Bite-Sized Game History: Looking Back at the GameCube, IGN Through the Years, and Doom Takes Over Twitter

With more than 50 years of history to pick from, a milestone birthday for some game or console happens nearly every day. But 2021 is a particularly big year for the fine folks at Nintendo. The consolemaker extinguished 25 candles for the Nintendo 64 over the Summer and blew out 20 for the GameCube just last month.

We’ll talk a bit about both of those anniversaries in this edition of Bite-Size Game History, as well as a new way to play Doom (which will officially turn 28 in a few short weeks).

You can find a lot of dedicated video game historians on Twitter, and in 280 characters or less, they always manage to unearth some amazing artifacts. Bite-Sized Game History aims to collect some of the best stuff I find on the social media platform.

Nintendo has been seen as the scrappy underdog in the video game space for a few decades now, but that perception really found its footing in 2001 with the launch of the GameCube. Even the most diehard Nintendo fans didn’t know what to make of the GameCube back then, as it was saddled with a proprietary minidisc drive and a really weird controller, and it was forced to compete against the twin behemoths that were the PS2 and the Xbox.

On top of all that, the public’s desire for more mature content (or what passed for mature content in video games in the early 2000s) pushed the GameCube even further into a hole. The sad truth is, very few people were interested in what Nintendo was doing between 2001 and 2006.

Things are different in 2021. You’ll find many players who marvel at the sheer number of great games that graced Nintendo’s “purple lunchbox,” but this great thread from Kat Bailey explores how it took a long time for our opinion of the GameCube to change:

Things started changing for Nintendo even before the GameCube, as anyone who owned a Nintendo 64 can tell you. The cartridge-based console was an even weirder delivery medium than the GameCube’s minidiscs, and the three-pronged controller still scares off players who weren’t around back then.

But the N64’s North American launch in 1996 is notable for another reason… it also ushered in the era of IGN.

Love them or hate them, IGN is one of the oldest sites devoted to video games still in operation today. Beginning life as N64.com, the site was co-founded by Peer Schneider, who recently took his followers on a nostalgic look back at IGN’s evolution (and their many many redesigns) in this thread:

While id Software’s Doom isn’t celebrating a milestone birthday this year, it’s still the gift that keeps on giving to modders. The seminal first person shooter has been ported to a wide variety of computers, consoles, and other devices over the years, and now it’s playable on Twitter… sort of.

Twitter users can “play” Doom by sending a sequence of commands to the @Tweet2Doom bot, which will input the actions into the game and render a video of the result.

Sometimes you get stuck on a wall and sometimes you complete E1M2 in 50 seconds:

Thanks to Kat Bailey, Peer Schneider, and Tweet2Doom for posting the great tweets found in this edition of Bite-Sized Game History, and be sure to follow me on Twitter to see more like them in the future.

Author: VGC | John

John Scalzo has been writing about video games since 2001, and he co-founded Warp Zoned in 2011. Growing out of his interest in game history, the launch of Video Game Canon followed in 2017.