Legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto admits the commercial failure of the GameCube made him depressed...

Cast your minds back to the dark days of the GameCube era. For Nintendo fans, this was a time where their console of choice was but a niche in the gaming market, occupying two shop shelves in a GAME store compared to the PS2 and Xbox's six or seven.

Speaking to Japanese magazine Famitsu this week, Miyamoto spoke of his feelings during the era:

"There was an era when Nintendo was going in the direction of doing the same things other companies did. The more we competed with new companies entering the market, the more we started acting similar to them ... It was a dilemma in my mind."

He said the fact that Nintendo's games were failing to stand out despite the effort gone into their development made him "very sad":

"That was especially obvious during the GameCube era; Nintendo titles were hardly even discussed by the [non-gaming] general public back then."

Thus, Miyamoto explains, Nintendo decided to start again from scratch:

"In the end we didn't want a new game system, but a product that would make the entire world go crazy. And so [ex-Nintendo president Hiroshi] Yamauchi said 'two screens.' That turned the development lab upside down!"