Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (30 page)

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.”’

As the games industry in Britain evolved throughout the eighties and nineties, one aspect stayed remarkably constant. From the 8-bit days onwards, the ‘sweet spot’
price for mass-market gaming platforms was between £150 and £300 – some cost more, but those machines were an indulgence of enthusiasts, or were punished with lower sales. What
this number meant in real terms changed, though. In 1982, a home gaming system cost as much as a fortnight’s family holiday, but by the end of the nineties, it was only the same price as a
European weekend city-break for two. Buying a games machine was never a throwaway decision, but over time it became less of a landmark purchase for households with children and more like an
indulgence for young people with cash.

Yet while the price of a console had found its level, everything around it changed to keep it there: the technology, the games, the developers and, especially, the number of players – the
nineties were the decade when the ‘installed base’ of users rocketed. It was not a purely British phenomenon; the market was booming in the US, across Europe, and around the world. This
was the decade that computer games ‘broke through’, changing in scale, reach, and ambition.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the new mass-market appeal of games coincided with a change in image: they were starting to look professional. And the transformation wasn’t simply an outward one;
the shift was industry-wide. Games were now made by teams rather than individuals, budgets ballooned, and investors looked for intellectual property as much as developer talent. Now titles were
promoted
through mass-market advertising channels, and publishers entrenched their domination over developers. These trends fed off and amplified each other, developing
symbiotically, escalating the industry in concert. But the root cause of this step change was the same as that which had fostered gaming in the eighties: new technology.