Phantasy Star Online Card Battle (GameCube – Prototype)

At E3 2002 Sega, in conjunction with Nintendo, showed a new exclusive Phantasy Star Online game which had a focus on card based battles, named PSO Card Battle. In the end the game evolved and was released as Phantasy Star Online Episode III: C.A.R.D. Revolution for Gamecube. However what is little known is that when unveiled for the first time at that trade show, the game was a premiere title for a new Nintendo pheriperal: a small LCD screen attached to the system.

At its developer roundtable that year Nintendo revealed Sega new project with a brief trailer and Yuji Naka explained how the idea for the game sprung from Nintendo’s idea to develop a portable screen for the GameCube and create the ability to link four GameCubes together for portable multiplayer gameplay. GameCube linkup feature and portability weren’t the only reasons to use the quirky device in fact Nintendo kept secret the most amusing feature behind the screen that is the ability to display stereoscopic images without requiring special glasses.

Only many years later, when the company was ready to launch its new autostereoscopic handheld system, Iwata confirmed the true nature of the the portable screen showed at E3 2002. So it’s more than likely that PSO Card Battle was one of the first 3D games for Gamecube, the genre is ideal to show off popup graphics, along with Luigi’s Mansion and probably Metroid Prime ( another game displayed on the little LCD screen in that faithful event ).

