The British games industry had prospered during its years of near isolation, but the protection that isolation offered also had a flip side: British developers had been commercially and creatively dislocated from foreign markets. British and American home gaming in particular grew separately, and along different paths. America, the world’s biggest games market, always had a closer relationship with home games consoles – dedicated devices in which the games load instantly from chunky plastic cartridges. Although they were on sale around the world, they were more popular, for longer, in the United States. And so, for a while, the markets on either side of the Atlantic used different machines, and were slightly out of phase. While Britons were starting to play games on the ZX Spectrum, American children were already tiring of their Atari 2600s and Intellivisions.
The consoles had been the foundation of the American games industry, but the software was managed badly. Between poor-quality games forced upon retailers, and a gold rush of independent publishers, the value fell out of the market, and by 1983 sellers were discounting games to a small fraction of their suggested price. There is a legend, repeated often and with a grain of truth, that Atari commissioned an E.T. game at hectically short notice for a Christmas 1982 release, and manufactured more copies than could possibly be sold. Unwilling to release a tide of cheap titles onto a failing market, the company eventually buried millions of unsold cartridges, including E.T., in a New Mexico landfill.
Consoles never disappeared from the world’s second biggest games market, though. From 1983, both the hardware and the games in Japan had been dominated by the manufacturer Nintendo. They had found legal and technological ruses to keep control over their console’s software, protecting the value of both the games and the company. But compared to the free-wheeling businesses fostered by home computing, console games looked very controlled, even closed. If the American market was out of step with British developers, Nintendo’s grip on the console hardware looked completely impenetrable.
As Codemasters grew during the eighties, David Darling became a regular visitor to trade shows in the US, and spotted that while American developers were writing games for the Amiga and Atari ST, they weren’t reflecting the buying trends of the public. ‘We noticed this because when we used to go to CES shows in America,’ he recalls, ‘even when you’re driving down the street you would see NES games at gas stations – it had taken over the culture.’
Consoles are technologically similar to computers, but they are very different as a business. Computer makers might hope that a thriving games market for their machine will boost sales, but they have no financial interest in or control over it – their profit is made from their hardware, and they compete to produce the best machine for a price consumers will pay. But the console business revolves around controlling the software market. The manufacturers – Nintendo, Sega and later Sony and Microsoft – charge the publishers a licence fee to produce games for their machine, while the hardware itself is often sold below the cost of production. The console manufacturers have many of the same concerns as the games-makers – they want a single, identical platform in as many homes as possible, supporting a long-lasting, high-margin market in their games. But they also act as a gatekeeper for those games: only the manufacturers can distribute the specialist equipment required to develop new titles, they can withhold a license, force the production of a certain number of units at the publisher’s cost, and so on. Developers might enjoy very productive relationships with the console makers, but it would always be on the manufacturers’ terms.
A console is a pure consumer games product. It has a controller rather than a keyboard, there’s no way for players to write programs for it and no way to distribute them if they could. The owner’s only job is to buy and play games – whatever their virtues, bedroom coding on a console is impossible.
In the United States in the late eighties, most developers believed that consoles’ time had passed. ‘Atari was a bit like Imagine – they became huge and then they collapsed,’ says Darling. ‘American retailers had written off games consoles. They thought home computers had taken over.’ This apparent decline certainly suited games-makers. Coding for consoles needed pricey development kits, and the high cost of manufacturing cartridges could break a company. Consoles were toxic, and the legendary Atari landfill appeared to have swallowed that industry forever.
Yet by the end of the decade, the Nintendo Entertainment System, a cartridge-based console, was the dominant gaming platform in North America. At under a hundred dollars, Nintendo had found a price point that worked for a mass market, and it used a common 6502 processor paired with a graphics chip designed for fast, scrolling images. It also devised legal as well as technological protections to ensure that only its cartridges could be used on its console. Nintendo had found an apparently watertight way to keep control of its software market.
So the company could be sure that there would be no flood of poor titles or unlicensed games, while the price captured a market missed by the more expensive Amiga and Atari ST. Nintendo brought over a library of games from Japan, with the highlight – a blissfully playable and fluid platformer called Super Mario Bros. – packed in with every console. The formula worked: while plenty of US developers focused on the 16-bit computers, the NES console was winning. As David Darling put it, ‘Nintendo had caught everybody with their pants down.’
