Nintendo verifies GameCube housing at E3 [update 1]

And we thought the GameCube wasn't at E3 ...

Thanks in part to a broken Wii title and a quick attendee, pictures have been floating around the internet that prove the Wii consoles we were seeing were just displays, and that all of the demos were being run in GameCubes. We've received numerous e-mails about the wire-cluttered image to the right of this post, but now Nintendo of America has come out and confirmed that, in fact, the Wii games were being played through GameCubes -- or, more accurately, Wii hardware embedded in a GameCube, "made specifically for the E3 show and is not the final mass-production version."

NOA's PR Manager Matt Atwood noted that "for some of the games that you've seen, the focus for them was not graphics at all," hinting that a few of the titles may seen graphical improvements. Atwood stated that the system specs are still being finalized, but that their E3 showing was "very indicative of the experience Wii will offer." Don't get your hopes up for vast technical improvements.

To be fair, the PlayStation 3's were being run off dev kits this year, and last year's Xbox 360 games were being played on Apple G5 computers.

[Thanks, kukyfrope and Jeremy]

[update 1: got a little "e"-xcited and added an extra letter to Jeremy's name -- fixed]