Nintendo Gamecube
(from Nintendo.com)

Is the NINTENDO GAMECUBE an audio-visual machine or is it a game machine?

Our answer to this question is clear. The NINTENDO GAMECUBE focuses on gameplay and is "the ultimate TV game machine and the first of its kind."

The Nintendo 64 was a highly advanced piece of hardware. However, because it had such superior capabilities, developers probably felt as if it was a "challenge" for them to produce for it. Because of this, along with complicating software development, N64 gained a reputation of being a difficult system on which to develop games.

Additionally, in response to the demand for new types of entertainment from users in the game trade, the scale of games became larger, and frequently special adjustments to software had to be made. This came back to haunt the developers in the form of development costs and it would not be an exaggeration to say that it made software development more challenging.

This type of problem, if not solved, could have a dramatic effect on the success of the game business.

We here at Nintendo decided to focus on solving this issue by creating the NINTENDO GAMECUBE with the purpose of realizing the highest level of performance and to enhance the productivity of software development. This is Nintendo's vision of what a next generation game machine should do.

Instead of going for the highest possible performance, which does not contribute to software development, our idea was to create a developer-friendly next generation TV game machine that maintained above-standard capabilities.

In order to accomplish this, we have painstakingly removed the "bottlenecks" which hinder an efficient system. We have introduced 1T-RAM technology, which has a minimum of delays, into the main memory and the Graphics LSI Mixed Memory. Also, secondary cache memory with a large capacity was implemented in the MPU. With this combination we have succeeded at creating reliable functionality that can be used with actual games.

We have been creating a world in which the player can enjoy the feeling of actually touching the "world" created by the software. In addition, the player can benefit by building a bond with the game and characters in it.

The NINTENDO GAMECUBE will carry on the "DNA" of Nintendo games and give birth to a new kind of entertainment that surpasses existing concepts of what great gaming is.