23 Years Later, We've Discovered An Amazing GameCube Easter Egg

Have you ever heard of GameCube’s squeaks? Perhaps we’re revealing some embarrassing gap in our collective knowledge at Kotaku in admitting we hadn’t, but we have now. And we’ve scientifically tested it. There’s a bizarre start-up Easter egg on the 2001 Nintendo console, and it makes it get all cute.

Yes, after 23 years, we’re bringing you all the hottest Nintendo console news, in reporting that with just a press of the controller’s Z button, a GameCube’s boot-up screen sound effects switch from the familiar xylophonic ditty, to something that sounds like a baby’s squeaky toy, complete with a child’s laughter.

Kotaku first encountered this phenomenon in a Tiktok video by Secret Castle Toys and Games—a Kentucky-based retro gaming store—posted just a few hours before the time of writing.

I’ll be honest: I thought it was a hoax. I could have Googled it, clearly, but for some reason I felt compelled to test it for myself. So I dug out my GameCube, and then remembered I haven’t a TV with a SCART socket since medieval times. Thankfully, in a bizarre twist, it turns out our pretty new 60" flatscreen has RCA sockets on the back! Who knew?! And so, in what I now believe will prove the start of a fantastic weekend, I’ve got one of the best consoles ever running on a stupidly big screen, and a 9-year-old to educate. But, before all that, I held down that Z button.

If you watch the video above, you’ll see why it feels like it should be fake. It could so easily have been the two people in the video goofing about with a baby toy off camera, and some creepy .wav of a kid’s laughter. But, nope, it’s confirmed!

We haven’t, admittedly, tested the second half of the video’s claims, with four controller’s plugged in at the same time, as it turns out I only own a single GC controller, despite being able to find multiples of everything else from Atari 2600 joysticks to Dreamcast’s house-sized gamepads.

Secret Castle’s Tiktok has almost half a million followers, so don’t expect to be able to impress too many people with this revelation for too long. Also, that store looks amazing. If you’re in Owensboro, Kentucky, you probably already know it.

Join us in five years time when we’ll bring you news of the Wii’s screenshot puzzle Easter egg.