“I think we managed to do all of the things they said don’t do!”
Japan, 1993, in the city of Kyoto, and two young men are on a bike.
They’re on the busiest crossing in the city and clearly, they’re drunk.Westerners.
Inside their bags, they have papers they probably shouldn’t have - confidential papers.
One look at them and you’d see the game Nintendo was making next.
One look at them and you’d see the 3D chip Nintendo had designed for it.
One look, and you would seeStar Fox.
“Err it’s all lies.
Nothing happened,” one of the men, Giles Goddard, tells me now.
I was pedalling and we went over, right in the middle of the biggest crossing in Kyoto.
And all the papers came out of the basket.
It was a disaster.
It was a double-disaster because of what Nintendo had told them earlier that day.
“And I think we managed to do all of the things they said don’t do!”
Miraculously, they got away with it.
Tattered, maybe, but far from ruined.
So when they returned to the office the following day, no one seemed to mind.
But how do two westerners in Kyoto get their hands on confidential Nintendo design documents at all?
Nintendo is a hard place for westerners to get inside even now.
Back then, it was even harder.
How did Goddard and Cuthbert manage it?
Why were they even there at all?
It was for Argonaut Software.
The same Argonaut Software he adored for Starglider, that colourful wireframe combat flight sim.
In that job advert, the stars all seemed to align.
So he went for it.
The teenager from Southampton was on his way to London to become a professional game developer.
Jez San created Argonaut Games back in 1982, and the studio was located at his house.
It was relaxed, it was informal, they’d go to the pub every Friday and hang out.
“We just had fun all the time,” he says.
“It was terribly slow but it worked.”
But this was only part one of a bigger plan.
By “help”, Goddard means ‘Nintendo’s help’.
The idea was to pitch Nintendo directly and ask for support.
But imagine delivering to a boardroom of now legendary Nintendo faces.
It must have been daunting to say the least.
Whatever San said, though, it worked.
“I think they just said yes there and then,” Goddard says.
The new aerial combat game that would be Star Fox.
Nintendo headquarters - Nintendo EAD (entertainment analysis and development) - is a place few people have been.
I don’t remember anyone from Eurogamer ever being invited inside.
It’s a secretive place.
Giles Goddard and Dylan Cuthbert going to work at Nintendo was a big deal.
That’s the house of Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda, the home of gaming.
It’s with this level of anticipation that Goddard and Cuthbert walked in.
They were expecting to be dazzled.
But it wasn’t the colourful welcome they’d hoped for.
“Everything was white or grey, the uniforms were beige…” Goddard recalls.
The only signs of personality were the figurines on people’s otherwise identical desks.
It was the opposite of Nintendo’s games - it was bland.
There wasShigeru Miyamoto, Katsuya Eguchi, Koji Kondo, Takaya Imamura, and Tsuyoshi Watanabe.
They were the Star Fox team then.
Today, they are the people who lead Nintendo.
Tiny, tiny little cafe, but it was always full of Nintendo people.
So if you wanted any secrets, that’s where you’d go for lunch."
He was always really curious about all that."
They had a nickname for him, he tells me - “Irrelevant”.
“I think his mind works in a very different way to other people.”
For the first part of their Japanese adventure, Goddard and Cuthbert were put up in a hotel.
They lived there, really.
And for a while, that was as fun as it sounds.
So it was ideal, especially if you’re eighteen or nineteen."
Star Fox, the project itself, was mired in technical issues.
Which was to blame?
And there wasn’t an internet to turn to.
There were only books.
It meant progress looked like wading around in a quagmire of trial and error.
Magnifying this further was Nintendo’s way of doing things.
It was a very different way of doing things than Goddard was familiar with.
“It was like a school, really,” he says.
But after I joined full-time, that’s when they actually started forcing the rules."
Except, there was no thank you very much, there was just a bell.
And then another bell, and then another one.
But no one seemed to notice.
Ground down by the regularity and familiarity of time, perhaps.
“You don’t really think about it after a while.”
