Capcom’s Cube Games

I don’t know. I’ve never liked many of Capcoms’s games. I hated Viewtiful Joe, but loved Killer 7 and Resident Evil 4. And most of these games came out for the PS2, sadly enough.

The GameCube clearly had better third-party support than the N64, even though some critics might say otherwise. For one, Capcom’s support of the console was a lot better. Capcom’s producers became so enamored of Nintendo’s hardware that they promised five exclusive GameCube titles to be developed by the company, known collectively as the Capcom Five.

Unfortunately, things didn’t really go as planned. Despite apparently being in love with the GameCube, Capcom’s follow-through on these titles was practically nonexistent, albeit in different ways for each.

Just so we’re clear here, the Capcom Five– the five exclusive titles that were to be the GameCube’s salvation– were:

• Dead Phoenix
• Product Number 03
• Viewtiful Joe
• Resident Evil 4
• Killer7

Some of these probably sound familiar. All of them were to be developed by Capcom’s Production Studio 4, and Resident Evil head honcho Shinji Mikami was going to be personally involved with each one. If one looks closely at the details, you’ll noticed that out of these five games, one was never released, and three were ported to the PlayStation 2. In fact, only Product Number 03 remains GameCube-exclusive, and it is generally regarded as average at best.

So, if all these games were going to be pivotal to the GameCube’s success, then what exactly happened?

Well, for one, Dead Phoenix never happened at all. Originally intended to be a spiritual sequel to the arcade and NES classic Legendary Wings, in later development stages, the game appeared more to be a free-roaming version of Panzer Dragoon than anything else and was reportedly able to handle up to sixty enemies onscreen at once. The game was quietly killed off in early 2003 and hasn’t been heard from since, though it has never been officially canceled.

PN 03 was the first of the Five actually released, and set a bad precedent, meeting neither expected sales quotas nor acceptance with critics. The first of the Five made more of a ripple than a splash, and made Capcom more than a little wary.

Viewtiful Joe was praised for both its crisp cel-shaded graphics and its revitalization of 2D gaming. It offered an interesting alternative to its contemporaries and received widespread critical praise. However, sales, while respectable, were not incredible, and Capcom felt that a PS2 port might reach a wider audience, though it was released a full year after the GC original. It did, and Viewtiful Joe 2 was released on both systems simultaneously.

And then, there was Resident Evil 4. This was the big one, the one that would make owning a GameCube worth it for anyone. It had a big name, a great story, revamped gamepla, and graphics that put even top Xbox titles to shame. It was, in short, a system seller, and it was only going to be on the GameCube. Producer Shinji Mikami at one point said that he would cut off his own head if the game appeared on the PlayStation 2.

From all reports, Mikami’s head is still firmly attached between his shoulder blades, but the game did, in fact, appear on Sony’s console, despite all promises to the contrary. GameCube owners got to play Resident Evil 4 ten months before anyone else with the benefit of improved graphics and controls which were system-specific– meaning, they were made for the GC controller. But the truth is that a lot of the steam behind RE4’s GameCube launch was taken away knowing that Cube-less PS2 owners could just wait until Halloween to get their hands on the coveted title. Most of them didn’t care that the graphics would be markedly better on the GameCube or that the cinemas would be in real-time instead of prerendered; they only cared that they didn’t have to buy a GameCube to play the game. Despite being the best-selling GameCube game of 2005, Resident Evil 4 couldn’t make the GameCube the must-have system that an exclusive release would have provided.

With this blow firmly in mind, it was really no surprise that Killer7 would appear concurrently on both systems, although, in retrospect, it might as well not have. Grasshopper Studio’s title saw mediocre sales on both platforms, although the GC version outsold the PS2 port by nearly a three-to-one ratio.

Capcom did produce some GameCube exclusives not among the Capcom Five, including the Resident Evil remake, Resident Evil Zero and Mega Man Network Transmission, which was a side-scrolling companion to the Game Boy’s Battle Network games. The lukewarm Viewtiful Joe: Red Hot Rumble is also conceivably GameCube-exclusive, although the port to the PSP handheld questionably invalidates that description.

The fact remains, however, that a complete and truly exclusive set of five top-tier Capcom titles might well have changed the course of the current console generation. Even if it wouldn’t have made the GameCube the top-selling console in any of the regions, the system still could have ended up in more households as a result.

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