“Super Mario Sunshine” (GC) – Sunnier Times in Iwata’s Era

The recent passing of Satoru Iwata on July 11 made me do some thinking about Nintendo as a company and the major impact it has had on my gaming life. It’s true that Iwata didn’t become the company’s president until 2002, and a lot of my fonder memories of the Big N come from the pre-GameCube era, yet I’ve always been a big fan of the company. Nintendo has always worked to innovate and bring new content to the market – sometimes this has worked, other times it’s been a huge bomb – but I’ve always loved seeing what they came up with next, and have always enjoyed Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Kid Icarus, and other first-party namestays.

For a while, I’d been meaning to put together a video showing off some of Super Mario Sunshine for the GameCube, rendered up to 2560×2112 with the Dolphin Emulator, to give an idea of what a very powerful HD remake for this game could look like. Iwata’s recent death felt like the perfect excuse to just pull the trigger on it and put an hour video together for you all to enjoy. Really, though, it was I who had the great pleasure of playing this. It was a game I played through way back when on the GameCube and I had a lot of fun with it, but I recall its more frustrating moments (and perhaps this recollection is why I didn’t return to it until now).

Before the meat of the video begins, I put a short “thank you” note to Iwata for all that he did for us as gamers. And, please stick around for the last 5 seconds that play after the credits – I think it’s a nice, brief little send-off.

I hope you enjoy this one, because I had a lot of fun putting it together. And thanks, Mr. Iwata, for everything you did for us!

Jessica Brown

Retro Games and Technology Editor. She'll beat pretty much every Mega Man game without breaking a sweat.