A second collection of friends came from Suncoast, and it was through them that I wound up reviving a small sliver of my gaming life after several years going cold (or, at least, lukewarm) turkey. Hanging out with them, the frequent activity of choice was firing up one of the GameCube “Mario Party” titles (the series reached 7 installments during its time on the Cube) or the game that had turned out to be the system’s most enduring title: “Super Smash Bros. Melee,” an improvement on the original whose potency as a Nintendo nostalgia-injection was even effective on an abstainer like me. It was in this way that I discovered what had been happening to my old digital friends while I’d been away: the GameCube had failed to make a real impact in a market now dominated by a new Console War between Sony’s Playstation 2 and Microsoft’s Xbox (An American console?? What madness was this?), but it was thriving as the console of choice for party games like these.
I would come to learn that GameCubes were a common fixture of college dorm life. (I was going to a local state college and commuting from home to save money, so communal collegiate life was somewhat lost on me.) To a generation of younger gamers picking up the Cube habit from the college-age older siblings, Mario and company were becoming better known as the fighting roster of “Melee” than as heroes of their own games.