Twenty years after its release, we discover a background on the GameCube and the fears of Nintendo.
The color of the GameCube is now iconic and catches the eye of anyone who knows the videogame industry well enough, but the choice of its chromatic guise was a cause for debate in Nintendo, twenty years ago. The vice president of marketing Perrin Kaplan remember that the US division of Nintendo wasn’t entirely sure about using that color at the time.
“We had suggested that purple was not the best to start with, but HQ persisted. We tried to propose silver and black, because no one in the US had ever used purple before.”
Kaplan explains his and the team’s concerns better: the problem was that “It seemed a more ‘feminine’ color. I think it didn’t give much the idea of masculine. I remember that at E3 we were all very nervous, we were afraid that the press would be heavy on us based only on the color”.
At the time, the president of Nintendo was Hiroshi Yamauchi, a man whose leadership was beyond question, and whose opinion of the American division was by no means high. Eventually, the GameCube was marketed in its iconic purple color, but later on too black and silver versions, as initially proposed by Kaplan, and other areas of the world even knew it in orange and white versions.
What color do you prefer your console to be? Most importantly, would you let (or be) put off by the color of the hardware?
Source: IGN
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