[quote name='UncleBob']The reason you never saw 3rd party component cables (and the reason the official ones were so expensive from the start) is because, apparently (and someone who knows this stuff better than I can probably explain it better) there's some kind of decoder chipy-thing that is usually in the hardware itself (DVD player, XBox, etc) that, instead of putting in the actual GCN itself (and driving up the price of the GCN), they chose to put it in the cables (thus driving up the price of the cables)... Add that to the fact that (guestimate) 50%+ of GameCubes can't use them, it's not really something 3rd parties wanted to touch.[/quote]
My feeling about the component cabels is that if Nintendo wanted to push them, they would have been available at the stores long before they took out the component output port. If people would have had them to purchase, this feature would have been more widely used and maybe not been dropped. I've said it before, it was like they never really wanted anyone to be able to use the component port.