‘When you’ve gone through all these Dragon 32s and BBCs and VIC-20s and Commodore 64s,’ he says, ‘the whole time you’re trying to work out what the next big platform is going to be.’ By the late eighties, Codemasters’ business had been shaped to suit the home computers most popular in Britain. The UK was certainly the company’s biggest market, but it was selling well into France and Germany and around Europe. The US market, though, was far harder to prise open. And while Codemasters had been inching up its prices – £1.99 became £2.99, 16-bit games sold for a fiver – it was firmly a budget label, with all the pressure on margins that that brought. A different platform might create a more robust business, but the choice was delicate: ‘It’s like walking across a lily pond, working out where the next lily is, not stepping on one like the Atari Jaguar that’s going to collapse,’ says Darling. Nintendo offered a piracy-resistant, high-margin market that stood every chance of becoming embedded throughout the US. ‘So we worked out that the NES was the next platform.’
Returning from the Computer Entertainment Show in Las Vegas, David Darling, his brother Richard and their colleague Ted Carron brainstormed the games they could make to exploit the NES. David Darling says they were looking for a mass-market product, one that would ‘appeal to everybody’, with a universality of options. ‘We were thinking about having a switch in the cartridge, to make your character bigger or give him extra lives,’ says David Darling. ‘We were thinking about ways to modify our game.’
As the session drew on, they wondered if it would be possible to apply this idea to other games. Super Mario Bros. and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles both had a giant presence in the United States – what if Codemasters offered a product that included the switch for those games, which players already had on their shelves? If the company could sell a device – Darling and the team called it a Game Genie – that could change every game the player owned, making them harder or easier, adding twists and cheats, then Codemasters wouldn’t need to create and market its own character or an intellectual property. Everyone with a machine would want the gadget for their own favourite title.
At first it seemed impossible. The game software was held in a fixed form in the cartridge chips, and the consoles had fierce technological and legal guards to shield them against unauthorised use. Nintendo’s system was in the form of a patented electronic ‘lock and key’, with a connecting chip in the console and cartridge. ‘You could quite easily copy the key chip,’ says Darling, ‘but if you did, then when the kid put the game in the console, he was putting all of the elements of the patent together. So he was replicating the patent, and because you were the supplier, you would be a contributory infringer.’ It was a tortuous defence, but legally effective. Nintendo had firm control over producers of its games and no one could adapt or sell unlicensed games ‘without Nintendo jumping on their head’.
But Codemasters found an elegant evasion. Its device sat in the cartridge slot on the top of the machine, and itself had a slot for an original game. The piggybacked games passed all of their data through the Game Genie, which could adjust it as the player wanted using a series of codes, arduously but satisfyingly entered by the gamer according to a book of cheats that shipped with the gadget. And of course, the original key chip was still there, in the game cartridge. ‘We got around it because it sat in the middle,’ says Darling. ‘The console wouldn’t even know that the Game Genie was there.’
It took six months to complete the device’s design. The NES had a presence in the UK, but it arrived after cheap home computers had become established, and its foothold was small. The real NES market had always been the US, and 1990 was set to be its peak year, with sales of fifteen million games. Codemasters sought a licensee for the Game Genie, and found a large, but not dominant, toy manufacturer called Lewis Galoob Toys Inc.
Despite their approaches, Nintendo refused to license the Game Genie for the NES, but Codemasters and Lewis Galoob Toys were both confident that they didn’t need permission so production was announced in May 1990. And Nintendo tacitly acknowledged that the device didn’t trigger the patent infringement defence, as Codemasters had calculated, because when it did sue Lewis Galoob Toys, it was for something else entirely.
