Back in the early days of my collection, I found an old article by IGN that talked about a special WaveBird for Japan. The article lost some of its shape, it used to come with this badly cropped picture, which seemed to be from an official promotion.
A lot of questions came from it. I couldn’t figure out what was that black shape in the background, and I was not sure if there was more to the graphic. Also, the article didn’t cite its source, so I couldn’t find where it came from. It didn’t say any information that could lead to the source either. I tried to reverse image search for the original graphic but it led me nowhere.
I was really annoyed at IGN’s lack of care, and since Nintendo nuked the almost entirety of its old Club Nintendo Japan website, you can’t access it. However, if you know the specific url with its special key for separate pages, you can still see them.
A few months ago, a Twitter user in Japan posted a graphic showing different release dates for the GameCube controller. I jumped, there it was, the full graphic, my first time seeing it. I quickly sent him a message asking for the full picture, and he sent it to me. I reverse imaged on google, looked through a few website, and I found the link to the original promotion. On a blog of all places.
Here you can see the original promotion in its full glory: https://web.archive.org/web/20041204085011/https://www.nintendo.co.jp/club/gvsz/index.html
Here, the key was “gvsz”, which stands for “Gundam Vs Zeta”, roughly the title of the game in the promotion. There are still promotions for the other five Club Nintendo GameCube controllers to find, but I haven’t been able to get one of those keys yet.
Big thanks to “Aeras” for posting the source into your blog, I couldn’t have done it without you. And IGN jeebus you gave me so much trouble.
The GCC Library 