Footage of an official LCD screen for the GameCube from E3 2002 has been discovered. The footage has been shared by Adam Doree on YouTube, a media executive who has been in the industry for over 25 years and has worked at IGN, Ziff Davis, Mashable, Segaweb, Gamerweb, and Kikizo (via Eurogamer, Go Nintendo).

Doree has dug through the archives to discover this never-before-seen footage of the GameCube's lost LCD Monitor from an E3 show over 20 years ago. He believes this footage is "probably the only surviving footage" of the LCD Monitor.

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The screen would have turned the GameCube into a little portable machine with a 4:3 ratio screen with a 320 x 420 resolution - not bad for a smallish screen on a little square box back in the early 2000s. The footage also shows the late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata showcasing the screen, describing it as a "high-quality screen" while showing off some Super Mario Sunshine — which was due to launch in just over a month in Japan and a few months later worldwide.

Iwata admits in the footage that Nintendo "haven't really decided at this point exactly how or in what form we're going to be releasing this or when it might happen", but that the team had also spoken to Sega's very own Yuji Naka about possibly making Phantasy Star Online "a portable game". If that had happened, we would've lost so many more hours in that universe.

Of course, the screen never released, though fans have made their own modded versions of it for the console — and we've wanted one ever since. Nintendo has mostly remained tight-lipped about this peripheral, but in an Iwata Asks interview with Hideki Konno, producer of Mario Kart and Nintendogs, over a decade ago, Konno briefly mentioned the console, which revealed that the screen had some secret 3D capabilities:

Konno: ... Some of the staff members around me were saying things like, "Today's 3D LCDs really look good!" I thought so, too. I had a connection with 3D games anyway. After the development of Luigi's Mansion for Nintendo GameCube was over, I was involved in the experiment of making a 3D version of it.

Iwata: Luigi's Mansion 3D. Unfortunately, we never released it.

Konno: Yeah. We tried fitting the Nintendo GameCube with a small, roughly four-inch, LCD that allowed you to enjoy Luigi's Mansion in glasses-free 3D.

Iwata: We showed that LCD as a reference exhibit at the 2002 E3, but kept the 3D aspect secret. I liked that, though.

So we nearly had Nintendo's take on 3D years before the 3DS — would we have had to wear funk red and blue glasses, too? Remember those things? Ahh...

Well, we'll have to settle with the fans incredible creations for our own mini LCD screens for our GameCubes. We would've loved to have seen the official thing hit the shelves, though. Huge thanks to Adam Doree for sharing the footage on YouTube and for preserving it for so long.

What do you think of the LCD screen for the GameCube? Would you have bought one if it ever came out? Let us know in the comments.

[source youtu.be]