Quote Originally Posted by Melf View Post
I think it's because people are finally discovering what a wonderful little system it is. Back in the 8-bit era, most people missed out because of Nintendo's bullying of retailers and publishers. When you corner 90% of the market with a monopoly, it's hard for other machines to get an audience.
I can't fully blame Nintendo for Sega's failure. It wasn't Nintendo's fault that Sega decided to make most games use the most boring cover art possible, and use no cartridge art at all by using plain text labels(with plenty of spelling mistakes). Just going by the marketing of the system for store shelves, it looked stupid and boring. I originally thought Sega's original controllers were horrible because the cables were stuck out the right side of them, but since the Famicom had the cables the same way I won't blame Sega for that stupid decision, though it was still stupid to just copy Nintendo. Putting the pause button on the console instead of the controller was also a dumb move. North America did miss out on a bunch of good games, but we would have got most of them if the system sold better here.

Quote Originally Posted by Melf View Post
The GameCube wasn't the same situation because Nintendo's hold on the market was long gone by then. I guess most people didn't have room for a third machine, and now that it's cheap, they're finding out that the GC was a great console.
At the time having a system that was capable of playing DVDs was a big deal, Nintendo's system couldn't do that back then. The PS2 also had backwards compatibility with PS1 games which made it the best system to get at the time, that and the games had a more adult appeal compared to the kiddie image of the Gamecube. Now it doesn't matter if systems can play DVDs, players are pretty cheap. Playing PS1 games isn't that big a deal anymore either, people can use a PS3 to play them now. A few reasons why the Gamecube is more popular these days. Just a feeling of mine anyway.