GameCube’s handle and purple color made it the hottest fashion accessory of the early 2000s

It is October 2002 and you’re at Hollywood’s hottest party. To the left you see Paris Hilton, clad in an aqua-and-lime-swirled halter dress that would make a 2022 Depop-er swoon. Christina Aguilera can be seen to the right with her newsboy cap on and her cargo gauchos swinging gingerly on both her hips. At any other event, these divas would have all eyes on them, but here they are just specks amongst the rest of Hollywood’s early 2000s glitterati — Leonardo DiCaprio, Alicia Silverstone, the cast of Scrubs — all of whom carry the season’s hottest accessory:

The GameCube.

Similar to its successful contemporary, Apple’s clamshell iBook, GameCube was designed with a quirky, techy flavor that ruled the 2000s, right down to the perfectly ergonomic handle. Each was marketed equally as fashion and function. Both used (and paid for) the early-aughts celebrity engine of fame to draw attention and advertise. It worked for the iBook, but can the same be said for Nintendo’s second-worst-selling console?

Nintendo started work in 1998 on Project Dolphin, a highly secretive initiative. The console later known as GameCube was Nintendo’s attempt at building a game system differently than 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 prioritized fun and whimsy — and distanced itself from the edgier lineups on PS2 and Xbox.

Nintendo will have to persuade gamers to embrace a revolutionary concept.

Purple.

“It wasn’t that you couldn’t bring out hardware that was a different color, it was just a very… ‘female’ looking color. It just didn’t feel masculine,” said Perrin Kaplan, former vice president of marketing and corporate affairs for Nintendo of America, in a 2021 interview with Video Games Chronicle.

Photo: Evan Agostini/Getty Images

Kaplan went on to say that many in the Western division of Nintendo attempted to convince Nintendo Japan to go in a different direction — but their concerns went unheard. After a copious amount of market research, where Kaplan says every color from “poopy brown” to hot pink was considered for the console, Nintendo’s GameCube launched in its trademark indigo, alongside black, platinum, and spice orange versions.

The quirky purple PlayStation 2 was laughed at by millions of gamers who had bought their consoles. The GameCube’s lack of violent games and no DVD slots were some of the criticisms. Nintendo had prepared for these criticisms. It was constantly striving to be functionally unique than the competition. But many at Nintendo felt the design of the console was keeping it from being taken seriously by “real gamers.” Tiny discs and multicolored controllers accessorized the GameCube, amping up the cuteness of the console and giving it a “Fisher-Price” aesthetic, according to Shelly Pearce, former head of PR at Nintendo of Europe, also talking to Video Games Chronicle. To some extent, this “cuteness” factor overly associated the console with children, but Nintendo had a bigger demographic challenge:

Girls.

According to numbers from a Nintendo-conducted survey released at Nintendo’s 2007 E3 press conference, 42% of GameCube users were female — compared to 32% for PlayStation 2 and 11% for PlayStation 3. This was something I was familiar with growing up in a middle-class neighbourhood. Using my GameCube’s iconic purselike handle, I carried the console from sleepover to sleepover, while its bunched-up wires and controllers knocked around in my Vera Bradley duffel. The nights progressed and older brothers were heard yelling on the Xbox headsets, while my sister and I played through. Mary-Kate and Ashley: Sweet 16 – Licensed to Drive. These brothers used to make their way into the bathroom or kitchen every now and then, sometimes stopping to laugh at us or to use the reset button to watch their sister cry.

As a kid, I never made the connection between these brothers’ vitriol for GameCube and the joy I got from slipping the console onto my child-sized wrist and parading it all the way to my mom’s minivan the next morning. It is now clear that the brothers who loved Mario Kart and Smash Bros. had to be distinguished from us fake gamers. As gamer culture evolved, the rising idea that we must only be using games to accessorize ourselves and our personalities made it obvious that GameCube, with its sociable games, high cuteness factor, and freakin’ purse handle, was our accessory of choice.

GameCube was a temporary failure for Nintendo. In 2006, Nintendo released Wii, which sold 101 million units over its lifetime, compared to GameCube’s 21 million. Nintendo decided to stick with a simple white Wii, with a few limited-edition colors, after learning from their mistakes. The console was not only for women, but everyone. With its delicate sensor bar, Wii was hardly a grab-and-go console, so it mostly sat on our entertainment center, blending alongside my brother’s equally sleek PS3. When I went to my friends’ houses to play Wii, their older brothers would fight for a turn to use the new gaming technology — though they would later return to their shooters on Xbox and leave us with our toy.

I too was impressed by Wii’s capabilities, but I didn’t feel much ownership over it. Wii was merely a component of my television. My GameCube’s color, which I chose and divided between friends according to the internal hierarchy that I created, felt personal.

As with the Vera Bradley bag, I kept dragging my GameCube around to sleepovers and college. Finally I put it in a drawer in my adult bedroom.

My brother bought his three PlayStations and all of their games from GameStop. It cost $78.

So it’s easy to say GameCube failed. And financially, sure, that’s hard to argue against. But for those of us who got hooked on it for more personal reasons, it became a symbol that I’ll hold on to for years to come. The purple color choice may not have resonated with the market, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way.