The Game Genie, Nintendo argued, created a ‘derivative work’ of its games. US law gives copyright holders control over sequels and adaptations of their work, and a version of Super Mario Bros. in which the jumping height had been doubled was, Nintendo argued, no different. Galoob pre-empted Nintendo’s first salvo by applying for an order confirming that it had not violated copyright, but was swiftly hit by an injunction: the company couldn’t sell the device throughout the United States, while Nintendo was held to a bond to cover lost sales. At first this was for $100,000, but Galoob argued that it had pre-orders for more than half a million Game Genies, and might have expected millions more. The bond was increased to $15 million.
The injunction had demolished Codemasters’ US plans, but the Game Genie went on sale in Canada, where it was hugely successful; there was every reason to challenge Nintendo in the United States. The lawsuit was very time-consuming, dominating the management attention of Codemasters, but Darling, sensing victory, relished the conflict. ‘We were quite young and enthusiastic, and confident,’ he says. ‘We got heavily into talking to lawyers. We’d go and see their lawyers, we’d see our lawyers, we’d go to hotels in Canada and get all three sets of lawyers together.’
Codemasters, still publishing games but now with giant sums at stake, edged ever closer to jeopardising its business. For a year, Nintendo doggedly blocked the Game Genie, escalating the case until it had reached the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, as high as such a dispute was ever likely to go. ‘We were fully aware of all the legal arguments, and we were quite confident that we’d win,’ says Darling. ‘But it definitely stretched the company.’
When the case came to court, Galoob and Codemasters won convincingly. The presiding Judge, Fern M Smith, ruled that there was no fixed derivative work. Using the Game Genie, the court said, was no different to skipping portions of a book, or fast-forwarding through a video – your experience might have changed, but the original product hasn’t. ‘It was a bit of a tenuous argument,’ says Darling about Nintendo’s case. ‘The judge said “No, it’s not true, because when you unplug it, it hasn’t actually changed the game.” For the copyright to exist it needs to be fixed. And it’s not fixed.’
Using Canadian sales as a guide, the court decided that the injunction had cost Lewis Galoob Toys 1.6 million sales, and when multiplied by the profit per unit, lost earnings were found to be slightly higher than the amount held for the injunction bond. Over Nintendo’s protests, the entire $15 million was paid directly to Galoob.
With the injunction lifted the pent-up demand for the Game Genie hit like a tsunami. ‘It had had so much publicity because Nintendo were trying to squash it,’ says Darling. ‘All the magazines were interested, saying: “Why are you trying to stop it – it sounds like good fun.” So when they eventually won the court case they sold millions and millions of them. I think it sold 140 million dollars at retail.’
The publicity from the injunction acted like an extra stretch on a loaded catapult, and in 1991, the Game Genie was the US’s fifth bestselling toy. Codemasters’ duel with an industry giant hadn’t simply enriched it; it was a step-change in the size of the company, and gave it access to the console market. ‘We were able to use the money to do Sega Mega Drive games,’ Darling says. ‘We could get into consoles fully. It enabled us to ramp up our development.’
The victory had also enhanced their credibility, and when Galoob approached Nintendo’s rival Sega about an equivalent cartridge for its Mega Drive console, the company was welcomed into talks and granted a licence. Codemasters leveraged its success to become a truly global publisher, finding developers from around the world. It had the funds to build development teams, acquisition departments and marketing muscle.
Nintendo might be forgiven for feeling taunted by Codemasters for a while. The UK company’s Canadian licensee, Camerica, used a Taiwanese manufacturer that came up with a way of fooling the lock-chip in Nintendo’s consoles with a series of pulses. ‘When the chip said “Is there a key there?” the cartridge would just shout so loud in its face it would get confused,’ Darling explains. Codemasters was able to publish NES games despite having obliterated its relationship with the console’s maker, and one of its releases, Micro Machines, took its place among the platform’s bestsellers without earning Nintendo a cent. To compound the insult, the Micro Machines brand had started as a line of toy cars, produced by Lewis Galoob Toys.
Codemasters then took the idea even further. The NES design required that some hardware, such as the key chip and a small amount of memory, had to be reproduced in every single cartridge, and this burden pushed the price up. Codemasters realised that it could use its lock-smashing technology to create its own captive and cut-price games market.