Nintendo would also work very long hours, and the expectation was that Goddard and Cuthbert would, too.
We couldn’t go home, kind of thing."
It wasn’t called crunch, not then, but that’s exactly what it was.
And it was mandated.
Sometimes you do flip and go ‘why am I here?
Why am I doing this?'"
Perhaps it’s not surprising that Goddard was often in trouble, then.
“Yeah numerous times actually,” he says with a laugh - and without a moment’s hesitation!
“We were always getting into trouble for this and that.”
But Goddard had other ideas.
And it worked: Miyamoto was calmed.
“But I did actually break it,” Goddard tells me.
“I just fixed it before he found out.”
To me at the time, it was magical.
And it was a big success for Nintendo.
But Goddard wasn’t entirely satisfied with it.
Perhaps it’s the programmer in him, but what bothered him was the frame-rate.
And then the design team comes in and ruins everything - read: makes it look pretty.
Did he want to go back to the UK or would he stay at Nintendo in Japan?
The offer was there.
And, not seeing much back home for himself in the UK, he took it.
We know it now as the N64, of course.
And it was to be a collaboration with Californian tech company Silicon Graphics.
They needed an away team.
And they would all fly out together to California to meet SGI.
It was a perfect chance to get to know each other, if only someone had taken it.
But Iwata wasn’t apparently much for small talk.
“He wasn’t a guy that really talked about personal things a lot,” Goddard says.
“Very much a work ethic, work and work kind of thing.”
And he was about to be in for a culture shock.
Iwata and Nishida knew Nintendo’s way of doing things: regimented order and discipline.
DreamWorks being a collaboration between SGI and Hollywood heavyweights Steven Spielberg, Jeffry Katzenberg and David Geffen.
So this party was serious showbiz - famous faces and known-names everywhere.
Iwata and Nintendo didn’t have time for such frivolity!
Iwata, he says, wasn’t impressed.
There were a trio of them, all magnificent in their own retro way.
That’s what the programmers worked on.
There was theSGI Indigo, a more filing cabinet-sized affair for the designers.
The SGI Indy had a bonus feature Goddard was excited about too: a webcam.
So, Nintendo did.
Yoshiaki Koizumi took the prototype and added “bones and everything” for Goddard to use.
It wasn’t the only important N64 milestone Godard was involved in.
The demo had Link battling a very shiny armoured enemy.
Sparks flew as swords clashed and light reflected impressively off of the enemy’s armour.
Except it wasn’t an actual game.
“So it went a bit over the top with all the effects.
“We turned everything on.
He was the lead programmer on it, in a team of only around nine people.
It’s why he remembers this period at Nintendo most fondly of all.
One was because his interest was waning.
Like the PDA - the personal digital assistant.
Or as Goddard calls it: “The iPhone of the nineties.”
The other reason was Nintendo itself.
So he did, and he left.
Vitei very nearly released a puppet game for Wii, too.
“And it just felt really really good.
It looked really good.
It sounded really good.
And everybody was blown away by it.
But being a second-party studio, so close to Nintendo, had its drawbacks.
Not in the Vitei office, anyway.
But what if there was an area there where a separate company could work?
And it’s this thought which led to the creation of Vitei Backroom.
Located, quite literally, in the back room.
That’s another new piece of tech he’s interested in: Playdate.
Chuhai made a California Games-inspired game for it, called Whitewater Wipeout, too.
And my eyebrows shoot up when Godddard teases what it might be.
“If you like Star Fox then you’ll like this,” he says.
But if you like Star Fox, I think you’ll like this.”
He’s come a very long way since Nintendo, Giles Goddard.
In many ways, Chuhai is the antithesis of the culture he worked in at Nintendo.
But scratch below the surface a bit and you’re free to see it there.
Nor does Goddard want it to rub it off, because why should he?
Nintendo shaped him, then, and for that he’s eternally grateful.
As he’s grateful for that advert in the gaming magazine for a job at Argonaut Software.
Most of all, though, he’s grateful for Star Fox.
“It fundamentally changed,” he says, “everything.”
