A hint of Fisher-Price about it The new GameCube is displayed at a press preview in Tokyo in August 2001. A hint of Fisher-Price about it The new GameCube is displayed at a press preview in Tokyo in August 2001. The first console I ever bought, it was hyped as a threat to the PlayStation, then mocked as a flop. But now, as it marks its 25th anniversary, it's looked back on with misty-eyed reverence T his week marks the 25th anniversary of the Nintendo GameCube, the first console I ever bought with my own money. I vividly remember getting on the bus after school with a year's worth of savings safely zipped into the pocket of my bag and going to a branch of Currys, where I dumped a bunch of notes, coins and vouchers on the counter to collect my pre-order.

When people ask what my favourite video game of all time is and I tell them, they inevitably wrinkle their nose and say: "What, the one with all the sailing?" To many, that's all The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is: a 20-year-old GameCube release in which toon Link endlessly sails the vast sea on his trusty talking boat. In 2013, when the game was re-released on Wii U a decade after its debut, Nintendo took the criticisms on board (the talking boat) and added a "swift sail", allowing players to bypass hours of sluggish seafaring. The seafaring was the point. It has now been two decades since the original Wind Waker was released in Europe in May 2003 and it's time that landlubber critics accepted they were wrong.

Nintendo's designer Shigeru Miyamoto – one of gaming's earliest superstar creatives, and the mind behind Super Mario Bros, Legend of Zelda F-Zero and many, many other wonderfully inventive games – has turned 70. Miyamoto, who has had a hand in the development of most Nintendo games and consoles, is the most influential game designer alive. Nintendo is part of the creative marrow of the games industry: there is barely a game developer today who has not played, and been influenced by, Miyamoto. He has worked at Nintendo for 45 years and, since the 1990s, he has been the face of the company. Alongside the late, great former president Satoru Iwata, and the genius hardware designer and Game Boy architect Gunpei Yokoi, he laid the foundations for the company's enduring success, and helped established its fun-first approach to video games.

A race car driver in peril of being eliminated from Sunday's Xfinity 500 race attempted a bizarre maneuver he learned in a racing videogame that blasted him from 10th up to 5th place, and earning a spot in the championship race this weekend. Ross Chastain, 29, pulled a Hail Mary pass when he recalled the'wall ride' move he from NASCAR 2005 on Nintendo GameCube. The Chevrolet driver grabbed fifth gear and blasted off at 130 miles per hour, riding along the outer wall and passing the five cars ahead of him, specifically driver Denny Hamlin who was holding on to fifth place. Chastain told reporters in a post-race interview that he was not sure the move would work, but his brother had used the sneak attack to beat him when they played the game together as children and he took a chance that paid off. The Xfinity 500 race kicked off at Martinsville Speedway in Ridgeway, Virginia - a half-mile track built in 1947. Sunday's race marked the 75th anniversary of the season, which drew in a massive crowd to the stands.

Even before he leveled up to Nintendo's top U.S. job, Reggie Fils-Aimé knew how to make strategic moves. While interviewing in 2003 to join Nintendo and head its U.S. sales and marketing efforts, Fils-Aimé asked to meet with Satoru Iwata, who had recently been made Nintendo president. Fils-Aimé got the meeting and the job, but years later learned it was "a massive breach of protocol." The request almost "precluded me from even getting the job offer," Fils-Aimé told USA TODAY, "But I knew enough about the company that for me to be successful, I needed to have a strong relationship with Mr. Iwata. This conversation (they had) was supposed to be about 30 minutes and ended up being much longer than that. And as they say, the rest is history."

Once again, Nintendo has done the impossible. Going into 2018, the Nintendo Switch is on track to sell 20 million units in its first year. That means it has already outsold Nintendo's 4-year-old Wii U and is the fastest-selling U.S. console ever, taking the honors from Nintendo's Wii console a decade ago. With Switch, Nintendo is back on its game and eyeing a return to its glory days. In the last 20 years, Nintendo has fallen on its face as often as it's succeeded.

From the Game Boy to the Wii, Nintendo has created some of the world's most memorable games consoles. Some were big hits, but others have been big misses. Ahead of the release of its next games machine, the Nintendo Switch, these are the main devices that have brought players the likes of Super Mario, Tetris, Zelda and Pokemon. The Game & Watch was Nintendo's first breakout video game success. Its inspiration came when developer Gunpei Yokoi saw a bored businessman punch buttons on a calculator to amuse himself on a train, says Katharine Byrne, news editor at video games publication MCV.