Triforce: When Sega Teamed Up With Nintendo And Namco
Image Source: CultureSlate
As the 2000s began, the console war between Sega and Nintendo had quietly come to a close, as the former discontinued its Dreamcast console in 2001. Instead, Sega would become a third-party developer, publishing its games on other consoles, including Nintendo’s. While Sega had been fighting Nintendo for control of the home console market, Sega and Namco were fighting a similar battle in the arcade market, though never with the same intensity as the console war. In 2002, what was once considered to be unthinkable had finally happened, Sega partnered with both of its rivals to release a new product.
The Triforce was an arcade board co-developed by Nintendo, Sega, and Namco. It was based on the hardware of the Nintendo GameCube, enabling easy ports between the two platforms. The name is an allusion to the Legend of Zelda series. Sega had also worked on a similar arcade board during that time, the Sega Chihiro, based on the Xbox home console. Though Nintendo had worked on arcade games before, they had largely exited the market after the release of the Punch Out! spinoff Arm Wrestling. As such, Namco and Sega handled the bulk of Software for the system, which included Nintendo IPs.
Three versions of the board were used, one by Namco and the rest by Sega. Sega’s boards made use of their patented GD-ROMs, previously used in the Sega Dreamcast, to store games. Namco’s boards made use of ROM cartridges to store their games. The board was developed in 2002, just one year after Sega discontinued the Dreamcast console, and featured a variety of games from Sega and Nintendo’s IPs; Namco made very little use of their IPs, but they were there. See below for a full list of games from both companies, both released and unreleased.
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Image Source: Sega Retro
Sega’s first release for the system was Virtua Striker 3 ver. 2003, a port of the Gamecube game, which itself was a port of the Sega NAOMI 2 original Virtua Striker 3. Other games released by Sega during this time include Gekitou Pro Yakyuu, Avalon no Kagi, and Virtua Striker 4, as well as updates to the latter two. The most famous game Sega released for the board is F-Zero AX. A companion to the Gamecube’s F-Zero GX, the two games could interact with each other through the Gamecube’s memory cards, with memory from AX unlocking content for GX.
Namco would largely release games featuring characters licensed from Nintendo, like Donkey Kong Jungle Fever and Donkey Kong Banana Kingdom. Their most famous games for the system were Mario Kart Arcade GP and its sequel. A spin-off of the Mario Kart games, these feature Mario characters racing with characters from Namco’s Pac-Man franchise, with Mametchi from Tamagotchi joining them in the sequel, as Namco had merged with Bandai the year prior. Another famous game that wasn’t released for the board was Star Fox, which was canceled for a variety of factors, though the Gamecube version was released as Star Fox Assault.
The Triforce appears to have had limited success in the arcades, if at all. Still, the board represents a unique time in the gaming industry when two of the biggest rivals of the gaming industry had come together. The boards can be pretty hard to find, though if you're lucky, one of the bigger cities should have an arcade with one of the games. A few of these games were ported to the Gamecube, but a homebrew application allows the games to be played on the Wii. With that being said, that was the Triforce arcade board.
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