From Duck Hunt to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Nintendo is the undisputed king of the launch game. Two of its console debuts, Super Mario World and Super Mario 64, can lay claim to being among the greatest games ever made; Wii Sports is the fourth best-selling game of all time. So it is a delicious irony that the best launch game for the GameCube was made not by Nintendo but by its old arch-rival Sega - indeed, it was one of Sega's first releases as a third-party publisher. Revenge? Truce? Either way it was poignant.
The game was a port of a relatively obscure arcade title that you played with a banana joystick. It was also the creation of Toshihiro Nagoshi: a proponent of Sega's ecstatic, day-glo arcade aesthetic in the likes of Daytona USA before he remade himself as the inscrutable lounge-lizard behind the seedy and sentimental Yakuza series. The game was 2001's Super Monkey Ball.
In Super Monkey Ball, you guide a cartoon monkey in a ball - two-toned and slightly opaque, like a toy capsule - to a goal. The levels are abstract assemblages of platforms floating in space. There is one control: the analogue stick. The key thing to understand about Super Monkey Ball is that you do not control the monkey - or the ball - you control the level. You tilt the world this way and that to guide the monkey where you want it to go. It's like a surreal ball maze, or an inverted Marble Madness. There are banana pick-ups which increase your score, as does your completion time. There are difficult-to-reach warp gates that skip you forward several levels. And that is all there is to it.