In recent years, a gradual move away from backwards compatibility and physical editions has resulted in increasing concerns about the preservation of classic games. But even when old games are made available on current systems via remakes and remasters, often certain features are lost to time due to hardware quirks that don’t exist anymore.
Consider Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, a 2003 GameCube release that leaned heavily into its multiplayer functionality for a unique couch co-op experience that didn’t translate into its 2020 remaster. For many, losing such features might be easy enough to overlook if the game itself remains widely playable. But for one group of four friends, their love of Crystal Chronicles’ was inseparable from their experience playing together as teenagers. So when the 2020 remaster failed to recapture their youthful experience in full, they started a project that would let them play the original game in all its glory, together, across vast distances.
Thus was born the ‘Hypercube.’
The Hypercube is a device cobbled together by the content creator pair behind Bork Yeah Games, Steven Squitieri and William Rankeillor, alongside two of their friends. The four are longtime pals who, as teenagers, played Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles together on GameCube using its unique multiplayer functionality. Originally, Crystal Chronicles was playable by up to four individuals on a single GameCube by linking four GameBoy Advances to the console via a unique cable. The GBAs then served as second screens and menus for each player, and allowed them to progress their adventure as a group.
However, when Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Remastered Edition was released in 2020 for the Nintendo Switch, it modernized the multiplayer functions in a way that didn’t sit right with the group of friends. The remastered multiplayer only allowed a single player to progress, with up to three friends providing additional support in dungeons.
“This means that if you wanted to play the remastered edition with a static group of four, you would be required to play the same dungeon four times in a row before moving on to the next,” Squitieri explains.
“To many, ourselves included, the remastered edition was not worth playing since it had lost the soul of the original. This is particularly a shame since the remastered edition introduced some new content and challenges.
“However, we still yearned to play the game again. Unfortunately, we’re now situated hundreds of miles away so meeting up in person is quite the hassle. After many late-night Google searching sessions, frantic theories, and tests, the HyperCube was born.”
The Hypercube is a multitiered setup, consisting of four GameCubes, four GameBoy Players, a Wii running Crystal Chronicles, Parsec program, numerous adapters, and Open Broadcaster Software. With this setup, the group of friends managed to recreate the Crystal Chronicles multiplayer experience online.
Bork Yeah Games unveiled the Hypercube on its channel, and is planning a Crystal Chronicles stream on Saturday, August 12, in honor of the game’s 20th anniversary.
The Hypercube project is a fantastic example of the ingenuity and determination of players to keep enjoying the games they love, even as that becomes ever more challenging. But it also further highlights the struggles around game preservation. Crystal Chronicles is far from the only game with unique features that make it difficult to enjoy in its original form, and a growing number of retro games are becoming unobtainable entirely.
Passion projects like Hypercube continue to prove that older games are worth recapturing in their original, intended spirit.
