History of the Nintendo GameCube
Nintendo was once the reigning champion of the video game console industry. After the video game crash of the mid-1980s, Nintendo moved into the U.S. market and was able to market its system with little viable competition. Once they became dominant, they maintained that dominance with exclusivity deals that protected their monopoly for half a decade.
That doesn't help the GameCube, however. Nintendo's glory days are far behind it, and the GameCube has struggled to hold off the XBox, while representing no serious threat to the PlayStation 2. The Nintendo GameCube's game library isn't particularly strong, and few developers are still interested in the GameCube platform.
GameCube hardware
The GameCube has a graphics system that's quite fast, but only when dealing with data in its small block of graphics memory. It does well with simple graphics of the sort seen in cel-shaded games, but doesn't do as well with complex textured scenes. It has no programmable vertex or pixel shaders, a slower CPU, and less RAM than the XBox, making it hard to compete on the basis of hardware. The one big advantage the GameCube's hardware has is that it's cheap, and Nintendo has been able to price the GameCube at a level that Sony and Microsoft haven't been able to match.
Nintendo Revolution: the successor to the GameCube
Nintendo intends to roll out a new machine to follow up the GameCube. The Nintendo Revolution will be backwardly compatible with the GameCube, but will use full-sized discs for its own games. Rumor, discussion, and debate have centered around the Revolution's controllers. Nintendo promises that they'll be, well, revolutionary--but few details have been forthcoming.
It appears that Nintendo won't attempt to differentiate the Revolution with powerful hardware. Instead, they're focusing on the game library and wireless networking capabilities of the system. Cutting corners on the hardware will allow them to sell the system at a lower price than the XBox 360 and PlayStation 3, so there may yet be room for Nintendo in the video game market. We'll see as time goes by.
Buying a Nintendo GameCube
If you're looking to buy a GameCube, you can get one here:
More information about the GameCube
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