GameCube and I have the longest history of any old system. I was a child of the Wii generation, and our family system had native GameCube support. My family had just gotten a huge income boost around late 2011, after years of being brutalized from the 2008 financial crash (my dad had lost his job and had struggled to recover from the gap of time when he was unemployed), and we got sucked into Skylanders. The game, for which there’s a lot negative you can say about it and its business model, was BUILT for a family like us. In playing it, I started to question who Spyro was, and was FASCINATED when I heard that he had a whole game series beforehand that I had never heard of. One day in 2012, we were taken to a local used game store THAT IS STILL AROUND (I got Street Fighter Collection on the Saturn from that same store recently), and I saw a game for something called “GameCube”.
My dad looked it up, learned that all we needed to play the game was a GameCube controller, and we left the store that day with a GameCube game and a controller.
Unfortunately, the game in question was…
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Two years later, I had become more invested in the cube because I had become a Sonic fan, and my parents SOMEHOW had gotten CIB copies of Sonic Adventure 2 Battle and Sonic Heroes for me on the Christmas of 2013 (actually how???), and we were looking around our neighborhood at garage sales. We stumbled across this sale where a man was, no lie, selling GameCubes in SHOEBOXES for only $30. Whole console, plus a controller… $30. Nobody was taking, since anybody who may have been interested had a Wii, but I knew what the system was and I knew that I wanted one, even if just to play games upstairs on our Goodwill tube TV that we only had a Roku hooked up to until then. I begged and pleaded, used all my saved up allowance, and I took home that day a Platinum GameCube with a somewhat damaged controller.
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This is still my current GameCube. Still works after twelve years of me owning it, plenty of years of it being used by me as a kid, and who knows how many more years of use before it ended up in my hands at the age of 10.
I don’t own Spyro anymore. I liked that game as a kid, but as an adult I see how painfully programmed that piece of piffle is. Tried to replay it for old times sake a couple years ago and I just… I couldn’t do it.
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