Platform: Nintendo GameCube

The GameCube's BIOS menu has slow, seemingly random ambient background music.

This background music, when sped up to sixteen times its normal speed, is actually the intro jingle for the Famicom Disk System, a Famicom add-on released by Nintendo in 1986.

There is a microscopic image of a Dolphin within a computer chip inside the GameCube, referencing the GameCube's codename during development.

There are two hidden alternate start-up sounds which can play after you power-up the console. The first one features a squeaking sound and a child's laughter, which plays when you have a controller in port 1 with the "Z" button hold down as you power-up. The second is of Japanese instruments played which activates via the same method but instead with four controllers.

The soft reflections used for the GameCube's startup animation and menu are the same texture file that Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask use for shiny items.

The working title for the GameCube was the Dolphin. As a result, many games from the GameCube era reference this, such as Super Mario Sunshine's setting being in the shape of a dolphin (the island is also named Isle Delfino; "Delfino" is Italian for "Dolphin") and Captain Olimar's ship in Pikmin being named the S.S. Dolphin. The GPU of the machine is named "Flipper", another reference to the console's codename.

Before it was released, a tech demo for the Gamecube was developed which featured an explorable version of Princess Peach's castle. This demo was later leaked online.

A tech demo developed by Shigeru Miyamoto over a number of years titled "Mario 128" was shown off at Nintendo's Spaceworld 2000 trade show and was designed to showcase the GameCube's ability to utilize multiple AIs. The demo featured 128 Marios dismantling a pseudo-8 bit Mario sprite composed of several blocks by picking up and carrying them away. This project had a tumultuous development cycle with little to no details coming out over the years until 2007 when he revealed at a GDC Keynote that some parts of the project were utilized in two games he produced in the 2000s. The general concept and some other parts of Mario 128 were developed into Pikmin after Miyamoto asked his team to create an entirely new game that would be nothing like a sequel to a Mario game. As for the second game, the ability to warp the terrain seen in the tech demo as well as "different sizes of spherical items" influenced the free-form gravity and ability to walk around entire planets in Super Mario Galaxy.

The GameCube's SDK has strings that reference all of the known N64 peripherals, including obscure ones such as the keyboard and mouse, suggesting that the GameCube was once planned to have support for Nintendo 64 peripherals.

When the GameCube was released, Nintendo targeted a 50 million sale goal by 2005, in order to compete with Sony and Microsoft. The consoles ended up only reaching 21.74 million units sold (estimate).

Two of Nintendo's biggest franchises, Mario and The Legend of Zelda, have water-centric games on the Gamecube. Some have speculated this is somehow related to the GameCube's early project name "Dolphin".

Nintendo ran a contest to help promote the upcoming release of the GameCube called "What would YOU do for a Nintendo GameCube?" where fans were picked to perform stunts that they'd chosen themselves to win a GameCube, Game Boy Advance, a games package, and USD. Some of the acts which were picked by entrants were to paint Nintendo logos with their tongue, juggling three consoles whilst dressed as a game character, painting and shaving themselves to be a Pikmin, and eating a GameCube made of spam, chocolate syrup, and cat food.

The GameCube is actually capable of rendering stereoscopic 3D. The GameCube was going to have an add-on that would attach to a TV and enable it to properly display 3D games. The first planned game for the add-on was Luigi's Mansion. The add-on was eventually cancelled as it would have cost more than the console itself.

The GameCube controller's design possibly originated from a prototype controller for the Virtual Boy. They were both purple, and had a similar shape.

The Panasonic Q was a version of the Nintendo GameCube that had the ability to play DVDs, audio CDs, and MP3s. The console ceased production after two years and only sold 100,000 units. One cause of the console's failure was that it was actually cheaper to buy a GameCube and a DVD Player separately.

There exists a GameCube Service Disk that was used by the Nintendo World Class Service to test and diagnose problems with the console and peripherals. It is assumed that once Nintendo retired the World Class Service, they took back the disks and destroyed them, which would explain why there are very few ever found.

This disk contains a fair amount of unused content, from unused sounds and unused test pictures to stereoscopic 3D test pictures.

Nintendo had once patented and developed a prototype motion controller for the GameCube; this controller went so far into development that game developer Factor 5 experimented with them for potential use in their launch titles.

The GameCube was the first Nintendo console to lack a launch title that starred Mario as the protagonist.

According to former Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi, the GameCube's cheap price was the result of Nintendo's perception that gamers cared only about the games themselves, and that game consoles were just pieces of hardware that were required to play the games. As a result, Nintendo decided to make the GameCube's price significantly lower than the competition's in order to make the former's titles more accessible to consumers.

The original slogan for the GameCube, "The Nintendo Difference," was meant to distinguish Nintendo from its competitors as an entertainment company first and foremost.

At Spaceworld 2000, it was announced that a version of the Gamecube Memory Card that would have expandable memory via an SD card would be released. However, this never came to fruition.

A similar device that allowed for the plugging in of an SD card into memory card slot was released alongside Dobutsu no Mori e+ in Japan, however this was only to take screenshots and did not allow for the saving of game data.