Pandora's Box: The Ultimate GameCube Tier List

Foreword: The GameCube's Legacy

The GameCube...

Such a wondrous machine...

A game console that was thoroughly misunderstood at launch...

The GameCube released here in Japan in 2001 on November 14th, and the 18th in North America. For Europe, it came out in 2002 on May 3rd, and the 17th in Australasia.

And Nintendo were down on their luck.

The Sony PlayStation took massive stabs at Nintendo's crown, as the Nintendo 64 wasn't doing super hot...

The system had a major flaw: Nintendo's insistence on using cartridges, not the DVD format...

While this made it very difficult to pirate Nintendo's games and virtually eliminated load times, it came at the steep cost of memory that could be stored and the price needed to produce such things.

As a result, third parties left Nintendo.

Capcom

Konami

Namco

And the biggest loss of all, Square Enix, which supplied the Super Nintendo with some of the greatest RPGs ever...

With the loss of their greatest allies, Nintendo lost many of its weapons needed to fight the ever-evolving console war...

Even with their surprise supporter and ace in the hole, RareWare, it wasn't enough to cope with their situation, and, without any standout RPGs on the console besides Paper Mario, it was a losing battle that Nintendo lost.

The first of many cracks in Nintendo's cast throne...

However, Nintendo had to change, to burst from the ashes to try once again, for that was all they could do.

They had to adapt, evolve...

And that, they did, and yet, did something...familiar...

Enter Project Dolphin, which would become the GameCube, the subject of today's tier list.

The system was unique, attempting to meet their competitors halfway, with the main media format being not cartridges, but their iconic Mini DVD format. This held some of the advantage of cartridges from the previous generation, while holding more space.

However, this still led to casualties in the gaming world...

While it allowed more confidence in their original partners, especially Capcom with their infamous Capcom Five (P.N.03, Viewtiful Joe, Resident Evil 4, Killer7, Dead Phoenix (Canceled)), Square Enix was still not willing to create any new games for the system, minus Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, a spinoff.

The evolving gaming landscape also held a sense of...maturity. Children were not the only ones playing video games, but teenagers and adults as well.

Which their competition capitalized on...

The Original Xbox, Microsoft's foray into the gaming industry was shaky, with no games to appeal to a Japanese audience, the biggest market for video games.

However, they had one tool the other lacked: an understanding of the online space.

As a PC company, they could create online functionality, and with the best graphics of the market at the time, they pioneered and cultivated online gaming.

And their game of choice?

Halo: Combat Evolved and later on, Halo 2.

They were first-person shooters meant for an older audience, exactly for the growing demographic at the time.