Marcel Winatschek

The VapeCube Is the Greatest GameCube Mod in History

Somewhere in America there is a hookah bar that looked at a black GameCube and thought: that could be so much better. The Nebula Vaping Lounge took Nintendo’s little lunch box—the black Jet Edition—hollowed it out, ran some tubes through it, and turned it into a fully functional hookah. They named it the VapeCube and they were not wrong to do so.

There’s a certain logic to it. The GameCube was always a slightly ridiculous piece of hardware—smaller than it needed to be, with a handle on the back like a purse, beloved precisely because it was weird and unpretentious. It sold poorly and aged badly in hardware terms, but everyone who had one remembers it with disproportionate affection. Converting one into a device for communal smoking isn’t disrespectful. It’s giving the thing a second life that suits its energy.

I have a stack of old hardware in a closet that I can’t bring myself to throw away and will apparently never actually use again. This is making me reconsider my options.