Cave Story GC: Cave Story for the Nintendo GameCube
Cave Story (Doukutsu Monogatari) running on the Nintendo GameCube, for one player or two on the same screen. An unofficial homebrew port, free to download as a GameCube ISO.
It is one 5.9 MB disc image. It runs from an SD-card loader (FlippyDrive, Swiss) or in the Dolphin emulator, and saves to the memory card.
What it is
- The whole freeware game in its original 320×240 look, with the English script.
- Built on doukutsu-rs, a rewrite of the Cave Story engine in Rust, with a new GameCube backend for graphics, controllers, sound and the memory card.
- Three difficulty levels: Easy, Normal, Hard.
- A 2-player mode: the second player joins on controller 2.
- Eleven characters to play as, chosen when you start a game: Quote, Masked Quote, Curly, Sue, Santa, Toroko, King, Chaco, Jack, Booster and Itoh.
- Saves on a GameCube memory card.
Changes from the original game
Two players
- Player 2 has their own weapons, ammunition, weapon levels, health and air, and their own status display, mirrored on the right of the screen.
- Enemies and bosses go after whichever player is nearer.
- The view follows both players. When they move apart it splits down the middle, one half each, and joins again when they meet. Arrows at the screen edge point to a player out of view.
- A player who runs out of health floats in a bubble towards their partner and is revived by a touch. Tapping jump bumps the bubble towards the partner. If both are down, the game is over.
- When one player takes a door, the other has three seconds, counted down over their head, to keep playing before both arrive in the next room.
- Either player can move messages on and answer questions.
- Players can bounce off each other's heads.
- Cutscenes show the characters the players chose.
Menus and controls
- Character choice in the new-game menu.
- GameCube buttons by default: A jump, Y shoot, L and R change weapon, X inventory, Z map, B back, Start pause. Controls can be rebound.
- Button prompts are drawn as GameCube buttons.
Drawn for this port
- Poses the game has no art for, so that every character can look up, look down and turn their back, and collapsed sprites for Santa and Jack.
- The disc banner above.
Optimizations
- Everything is drawn by the GameCube's graphics chip: each picture sheet is a texture and each sprite a quad, sent in batches.
- All game data is inside the program, compressed, and unpacked as it is needed. Nothing is read from the disc while playing, so there are no loading pauses from it.
- Text and other grey pictures are stored at a quarter of the memory of full-colour ones.
- The disc image is 5.9 MB instead of a full 1.4 GB GameCube disc: boot code, the program, and the banner.
Notices
- Unofficial. This is a fan-made port. It is not made, endorsed or supported by Studio Pixel, Nicalis, the doukutsu-rs developers or Nintendo.
- Testing. This build is tested in the Dolphin emulator only. It is a new engine for this port and has not yet been run on a real GameCube.
- Saves. Saves from earlier builds of Cave Story GC (the CSE2 engine) do not carry over.
- No warranty. Provided as is. Use it at your own risk, and keep a backup of your memory card.
- It needs a GameCube (or Wii) able to run homebrew, or an emulator. It does not help with, or contain, any commercial game.
Credits and licences
| Cave Story | The game, its story, graphics, music and sound are © 2004 Daisuke “Pixel” Amaya (Studio Pixel), released as freeware. No licence came with it; all rights remain with the author. The data in this build is from that freeware release. |
|---|---|
| English script | The fan translation by Aeon Genesis. |
| doukutsu-rs | The engine, including its built-in dialogue font. Copyright 2020 doukutsu-rs contributors, under the MIT licence (below). |
| Rust | The Rust standard library and the crates doukutsu-rs uses, each under the MIT and/or Apache 2.0 licence of its authors. |
| libogc, devkitPPC | The GameCube libraries and compiler from devkitPro. libogc is under the zlib licence. |
| This port | GameCube port, 2-player additions and added art by Armando Flores Montenegro, 2026. |
GameCube and Wii are trademarks of Nintendo. Cave Story is the work of Studio Pixel.
doukutsu-rs licence
MIT License Copyright 2020 doukutsu-rs contributors. Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
Download
Cave Story GC.iso (Google Drive)
6,193,152 bytes · doukutsu-rs build, 14 October 2026
SHA-256 b7983f36e961620ac7565c6cf9cd802ae921d9159bea146f8813c614889212ef