Thanks to a known Nintendo enthusiast on Twitter, we now know that when Nintendo released the famous Gamecube, they almost made it a portable console!
Meaning that if you had one you could lift it up and take it with you, dock it and connect it to the TV. Sound familiar? It should because that’s pretty much what the switch is, only the Gamecube might have lacked the screen the concept is the same.
Not only did they reveal that the GameCube would have been portable, but they also found that there was going to be a Wii start up disc that would have been used with store demo Wii’s. They may have just not bothered making one because the Wii was already such a huge hit of a console and figured if you wanted to buy one you would already have it. The only people who would have benefited from the start up disc would have been those who waited to buy the store console, and by that point it would have been so played with the power being on 24/7 it would have been a turn off to buy. They likely just had stores send the console back for refurbishment at the end of it’s life.
It’s also been revealed that the Wii remotes were originally intended for the GameCube! That’s a little mind blowing when you think about the games that came with the console. Those games would have been played way differently. But then again they also eventually released them for the Wii in the Wii store so perhaps that was because it was already written in the code how to interact with the controllers.
Now that we know that it was intended to be portable it makes a lot more sense that it had that handle on the back. Of course if you were carting it around from one place to another anyway you were just ahead of the game.