Smash was big, as was Mario Kart.
Our household dropped consoles after the NES because my brother was a PC guy, I got my first job at 13 so I could afford a GBA early 2002. At 13 you were allowed to deliver door to door advertisements.
Delivering about 200 of these packages in my own neighborhood I would make roughly 10 - 15 Euro a week depending on the weight of the ad package. Which was equal to one new video game a month if my parents allowed it and I hadn't spend the money elsewhere.
Then my bro bought a GameCube when Double Dash came out but he didn't like it much and switched to PS2, so I could buy his GameCube from him after like 3 months with my birthday money.
That meant I could finally start training at home to beat my friends at Smash Bros. and Soul Calibur II and the likes. One of my friends was 2 years older than me and had collected all the Nintendo games and consoles you could imagine.
We would go there at least once a week to play Smash Bros. and other games. Being a late adapter of the GameCube also meant that you had plenty of Players Choice titles to pick from.
2004 and 2005 were probably the peak of the GameCube era. At that point we had dozens of great and fun multiplayer games even stuff like Donkey Konga and Wario Ware, while we waited for the new Zelda that had blown everyone's mind.
Playing Resident Evil 4 at 16 felt like I was getting a sneak peek into the future of video games and how amazing it was going to be. We had another dude in our group who would drop by once every month when he didn't need to go to his youth church group to bring his Xbox with HALO and Forza. Even though HALO was fun I was already spoiled by playing Half Life and all its mods with my brother. Some of which he developed maps for. I still recall how happy he was when he reversed engineered the texture work of Max Payne 2 to use in The Specialists Mod basically taking the Source mod-scene to a higher level.
