I was an avid GCN defender back then and I'm pleased to see it become a beloved system. The aesthetic/kiddie thing was a stupid reason people hated on the system; back in 2001 everyone was a lot more insecure and said the purple lunchbox was gay or whatever. Just stupid, who cares.
I think the GCN had just as many fantastic games as the N64 from Nintendo, and stronger 3rd-party support. I'll agree that Sunshine is weaker than SM64 and TWW is divisive even if I love it. But then there's Prime 1 and 2 (N64 missed out on Metroid entirely), a fantastic Smash Bros game, a Mario Kart that DIDN'T have horrible constant rubberbanding, Paper Mario/F-Zero/Mario Golf all roughly as great as their predecessors, the excellent Pikmin games, Eternal Darkness, DK Jungle Beat, Animal Crossing, the charming and creative Chibi-Robo third-party stuff like Skies of Arcadia, Sonic Mega Collection, Resident Evil Remake, Soul Calibur II, Tales of Symphonia, Viewtiful Joe, Timesplitters, MGS: Twin Snakes, and the masterpiece that is Resident Evil 4. Unlike the N64, it wasn't starved for RPGs, it had more than a few dozen games worth buying, and the droughts were much shorter.
I love the N64 but the GameCube was an ambitious, creative system that got overly dumped on because it lacked college favs like Halo and GTA, and teenagers didn't like one of the 3 colors it was available in. Just dumb.
I had a GameCube back then too, and I defended it hard — even though deep down I knew it wasn't giving me what I actually wanted.
From launch through the mid-life, it was a solid system. But from the mid-point onward, it completely fell off a cliff. Once Nintendo shifted its internal resources to support the DS and secure its lead against the PSP, the GameCube was basically left to rot. After 2003, being a GameCube owner was rough. The release schedule became a wasteland, major gaps everywhere, and the system felt practically abandoned.
When you look at the library now, in 2025, with everything laid out and accessible all at once, it
can look like a good catalog. But living through it from 2001 to 2006 was a very different experience. You definitely felt that a lot of big, relevant games hitting other platforms simply weren't coming to the GameCube, and that void was obvious.
And I also disagree about the overall quality of the GCN library. A lot of titles are heavily overrated today because of nostalgia or retroactive reappraisal. Very few GameCube games had any real industry-shaping impact compared to what the NES, SNES, or even the N64 delivered. The reality is that the GameCube was Nintendo's worst-selling console at the time — their biggest commercial failure until the Wii U — and that happened for a reason.
I find this debatable, the same accusation has hung over Nintendo since 1981 when Donkey Kong became a hit. Nintendo explicitly abandoned its policies with the snes, and the N64 had gory games. While these companies (Sega, Sony, MS) sell themselves as adult-only companies, behind the scenes they try to launch their own supposedly childish games, like Sonic, Jak, Sly, Ratchet, Astrobot, and Blinx. The cubic format was a mistake; a similar appearance to the N64 would have been a better approach. Nintendo could have made a controller like the Sega Saturn's 2D controller but with two analog sticks. Another mistake was not inventing the Nintendo GT, a realistic car simulator; it took Microsoft making Forza. In short, They didn't have an answer to GT and Final Fantasy.
Iwata made the Wii sell 100 million units, but thanks to him, today I don't like Nintendo; I think it's a company that makes indie games at exorbitant prices.
I have to disagree about Donkey Kong. That whole "Nintendo is for kids" stigma simply didn't exist back then. In the early '80s and even throughout the NES era,
games were just games. Nobody was drawing a hard line between "adult" and "childish" the way people later started doing.
The NES absolutely didn't carry a kiddie image — it had plenty of titles with darker aesthetics or violent themes: Ninja Gaiden, Double Dragon, Guerrilla War, Ikari Warriors, Contra, Castlevania, and a long list of others. There was no narrative at the time that Nintendo was somehow targeting children while everyone else was targeting adults. This whole "games for kids vs. games for adults" framing only really started during the SNES vs. Genesis rivalry — specifically when Kalinske's Sega pushed the "Genesis does what Nintendon't" campaign. That was a deliberate marketing strategy aimed at positioning Sega as the cooler, more mature alternative and painting Nintendo as the childish option.
Sony and Microsoft later ran with the exact same narrative to carve out market share from Nintendo. So no, this stigma didn't start with Donkey Kong. It was manufactured during the 16-bit era and weaponized heavily throughout the PS1 era and beyond.
No, it started in the Wii era, with "core" gamers hating the Wii so much that they collectively forgot how much shit they had thrown at the GC until the previous day. There is no rational explanation for the praise a game like Eternal Darkness still gets to this day. A game so rigid that it makes Fatal Frame feel like Bayonetta, and that gets easily spanked by FF in the horror department too. Or Star Fox Adventures, a travesty of Star Fox that sent the IP into a downward spiral it never recovered from.
To me, the GC lived and died by Metroid Prime and RE4. Those games pretty much made the system worth a damn to me, and by themselves saved the whole generation in my eyes.
Also yeah, the GC was presented and marketed in the worst possible ways. But to be honest, there was no place for Nintendo's trademark look and feel in the market shaped by PS1 and PS2. Even making the console all black by default, getting rid of the handle and doing everything to make the thing look less kiddy, it was doomed from the moment they decided to launch it with Luigi's Mansion when PS2 was getting FFX, DMC, Silent Hill 2, MGS2 and GTA3, and Xbox was launching pretty much simultaneously with Halo. The presentation of cel-shaded Zelda after that famous, "mature" CG demo of Link and Ganondorf completely killed any residual chance the system had to regain lost ground. And on top of that, Nintendo still managed to botch mainline Mario and Zelda while Miyamoto was working on Pikmin, of all things.
I fully agree with the second half of what you wrote. And yeah, there
were other good GameCube games besides Prime and RE4 — they just didn't have the industry-shifting impact Nintendo desperately needed at the time.
But I really have to question the idea that this whole mindset started with the Wii.
Back then, people constantly pointed to the GameCube as
proof that Nintendo's traditional strategy was a failure. The narrative pushed hard by Nintendo fans at the time was that the "old Nintendo" couldn't compete anymore and that the Wii's blue-ocean approach was the only realistic path forward.
If you dared to question Iwata or the direction Nintendo was taking with the Wii, the first thing fanboys threw in your face was how the GameCube had "failed" and how Nintendo supposedly had no chance in the hardware race. That was their entire argument — and it got repeated endlessly as a form of damage control.
Today, that rhetoric has aged incredibly poorly.