Through Camerica, Codemasters issued a device called the Aladdin. It included the memory usually supplied in every cartridge, along with the circuitry for fooling the lock chip. Like the Game Genie, the Aladdin sat between the console and the game, but instead of a slot to insert Nintendo cartridges, it used its own unique media, much smaller and sold only by Codemasters, which the company called ‘Compact Cartridges’. Codemasters released half a dozen cartridges for its system, including Dizzy and Robin Hood titles from the Oliver Twins, all at a comfortably lower price than the Nintendo-endorsed games. Not only was there less hardware in each cartridge, there was no licence to pay. The Game Genie might have compromised the integrity of Nintendo’s games, but the Aladdin was a direct assault on the Japanese company’s business model. It literally piggybacked onto the console that Nintendo had sold as a loss leader.
The Aladdin caught the dying tail of the NES lifecycle, and after its launch titles it faded quickly. But by then Codemasters was a global publisher with popular franchises, and Nintendo was a platform owner that needed to attract the best titles. And while there had been money in prising open gaps in Nintendo’s legal and technological protections, Codemasters’ real business was making and selling games. The successor to the NES, the Super Nintendo, reset the board for both companies.
Darling flew to Seattle with the sales director of Codemasters, and met the chairman of Nintendo in the US, Howard Lincoln. The discussions went surprisingly well. ‘We said that it’s water under the bridge,’ Darling recalls. ‘Let’s just get on with other things.’ And they negotiated a licence.
The NES console was on the boundary between a simple computer and a dedicated games machine. It had a widely known processor but only a tiny sliver of memory and it was the developer’s job to conjure up ways around this, or if necessary provide more chips in the cartridge. Where most computers used a ‘bitmap’ – a minute grid of individual screen pixels – for their graphics, the NES used a specialist ‘character map’: it could display pictures built from tiles and slide them about at a decent speed, and simply couldn’t draw anything else. And, character graphics aside, it was very slow.
Around the world, developers puzzled over the best way to make use of this limited system. In Britain, the head of the innovative developer Argonaut had a scheme that would surprise anyone who didn’t know him. ‘I think it was my idea,’ says Jez San, ‘that you could do 3D on an 8-bit games console.’
Rendering 3D graphics would still be a challenge on fast, friendly systems. On top of the tortuous work of streamlining the maths for rotation and plotting, complex lines and shapes have to be rendered a pixel at a time onto the screen. Even with all the puzzles solved, a bitmap is essential. Nintendo had designed the NES with entirely different games in mind – it wasn’t simply that 3D wasn’t considered, it had been actively locked out.
There is a common characteristic amongst coders: they’re energised by challenges, competitively striving to defeat the seemingly unconquerable. Argonaut’s team, hand-picked by a veteran bedroom coder, had this quality in abundance. So they made the NES show 3D graphics.
It was almost an aesthetic project, a demonstration of their skill, and it’s hard to miss San’s pride as he remembers the moment. ‘It was an impossibility, and yet we did it. We reverse engineered the machine and we did it.’
The Argonaut team were resourceful and mercurial. When they heard that Nintendo would be releasing a handheld console called the Game Boy, they guessed at its specifications, wrote an ‘emulator’ which allowed them to simulate their hypothetical machine, and developed a game on it. They had followed rumours of the hardware during its development, and their guesses turned out to be fairly accurate. ‘So when the Game Boy came out, we had a game running on it in a day,’ San says.
Once again, Nintendo had designed the machine to lock out unlicensed cartridges, but this time part of its mechanism used conventional copyright law. When a game was slotted into the back of a Game Boy, it read a Nintendo logo from the cartridge and dropped it from the top of the screen. If it couldn’t be found, the console rejected the game, and if it was there without a licence, Nintendo could sue the game-maker for breaching its trademark. It elegantly shifted the defence from a patent to copyright infringement, and the ‘key’ from costly hardware to a software graphic.
Within days, Argonaut had beaten it. ‘I had this idea that with one resistor and one capacitor, which cost less than a cent, I could defeat that protection,’ San says. These new components switched the console’s attention at a vital moment. It read and acknowledged the word ‘Nintendo’ and then, just before loading the graphic for the opening animation, swivelled its gaze onto Argonaut’s logo. ‘They made a mistake in their code,’ San explains, ‘that it read the logo a second time to display it on the screen, so we took advantage of that. Argonaut dropped down, and it still booted.’
