day I was looking around in EB Games, and I didn’t have any money so I couldn’t actually buy anything. So I was there for quite some time just looking and waiting for my mum to finish doing something. Eventually the store person came up to me and asked if I had a GameCube, I said yes, and he then gave me the store demo disk that had been lying around for a while. I thought that was awesome and gladly accepted.

Finally..a demo..

The demo features the Hoth level from Rogue Leader III, the Star Wars arcade vector-based game, and some trailers and artwork galleries. I was surprised that the disk featured a full version of the arcade game and found it to be fairly fun. Hanging around and looking in EB actually paid off for once that day.

The last little ‘Cube bonus I received was a front fascia for the GameCube itself. Nintendo Australia held a competition on their website, and from what I can remember they had 1000 or so to give away. I was lucky enough to win one of them, and what’s more, it was a Metroid Prime-styled one! Not much to say really, but I did have it on there for quite a while, and it is pretty cool.