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Why was purple the default console color for the Game Boy Color/Game Boy Advance/GameCube?
- Thread starter Deleted member 43084
- Start date
I like purple, but there is a big difference.
Riiiiiiight....
It's an awesome colour IMO and stood out as something unique against the competition at the time.
Make sure you share some pictures, please. Interested to see how this looks.
Love this colour even though I don't have it.Yeah... those pictures don't sway me in the least. I'd rather take a spice orange GCN any day of the week.
I do need to bust out some pics of my custom yellow GameCube! I had it done by someone via Etsy, I think, a good few years ago now. I've got it packed away in storage but I'm sure I have some pictures somewhere. Will have a dig.
They considered blue for boys and red for girls, found both too extreme and gendered, and went for the middle road.
I'm not making this up, it's how they decided the default color for the GBC should be purple and I guess they liked it enough to keep it for GBA and GC.
I'm not making this up, it's how they decided the default color for the GBC should be purple and I guess they liked it enough to keep it for GBA and GC.
This is correct, but to be fair it doesn't make sense in context as this is clearly not the corporate image that Nintendo was going for at all.
Lots of Sony Xperias are purple. It's an unusual consumer product color that makes it stand out and it looks cool on some things
For the Gamecube it was an exceptionally dumb decision for the western market. During the 6th generation of consoles the largest demographic of gamers were adolescents males who were born in the 80's and had grown up with gaming, and they didn't want to personally identify with a kiddy console. Nintendo just completely lost touch with this demographic during that era, and I wish I knew definitively what happened. I suspect Yamauchi got too old, and Miyamoto the game designer had way too much input in Nintendo's larger decision making.
Maybe because they've often used Red / Blue / Green / Yellow for buttons on their controllers, they decided to use purple so as not to be confusing(?) for their consoles? I mean, they could've gone with a neutral, but perhaps they wanted a color, but one that didn't clash with other aspects of their previous hardware designs.
Maybe they saw the NA Super Nintendo and thought "hey, purple is nice, let's do that!" I dunno, man.
Maybe they saw the NA Super Nintendo and thought "hey, purple is nice, let's do that!" I dunno, man.
I know people will go with the "I like purple" but from a marketing POV it was a disastrous move. You might as well put in giant neon colors above it "Baby's First Console".
Yeah the design in retrospect can be seen a neat, but for the time, it was a horrible move especially going into an era where Grand Theft Auto would take off and Nintendo was trying to push Resident Evil exclusivity hard.
As an accent color for the SNES was one thing (and that was purposefully chosen to tone down the colored buttons of the Super Famicom), but full blown purple for the entire console ... even the Wii would've had trouble taking off if it was bright, shiny purple plastic as the primary marketed look.
It was hard enough at that time dealing with a PS2 that already had a 12-18 month head start, but to throw in self inflicted errors like that ... just made it impossible for the GameCube to compete. It's cold and cruel market, it's not an easy one and when you shoot yourself in the foot on top of competitors piling on top of you ... it's not a good combo.
Save the creativity for the games, the NES and SNES did just fine with "boring" designs.
Yeah the design in retrospect can be seen a neat, but for the time, it was a horrible move especially going into an era where Grand Theft Auto would take off and Nintendo was trying to push Resident Evil exclusivity hard.
As an accent color for the SNES was one thing (and that was purposefully chosen to tone down the colored buttons of the Super Famicom), but full blown purple for the entire console ... even the Wii would've had trouble taking off if it was bright, shiny purple plastic as the primary marketed look.
It was hard enough at that time dealing with a PS2 that already had a 12-18 month head start, but to throw in self inflicted errors like that ... just made it impossible for the GameCube to compete. It's cold and cruel market, it's not an easy one and when you shoot yourself in the foot on top of competitors piling on top of you ... it's not a good combo.
Save the creativity for the games, the NES and SNES did just fine with "boring" designs.
I loved that it was purple when I was a kid. Now though, I'd be concerned about how i'd tie it into the living room colour scheme.
It beats the usual grey/white/black for me - nothing wrong with electronics in that colour, but the purple stood out really well. Definitely not 'lame'.
Nothing beats orange GC though.
Nothing beats orange GC though.
Purple is fun. It's youthful. It's also a color that could be appealing to girls without turning off boys.
Dunno, I really liked it when it first came out. Was getting sick of black/grey hardware and the indigo blue was a nice change. Many guys in my circle felt super insecure about it being that color and I always found it weird. Like are you going to stare at the console for weeks or are you gonna play the games instead. It's purple, it's cool, play some smash.
While I don't have anything against purple, a nice blue/green/red/yellow would have been nicer to the eyes and have a more lasting impact on me, but would have made the hardware look more childish maybe ?
Typing this I realize that's probably the reason they chose purple. Colored makes it easier to distinguish amidst competitors (sticking to classic black or white consoles) without being too reminiscent of colorful children toys (blue/green/red/yellow...).
Typing this I realize that's probably the reason they chose purple. Colored makes it easier to distinguish amidst competitors (sticking to classic black or white consoles) without being too reminiscent of colorful children toys (blue/green/red/yellow...).
I like that shade of purple. I got the purple gamecube (now covered in ultra rad twilight princess decals).
Trying to figure out which of these words describe Taco Bell. Maybe the content of the food falls under mystery.
I was never into the purple either. Kiwi GBC, Black GCN. GBA was GLACIER aka transparent purple but I didn't have a lot of options.
I always wanted the lime green (dunno the official name) GBC but because I had the yellow OG GB I wasn't allowed one. I did eventually get a white GBA one Christmas though, fucking loved that thing.
Purple is a great color that's easy on the eyes, different from the black that Xbox and PS2 were using, and is more memorable because it was so different.
It absolutely does fit in with their image. Their whole shtick was (and still is) The Nintendo Difference.
NCL chose purple because it stands out as unique, creative, interesting and inviting. All qualities that absolutely fit Nintendo's MO to a tee.
Of note though is the fact that NOA really worked hard to downplay the Purple GCN in favour of the Black GCN, mostly likely to try and avoid the Kiddie Purple Lunchbox image... it didn't work lol.
Seconding with a lot of other people in this thread, I kind of hoped that the switch would come out with a purple official colour scheme as well!