At the 1989 CES trade show in Chicago, San showed his trick to Nintendo. He had written some hit games and ran a company, but he was still only one of a crowd of developers, and in his early twenties, amongst the youngest. The man he showed it to ran Nintendo in the US – he was employee number five in the company. ‘I cheekily showed them the Game Boy with the word Argonaut dropping down, and it had a 3D game running,’ San recalls. ‘Just to say, “Hey, look what geniuses we are, that we could defeat your protection and build a game on your machine, without any instructions from you on how to do it.”’ Jones laughed, and agreed that it was cool.
But he remembered Jez San. On his return to the UK, San received a call from Tony Harman from Nintendo UK. The head office wanted to speak to him; there was a flight leaving for Japan the following day. They would pay, but he should be on it.
San agreed. He flew to Kyoto, and found that his meeting was with the then president of Nintendo, Hiroshi Yamauchi. Yamauchi was rarely seen but had an intimidating reputation, leading a company that was notoriously protective and controlling. ‘He’s the old man, the godfather,’ says San. ‘He’s very old and not very mobile, and doesn’t speak a word of English.’ San was led to his room, ‘which was boiling hot, I was sweating like a pig,’ and Yamauchi spoke to him through a translator.
‘We want your 3D technology. How much do you want?’ Yamauchi asked.
‘And at this point,’ says San, ‘I had no idea what I was doing.’
He didn’t have a business agent with him, or any warning that a deal would be offered. He certainly didn’t know how to value his technology. ‘I thought of the biggest number I could possibly think of, and I said two million dollars. And he said fine.’
It would be natural to wonder, as San has, how much higher that number could have been. Should he have asked for ten million, or a hundred million? But the deal had already been closed. When he returned to his hotel room, his brother called to ask him if he knew why two million dollars had arrived in Argonaut’s account.
Nintendo has sometimes been portrayed as distant, even secretive, with high cultural and legal barriers confronting outsiders wanting to learn more about it. But this doesn’t wholly fit a company that would pay a stranger a small fortune without a contract. As San observes, ‘this is the Japanese way – they either trust you or they don’t’. There is another way to think of Nintendo. Perhaps more than any other games platform maker, it is a company centred on intellectual property. It has brands, Mario and Zelda in particular, that it protects jealously and promotes ahead of other software. From its entry to the market onwards, it has cared more about controlling the content than impressing with hardware – its machines are often the least powerful of their generation. The battles it fights most fiercely are those where its brands, or its control over its intellectual property, are threatened. Nintendo’s most public face to western audiences during the nineties – US Chairman Howard Lincoln – didn’t emerge from gaming, but was the company’s attorney in its defining copyright lawsuits.
Nintendo embraced Argonaut. San’s team had techniques to share, and were taken deep into the heart of the Japanese company, physically installed in the Kyoto offices and treated like Nintendo employees. And they worked directly with the most important designers in the company, including Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario and Zelda and almost certainly the most respected games-maker in the world. ‘I think Nintendo had had Japanese companies doing that,’ says San, ‘but we were the only western company ever allowed to work directly with Miyamoto-san.’
San had signed a deal promising to teach Nintendo how to make 3D games and to produce them for the NES at Argonaut. He and ‘fellow geeks’ from Argonaut commuted from London to Kyoto for a week every month, and held classroom lessons in 3D technology. ‘We taught them the look, the feel, the matrix multiplications, everything,’ he says.
Argonaut’s first game for the NES was a version of Starglider, its hit 3D space combat game for the Amiga and Atari. Although ‘solid’ 3D graphics were becoming common on the 16-bit platforms, the team used the wireframe graphics of the first game. Given the constraints of the platform, this technology was remarkable, but Nintendo didn’t want to use it. At least, not yet.
