Nintendo GameCube It was a console with which certain patterns seen in its predecessor, Nintendo 64, were repeated.
While he enjoyed the full support of third-parties who developed titles that were exclusive at the time – like Konami with Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes and Capcom with Resident Evil 4, Killer7, Viewtiful joe, PN03, Resident Evil 0 and the remake of the first resident Evil-, the truth is Game Cube lost the presence of non-Nintendo studios and eventually lagged behind sales of PlayStation 2 and Xbox units.
But for Perrin Kaplan, former vice president of marketing and corporate affairs at Nintendo of America, the sales problem of GameCube derived from its appearance, as the purple You could not associate the audience that Sony and Microsoft were targeting, the competition.
In an interview with VGC, Kaplan said his team suggested to Japan that it was not a good idea to go to the market in purple, but the answer was negative before the recommendation to leave in another tone.
“We press for black and silver […] It wasn’t that you couldn’t get hardware with a different color, just that it was a color very feminine. I believe that it didn’t feel masculine“, said.
Kaplan’s remarks were supplemented by those of Beth Llewelyn, former director of corporate communications for Nintendo of America, who said that color made it difficult to compete against PlayStation 2 and Xbox.
“At that time the systems were black, not even white had been done at a broad level […] To have that purple box didn’t help too much“, he referred.
Also, Dawn Paige, former Nintendo UK Marketing Director, said the GameCube look made consumers they thought it was a console aimed at children, when in fact it was intended to reach the same audience of PlayStation 2 and Xbox.
Nintendo GameCube sold alone 21.7 million units in the world and is the second least successful home console in the Big N, behind only Wii U and its 13.5 million displaced units.