In the early 90s, there was a back room at
Nintendo’s headquarters in Kyoto, Japan that served two different purposes. Primarily it was the room in which Star Fox
was being made, or at least, where the bulk of its programming was happening anyway, but
unofficially it had also become a favourite spot for some of Nintendo’s top minds to
take their smoking breaks. Why this room in particular? Well, other than it being a fairly discreet
place to enjoy a cigarette, there were three guys working inside that were really worth
seeing in action. Hilariously, none of them smoked
and actually found it quite annoying that everyone else would, but that's not what made them
such a novelty to be around. These three, just teenagers at the time, were
Star Fox’s lead programmers. That’s no small feat either. This would be the very first console game
in the world to offer accelerated 3D graphics. This is 1992 we’re talking about. Back then if you wanted a 3D model in your
game, at least on a console, an artist would usually need to draw each different angle
of that model, by hand. That’s not how Star Fox was going to work. They were converting 3D wire frames into 2D
images automatically. This is revolutionary stuff. These teenagers are schooling Nintendo on how to use their own hardware. Because yes, that’s the other thing. They weren’t even Nintendo employees.They weren't Japanese either. They’d been contracted from a tiny company in the UK called Argonaut Software. And if that sounds unusual, it’s because it
was. At this point in time, the Nintendo Japan
office consists almost entirely of Japanese employees. How did three British teenagers end up working here and on such an important project, too? Well, to understand that, you need to know
the story of Dylan Cuthbert. Two years ago, before starting working on Star
Fox, at the age of 17... God, that's 10 years younger than I am right now. His boss at Argonaut set him the task of hacking Nintendo’s new handheld device, the Game Boy. Cuthbert was told to break through its copyright
protection, reverse engineer the console and then figure out how to make it run a real time 3D game; something that had never been done before. [grumbles] And he was 17. 17! “We basically just tried to put 3D engines
onto anything that came into our hands. At that time, that was Argonaut’s policy,
even.” Cuthbert does what he was told to do and creates a demo for the very first proper 3D game on the Game Boy. It's got movement inspired by Ballblazer for the Atari, although this wasn’t a sports game; you’re
driving around as a space tank shooting at things, And those 'things' are three dimensional objects,
as is the tank you’re driving. People start taking notice. Argonaut very quickly secure a publisher for the
game, which at the time is called Eclipse, later on, Lunar Chase and really, that should be the
end of the story. It gets released, people buy it, some of them
like it, some of them don’t. The end. Except no, that’s not the end of this story. Not quite. Because the boss of Argonaut Software is a man called
Jez San, is young and very ambitious. He takes the demo, without telling Cuthbert
that he’s doing this, by the way, to the Consumer Electronics Show in America - there
was no E3 back then - and manages to blag his way into a meeting with a representative
from Nintendo. He pulls out a Game Boy running Cuthbert’s
3D demo and says: hey, I bet you didn’t think anybody was doing this. And from that point, things start snowballing. Jez San and Dylan Cuthbert are both flown over to Japan within two weeks of that meeting at CES. Business class, of course. Because Nintendo wanted are trying to impress them. When they get there, there’s another meeting planned. This time the two of them are demoing the
game in front of something like 30 Nintendo employees, all wearing matching uniforms. Miyamoto was part of that group, as was Gunpei Yokoi, the designer of the Game Boy they'd just hacked. Imagine giving that presentation. But of course, it goes well. Nintendo decides to acquire the rights to Argonaut’s Game Boy game, even if does already have a publisher. They'll just need to make a very generous offer to ensure that goes through smoothly. That game, by the way, would go on to receive
yet one more title, before being released in a couple of years time, only in Japan. It was called: X. However, this meeting in Japan is not
just about the Game Boy. There was an ulterior motive. Nintendo also wanted to show Argonaut something else. The Super Nintendo. San and Cuthbert became some of the first
people outside of Japan to see Super Mario World actually being played, although apparently it
was quite buggy at the time. But more than that, Nintendo wanted to get
their take on two other games: F-Zero and Pilotwings, both of which offered their own
pseudo-3D graphics, but with severe limitations. Nintendo had aspirations for their new console to support a real 3D engine and they wanted to know: could Argonaut could help make that happen? “Jez goes: well I know this guy who makes custom chips." "Let me call him right now!" "And so he picks up the phone in the corner of the meeting room," "And called directly to the UK and talked to Ben Cheese and discussed whether it could be possible or not." "And basically that's where the whole thing got born." It's a fantastic idea. Because the chip is inside the cartridge and