Nintendo revealed that it was on the verge of releasing the ‘Super Famicom’, a successor to its breakthrough platform, to be known as the Super Nintendo in western markets. This console continued the philosophy of low-cost, dedicated gaming hardware, but was much faster, with more pictures moving at once and in more colours, and plenty more space for developers to build their games. While still principally intended for 2D gaming, it now included an option Nintendo called ‘Mode 7’, in which a detailed image was warped, stretched and rotated into a fast-moving landscape that disappeared into the horizon. It was a jaw-dropping gimmick, but was really only of use for games designed around it.
Argonaut was given one of the first pre-launch consoles to be entrusted to a company outsider – Jez San claims to be the first person in the world to complete its tent-pole game Super Mario World – and the British company got to work with another conversion of Starglider. It was a fine attempt, reasonably optimised for the hardware, but still fighting with a character-mapped screen, and an 8-bit processor with very little mathematical capability.
Nintendo liked it, but it wasn’t a huge advance on the NES version and they asked if Argonaut could do more. San was blunt: ‘We said: “No! You’ve got a crappy processor in there, you haven’t designed it to do 3D maths, it’s really poor at multiplications. Your machine can only do it at this level.”’ Then, on the spur of the moment, he made a suggestion: ‘But we could do much more if we design a chip.’
San can’t now remember if he had been mulling over the idea in advance, but he certainly didn’t plan to pitch it. If he had, he would have made some calculations of the improvement in speed he might realistically deliver. Instead he committed himself, for a second time, to a figure chosen on the spot. ‘I made up the number ten times. I had no idea, but I thought ten times sounded about right.’
Having promised a ten-fold speed improvement, Argonaut started recruiting chip designers. Its first hire was a man called Ben Cheese, the engineer who had finally managed to make Sinclair Research’s microdrives workable. He was brilliant – ‘a genius,’ says San – with a smart wit: he drew the subversive cartoon in Sinclair’s in-house magazine. ‘He was actually related to John Cleese,’ according to San. Other designers, Rob Macaulay and James Hakewill, joined to design the hardware, while Argonaut’s Rick Clucas took charge of the software for the project.
Argonaut had a plan for the design process. Processor experts, who thought in terms of silicon performance, usually devised microchips, and by the time the software makers saw them, the chips were set in concrete, complete with any aggravating quirks and shortcomings. This, though, would be the ‘dream 3D chip’, conceived from a software perspective. ‘Wouldn’t it be good if it could do this? If it had an instruction to do that?’ San remembers the team asking. It was the same philosophy that he had applied when he commissioned the Demon modem in his teens – Argonaut made hardware to run the software that had already been written.
The company christened its chip the MARIO 1, rather tortuously standing for Mathematical, Argonaut, Rotation and Input/Output. It ran so much faster than the Super Famicom processor that later developers would write their entire games for Argonaut’s chip, relegating the console hardware to housekeeping. It automated 3D maths, while fully half of the chip’s circuitry was devoted to translating the images to appear on the console’s specialist 2D graphics hardware – Argonaut’s ‘impossible’ breakthrough was now a standard feature. The chip was a masterwork, filled with the kind of technical triumphs that thrill aficionados of silicon hardware.
For Nintendo, what mattered was that Argonaut delivered. ‘We promised ten times the performance, which we had no idea if we could achieve,’ says San. ‘When it arrived, it had a hundred times the performance.’
Nintendo recognised that the MARIO 1 chip could become a vital business weapon. The company had a head start on a gaming technology that would be very attractive to players, and the way that it had been implemented, both the notion of a 3D accelerator and the technology on the chip, was very patentable. And those patents could be used to bludgeon competitors.
They formed a joint company called A/N Inc, for Argonaut slash Nintendo. It held the rights and patents for the chip, and earned the royalties that Nintendo paid for it. Nintendo, with a fifty-one per cent share, retained a controlling interest, and used this for leverage wherever rivals emerged. For instance, it considered applying for an injunction against an entire hardware line from Sega, which was pushing into 3D gaming with a Game Genie style add-on for the Mega Drive called the 32X. This time it was unnecessary: the 32X was badly timed and overpriced, and letting Sega continue was far more damaging.
