Mario

Metal Gear Rising, that kind of stuff.

His involvement, it's a bit like, you know, in Hollywood where you get like somebody's cast, like Chris Pratt springs to mind in like Jurassic World or Mario or the Lego movie.

His involvement guarantees X amount of dollars on the off side.

And I think Kojima's pretty similar.

Nice.

So then I got the kids like Mario and Princess Peach shit.

Oh, yeah.

Are you back here, Crystal?

Huh?

Luigi? Luigi from Mario? From Mario? Oh, my

God.

The L-G-T-B.

Miyamoto originally planned to create a Popeye game, as the character was popular in Japan, but Nintendo struggled to find a way to portray the Popeye characters using the technology available.

And so, Donkey Kong, Jumpman, and the Beautiful Girl replaced the Popeye characters.

Donkey Kong was a giant ape who kidnapped the beautiful girl, renamed Pauline, but was undone by Jumpman, who was renamed Mario.

Nintendo of America, founded as a subsidiary in 1980, had 3,000 radarscope machines, but they only managed to sell about a third of them, again because the game wasn't very popular.

Donkey Kong was retrofitted into the unused radarscope cabinets, and it quickly took off.

As Sony and Microsoft sought to provide DVD and CD playback, Nintendo's box focused solely on games, to the extent that it only fit mini-DVDs in its dinky disc bay.

The console's front prominently advertised its capability of supporting four controllers with no extra add-ons, perfect for multiplayer games of Mario Kart Double Dash, while its colorful pad remains beloved and still used by Nintendo fans today.

Of course, the GameCube is best remembered for its game lineup and as the birthplace of franchises that have since become Nintendo staples.

Even at release, the GameCube offered perhaps one of the best console launch lineups of all time.

Alas, as time went on and the GameCube's sales numbers couldn't match PS2 or Xbox, third-party support for the console began to wane.

Still, Nintendo rewarded its faithful with games that still regularly feature among lists of the all-time greats.

Metroid Prime and its underappreciated sequel, Super Mario Sunshine, and The Legend of Zelda Wind Waker, and some notable third-party support did continue, with a post-Dreamcast-era Sega providing the phenomenal skies of Arcadia Legends, while the infamous Capcom 5 agreement saw the launch of the masterpiece that is Resident Evil 4.

In terms of pure numbers, GameCube was something of a failure.

What were their names?

[laughs] Um, Luigi and, um, I don't know, Mario.

Mario.

Yeah.

I knew you were gonna say that.