A good day in the history of video game preservation
Remember the Nintendo Dolphin? The N64 successor that would destroy the PlayStation 2 and put Nintendo back on top? Well, Nintendo ended up naming it GameCube, and it fell a bit short of the expectations of even putting a dent in the PlayStation 2.
Still, the GameCube deserves a high place in video game history for providing a home to countless classics. As spotted by VGC, Ziff Davis Vice President and video game history preservation enthusiast Adam Doree just re-reminded us of that by uploading a remastered version of the GameCube’s original unveiling featuring mostly never-before-seen footage.
The footage comes from Doree’s own archives. Everything is now color corrected, semi-stabilized, and features a higher bitrate and other improvements. The footage is a compilation of highlights from Nintendo Space World 2000, the conference where Nintendo unveiled the GameCube. Clocking in at nearly one hour, this is a big but beautiful time capsule that has a lot to unpack.
So let’s look at the highlights of the highlights.
At 3:24, they unveil the GameCube.
At the 17:00 minute mark, they show something they called Mario 128. Interestingly, it’s a tech demo that resembles Super Mario Galaxy much more than it does Super Mario Sunshine. It was the center of Nintendo rumors for quite some time afterwards.
At 25:38, we get a then-new look at Zelda. It sure does bear a lot of resemblances to what we ended up getting with Twilight Princess.
On a sadder note, there’s Rare’s showcase. At the 26:00 mark, we get to take a look at GameCube’s Perfect Dark and Banjo games that ended up never making it into the console.
The whole thing ends with a neat Q&A session with Shigeru Miyamoto at 40:43.
This isn’t the first time Adam Doree’s revealed some surprising footage from Nintendo’s past. He’d very recently shared footage of a GameCube LCD monitor that almost was, so we must once again thank him for his efforts in preserving these pieces of Nintendo history.