The 3D technology was a trailblazing way for Nintendo to differentiate itself from the competition. Even though the Super Famicom had already been released in Japan, the company seriously considered including the chip in the hardware for the US and European launches. It attached to the cartridge interface, and could easily sit inside the machine. Eventually Nintendo decided it cared about cost and compatibility more, so the chip would appear in the cartridges themselves. It was branded the Super FX chip, a badge of technical wizardry for the games packaging.
Of the Nintendo staff with whom the Argonaut team had been working, the most famous, and the one who influenced San the most, was Shigeru Miyamoto. It is difficult to overstate his stature in gaming – he is the author of Nintendo’s most cherished mascots, and for decades his games have gathered the best notices in the industry. He is known for his uncanny feel for perfecting gameplay, and for steering directionless projects to success. Under his guidance, Starglider blossomed into a new game.
‘Mostly we learnt about characters,’ says San. ‘Characters were Miyamoto-san’s forte.’ Argonaut had never used third-person heroes before, while Miyamoto revelled in them. They didn’t need to form part of a coherent story – as San noted, ‘a plumber saving a princess makes no sense’ – but they had to capture and direct the spirit of a game. The atmospheric but anonymous world of Starglider became the adventure of Fox McCloud, an anthropomorphised animal star pilot. Although barely seen during gameplay, between levels and in all of the packaging he engaged the player with the plot, and gave context to the abstract landscapes and star fields. ‘We learned that knowing who your character is, and seeing what happens to them, is very important,’ San says. The game was renamed for its hero: Star Fox.
And thanks to the Super FX technology, the graphics were peerless. The wireframes were replaced with solid buildings and spaceships, at speeds that matched and beat the best of the Amiga and Atari ST, on a far cheaper machine. The cost came elsewhere; including the chips in the cartridge pushed the game into a premium price bracket, and third-party developers, already squeezed by the cost of their stock, were loath to risk more on a game style that was notoriously difficult to design for.
Only Nintendo made best use of the Super FX, in some cases eschewing the 3D technology. As a supporting feature, Argonaut had included tools in the chip’s design to rotate and scale pictures. ‘Nintendo was a largely 2D company – they were ecstatic that it could do that,’ San recalls. Yoshi’s Island, Nintendo’s sequel to Super Mario World, used the chip exclusively to throw the player around rotating landscapes, and grow the boss enemies to previously unthinkable sizes. ‘For us,’ says San, ‘that was the easy stuff.’
The Super FX chip sold millions – there was one inside every 3D game, and in Yoshi’s Island. The patent fees were low, but with such huge sales Argonaut became a wealthy company. The creation of specialist 3D graphics changed hardware for gaming. Within five years, a 3D chip of some kind would be in every console made and within a decade, almost every home computer too. ‘We invented 3D accelerators,’ says San, ‘and we have the patent for it.’
Argonaut and Nintendo grew a business together, and then grew apart. ‘After a while there became friction,’ says San. ‘Nintendo had too much say.’ As an ambitious young developer with an influx of cash, Argonaut wanted to grow and make new games. Nintendo, a company that carefully managed its properties, asked Argonaut to stay small.
Their contract hadn’t been explicitly exclusive, but there was an unspoken and tacitly enforced agreement. Argonaut gave Nintendo first refusal on any development capacity that it had, and Nintendo always had another project for the British company. When Argonaut grew quickly and the void remained unfilled, this soft agreement broke down. ‘After a while I had to say, “We’re no longer going to be exclusive to you,”’ San recalls. ‘So that was the beginning of the end. They started poaching our people. Nintendo hired some of our best people, and apologised.’
For a while, the two companies had been compatible, but their habits were always quite different. The two lead developers, Shigeru Miyamoto and Jez San, worked well together, yet they disagreed on the process of making games. ‘Argonaut were in a cut-throat world of milestones and deadlines,’ San says. ‘Miyamoto-san tinkers and tinkers until he finds something that’s fun, and then he tinkers some more.’ Miyamoto’s approach generated fantastic titles, but wasn’t plannable, and for all that San had learned in the company of geniuses, Argonaut had its own ambitions.
‘We both got a lot out of it,’ he says. ‘Nintendo got 3D, which was of a multi-multi-billion dollar value to them. We got fantastic distribution and royalties and did very well. And we got to learn how Nintendo makes games.’