not the console, anyone with a Super Nintendo could benefit from this. Now here’s a cool bit of trivia. If you open up one of these cartridges, as long as it's a game that has the Super FX chip included, like Starwing here, which is the European name for StarFox. Take that off and probably lose the screws. Right here, and you can see it really clearly, there's the Super FX chip. And on the front there, it's labelled MARIO Chip 1. Now 'MARIO', in this case, is actually an acronym for Mathematical, Argonaut, Rotational & Input/Output. I can see why they stuck with Super FX,
it’s a bit catchier, but a nice bit of trivia for Argonaut fans there. [Impressed Flamingo Sound] While Cuthbert is busy working on
X, the chip begins production. And around the time a prototype for that chip becomes available, he’s just about finishing up on the game. And so he jumps over to a new team that's been set up to create a 3D game for the SNES using that new capability. Quite simply, Argonaut has more experience working with chips like this, and can actually make a 3D game for the Super Nintendo, quicker than Nintendo can. And so they started work on a title they were
calling SNESGlider, a homage to another Argonaut game called Starglider, that released in the
mid-80s. The problem was that it wasn't so good. The game was being designed by a bunch of
programmers who were more interested in making cool 3D graphics and experimenting with this new chip, than actually making a game that was fun, and that people would want to play. Cuthbert remembers showing it to Miyamoto
for the first time and hearing him take a sharp intake of breath. Not a good sign. Sure, Argonaut may have had the technical expertise,
but they would need Nintendo’s designers. “So all the games I’d played up until
that point, on the Spectrum or the Amiga, had everything thrown in and you weren’t
expected to complete the game, you were just expected to experience it.” There’s a Japanese word, Merihari, which
traces its etymology back to the musical world where it refers to the lowering and raising
of pitch within a melody. For music to remain interesting for the listener,
it needs a good balance of highs and lows. It can’t just be one single note throughout. This, Cuthbert told me, is how Miyamoto talked
about game design. Don’t just chuck every good idea in from
the start. Think about the beginning, the middle and the end. Oh and we’re not going to call it SNESGlider. So it’s decided that Cuthbert, along with two
other Argonaut programmers, Giles Goddard and Krister Wombell, should move to Kyoto
full-time. They were clearly very talented at working
with this new tech and full of experimental gameplay ideas, but they needed direction. The real core of the game’s design would
come to Miyamoto at the start of the New Year, as he was taking part in Hatsumōde, a Japanese
tradition which involves visiting a local Shinto shrine. He lived near the Kyoto shrine of Fushimi
Inari-taisha, famous for its torii gates, of which it has around 10,000. It takes about two hours to walk through them all. As he was walking up the path towards the
heart of the shrine, which is dedicated, incredibly, to Inari Ōkami, the Japanese kami of foxes,
Miyamoto imagined what it would be like to fly between the gates as a 3D experience. When the Argonaut programmers returned from
their Christmas break, he told them he knew what this game should be now: a fast-paced
flight simulator: not a realistic one, of course, but something exhilarating, in which
you’re swooping between gates and avoiding obstacles and enemies and laser fire. And so for the next 10 or 11 months, which is all it took to create the original Star Fox. Cuthbert, Goddard and Wombell would
continue leading the way on the technical side, while Nintendo honed the game’s design. For three headstrong teenagers, this dynamic
was sometimes frustrating. “At that age, we were suddenly thrust into a company like Nintendo and kind of showing up the other programmers." "So that kind of went to our heads a little bit." "But we were always very..." "We weren't..." "We weren't too rude, I suppose." The original vision for Star Fox had the game set in an open 3D space, but it was Miyamoto that pushed for the game to actually be an on-rails shooter, recognising the advantages this would offer them in terms of level design and pacing. He was also very hands-on with the controls. "That’d be Miyamoto having his mid-afternoon smoking break, or whatever, and using that as an excuse to actually make the game better.” I just can’t imagine Miyamoto smoking. My mind refuses to form that image. Anyway, I’m told he gave up the habit shortly after the release of Star Fox and Nintendo even ended up banning smoking within the office,
which I'm sure at least the Argonaut guys appreciated. Following the game's release, they all end up doing different things, with only Cuthbert going on to work on the game’s sequel, Star Fox 2. Poor guy. But for a while, the three of them helped
teach Nintendo how to program for their own console. And to Nintendo’s credit, they weren’t
too proud to recognise that. In 2011, Miyamoto and Cuthbert are reunited
for an interview. And here is a quote from the Japanese designer: So this is Miyamoto talking about Dylan Cuthbert. I quite like that as a message to end on, I think. Yeah, you can't get too proud just because you're older. Although, I mean... He was SEVENTEEN. SEVENTEEN. [grumbles] No, it's fine.
