The road to releasing any console is a long one. The twists and turns along the way can be many. Though most publishers are very quiet about development as it's happening, hindsight or the imminent launch of a platform can cause some of these fascinating stories to come to light. Nintendo's 3DS hits Japan in less than two months, and already some of its biggest names are beginning to discuss its lengthy creation. In fact, the 3DS's origins started much earlier than any of us might suspect... with the GameCube, a home console system first released in 2001.

A home console being a key component of a portable system release almost 10 years later? You'd better believe it. In a conversation with Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto and writer/designer Shigesato Itoi, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata revealed that the GameCube actually had "3D-compatible circuitry built in." In other words, the system could have displayed 3D tech if a certain accessory was purchased and installed. Itoi then prompted Iwata for an explanation as to why this expansion was never released."The liquid crystal for it was still expensive," Iwata said. "Simply put, Nintendo GameCube could display 3D images if you attached a special LCD, but that special liquid crystal was really expensive back then. We couldn't have done it without selling it for a price far above that of the Nintendo GameCube system, itself! We already had a game for it, though — Luigi's Mansion ."Can you imagine playing Luigi's Mansion in 3D without glasses? Miyamoto noted that the game would actually "jump out at you pretty nicely." Sadly the technology prevented the publisher from ever moving forward with its plans.Of course, Nintendo's 3D ambitions precede even the GameCube. Most of us are familiar with the Virtual Boy, an attempt to create a portable 3D system, albeit one that required a headset mounted to a stand. The system never took off, in part due to a limited amount of software but also because, in an era when graphics were becoming more and more sophisticated, the Virtual Boy's visuals were only in black and red.Miyamoto and Iwata also suggested one reason the Virtual Boy failed was because of perception. The portable was never meant to be seen as a full-fledged videogame system, but more as an elaborate electronic toy. The two noted that had the marketing message been different, perhaps consumer expectations would have been different.Flash forward eight years after the launch of the Virtual Boy to 2003, the year before the Nintendo DS launched. Nintendo's Game Boy Advance was the dominant handheld, and it had just seen a new edition hit the stands, called the Game Boy Advance SP. This clamshell design would yet again be a testing ground for Nintendo's 3D ambitions.Now working with a smaller LCD screen, Nintendo's attempts to control the price of a 3D system were approaching success. But they encountered another problem... "Making three-dimensional images that can be seen by the naked eye requires a special liquid crystal, so we tested it out by putting it in the Game Boy Advance SP," Iwata noted. "But the resolution of LCD was low then, so it didn't look that great and it never made it to being a product.""In order to make images look three-dimensional without special glasses, you display the images for the left and right eyes separately, and deliver each one separately. To do that you need high resolution and high-precision technology. We didn't have that to a sufficient degree back then, so the stereoscopic effect wasn't very sharp."It would, of course, be another eight years before Nintendo finally cracked the difficult challenge of finding the right technology at the right price to create the 3DS. When you pick up your system in the coming months, realize that the 3DS is not just another portable, but a descendant of the Virtual Boy, GameCube and the GBA SP. That's quite a bit of ancestry.