Codemasters and Argonaut both changed Nintendo, for a while. Codemasters challenged its control over licences, and forced it to confront, and probably adapt, the way that it bound together technology and the law to be a gatekeeper. Argonaut gave it control of a technology that allowed it to gain ground on its rivals, both by racing ahead and pushing them back.
Perhaps these very different influences came from a similar place. Codemasters and Argonaut had each emerged from a hothouse of home coding, only a step away from a hacker culture. Both developers spent years using platforms as tools, where software and hardware were co-dependent, but autonomous. From the moment they started working with the consoles, neither felt instinctively limited by Nintendo’s timing or consent. And although they used the technology for creating the best gaming experience they could, each hacked it too, diverting the fortunes of one of the world’s most influential, and seemingly most inaccessible, games giants. It was a hard habit to break.
After Nintendo, Argonaut was hired by Philips to make a 32-bit version of the Super FX chip for a follow up to its CDi console. When the CDi flopped, the project to build its successor was cancelled with a finished product in sight. The CDi 2 head, Gaston Bastien, moved on to Apple to work on a console called Project Olive, and hired the Argonaut team again. But Apple was volatile in the nineties, and again the project was aborted. This time it was particularly irritating, as the team believed they had created a breakthrough technique, previously dismissed as impossible, for accurately mapping complex pictures onto a 3D space. ‘We’re doing this project, it’s almost finished, it’s fantastic,’ San recalls. ‘The spec pisses on the Sony PlayStation – an order of magnitude better 3D graphics. And then Apple cancel it.’ It would have been the leading console, thinks San, with Argonaut’s tricks propelling it to the next generation, years ahead of its rivals. ‘Apple could have owned the gaming space.’
Argonaut returned to games development. In the lead-up to Christmas 1997, a PlayStation game they developed called Croc: Legend of the Gobbos drew the attention of the gaming press. This was partly because, in the UK, it was released in the same week as Psygnosis’ big title, G-Police. Psygnosis had hoped that this would top the Christmas charts, but Croc pushed it into second place. Croc also benefited from a giant, worldwide advertising campaign.
But the main comment made about the game was that it was remarkably like the flagship title for the new Nintendo 64 console, Super Mario 64. Both games were 3D platformers, and the lead character in Croc had more than a passing resemblance to Mario’s sidekick, Yoshi. The controls, the main character’s languid gait, and the whole look and feel of the game seemed to be an imitation of Nintendo’s title. ‘Well,’ says San, ‘if you come second, you’re going to get accused of that.’
But the genesis of the game, of both games, is more complicated. Croc was quite intentionally Argonaut’s ‘Nintendo’ game. ‘It was everything we had learned from working with Miyamoto-san about character design and how to do 3D games,’ San says. ‘Our 3D and his characters.’
In a very different form it had been an entirely Nintendo game, designed while Argonaut’s team were working in their offices in Kyoto. ‘We actually offered it to Nintendo – we offered it to Miyamoto-san,’ San says. ‘At the time it was called Yoshi Racing, because we had put a Yoshi character in there, which looks remarkably like a Croc character, and Miyamoto was blown away.’ Argonaut had used Yoshi because they believed that only a Nintendo team, and probably only Miyamoto, would be allowed to make a Mario game.
When they parted ways, both companies continued to work on their own ideas for a 3D platform game. But Argonaut had been distracted by Philips and Apple, and was running low on cash to fund development. ‘Unfortunately, we took longer to build Croc than they took to build Mario, but then we were under-resourced and under-financed,’ San says. ‘When we finally did get the money to build it and do it, it was very successful for us, but by then we weren’t the first 3D platform game, we were the second one. And that makes a very big difference.’
So if Croc and Mario 64 look similar, it’s because they share a common heritage. Croc was once a 3D interpretation of a Mario character, and Nintendo had been shown what could be achieved in 3D by Argonaut. ‘Miyamoto bumped into me once on an escalator in a tube station,’ San recalls, ‘and he said: “Thank you for your ideas. We owe you a lot.”’