Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 174: Dylan Cuthbert's Road to Star Fox

Episode Date: October 8, 2018

Jeremy drops by the offices of Q-Games to speak to Dylan Cuthbert (and Mark Lentz) about the early days of gaming and how tinkering with Game Boy hardware led to the creation of the first true 3D game on Super NES, Star Fox.

Those are you in Retronauts, the Fox and Our Stars. Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Retronauts. I am Jeremy Parrish. We're recording live in Kyoto, Japan, at the offices of Q Games. And this is an episode that has been a year in the making. I'm glad we finally managed to line it up. And this year, we're recording, making the attempt to record before Bit Summit happens rather than after, because events like that take a toll on humans. So, yeah, I am here with two special guests, and I'll let them introduce themselves and talk a little bit about themselves. if you don't mind.

Okay, I'm Dylan, and I run Q Games, and I've made a few games. Do you want to give your last name, too? Oh, Dylan Cuthbert. There you go. I mean, I think people probably know, but just in case. Just in case, yeah. And I'm Mark Lentz. I work at Q Games, and I'm also a Retronauts fanboy, sadly.

Yes, you're the one who made this happen. So thanks to you, I am here and talking to a man who has worked on many classic games, things that we have talked about on the show before, but it's always great to be able to get insights from, you know, the person who actually created this stuff. And so, of course, I think your most famous work has been, to date, Star Fox, just, you know, because of the sort of place that held in game history and Nintendo's history and what it represented for the Super Nintendo system. Yeah, yeah. But I feel like you've probably talked about that a lot over the years and people have asked you most of the questions that I could think to come up with.

Yeah. So I'm not going to have one or two, you know. I'm not really going to focus that much on Star Fox. I'm more interested in talking about sort of the road that got you to Star Fox. And, you know, what that represented for Super NES was was kind of built on the shoulders of many other projects you would work before that. And then, you know, after Star Fox, like how did you get to the point of, you know, running Q games and working on the pixel junk series. So those are really kind of the two main areas of focus here. And I know you've got

a lot going on for BitSummit preparations, so I'll try not to keep you too long and drag this out into the night. Also, I'm very jet lagged. So at about the 30 minute mark, I may fall asleep. We'll just carry on talking. Right. Just keep going. I'm sure, just to keep the tape rolling, I'm sure it'll be great,

and you can, I'll edit out the snoring. Yeah. It'll be painting pictures on his eyelids. Uh, so, you know, Yeah, thanks for making time in this, like I said, busy lead-up to BitSummit. I know you're showing Eden Obscura there. Actually, we're showing another game called Sticky Bodies. Okay, I don't even know about that way.

Is that that that announced? Well, we kind of leaked it kind of a few days ago, right? It's okay to talk about it because this will go up in a few weeks. Yeah, yeah, no, no, we've put a picture up about it. Okay. But we haven't released any more information about it. All right, so what is sticky bodies, aside from something you want to avoid on the train it's uh yes exactly it's um it's a really it's it's a result of a game

jam we did earlier in the year and uh the idea was kind of interesting so we thought oh well it's just expanded out and see what the bit summit people will think of it you know the bit of people come to bit summit and uh it's uh a game where you drop strange humans or people from the top of the screen and they fall and fall and fall and they collect with other humans and things and at the end um there's a surprise waiting and that's what i'm going to say okay so i made the music just throwing that oh yes yes that's true yeah that is what that is what you do here apparently yeah amongst other a lot of things right a lot of things yeah so so what is the objective with uh sticky bodies uh to connect um pork pie

and sausages on the way down while trying to get as many of these sticky bodies to stick together as much as possible and then they and then you get scored on it

at the end it's an iPhone game so it's just a little quick little thing just a little fun little thing like angry birds not angry birds more like crappy birds got it

so kind of in the spirit of like stunt copter or something yeah yeah it's kind of that kind of thing and just a very silly stupid funny kind of thing. It has a bit of sort of Monty Python kind of feel to it, the humor.

Well, I will look forward to seeing that. So, was it that way? You said that was a game jam concept? Yeah, basically, yeah. So someone here at the studio came up with that. Yeah, and it's like a combination of someone at the studio, and also we collaborated with the Kyoto. There's like an education kind of group

that tries to help students, like, learn to do, to make games and do stuff like that. And they did like a special game jam. and we helped like sponsor it. And then so it was the idea was like, you know, you have a student and then you give them like a professional person to work with and then see what the two of them come up with. And the two of them came up with this.

Okay. So do you feel that the, just out of curiosity, the way games have kind of, let me think of how to phrase this. So this is a game that's like a small team basically. Oh yeah, it's tiny. Right. And it's just, we don't know if we will even make it to completion. Right. So it's just for Bit Summit, really, for the time being at least. Okay. So, yeah, like, I'm curious about sort of your perspective, like historical perspective on this.

I feel like gaming's kind of come full circle because when you started out, you were making games as like just a couple of people. Yeah, or just one person. Or just one person. Yeah. Yeah. And games then, you know, got bigger and bigger and more and more demanding. And then now we're back where you could make a little game. game like sticky bodies with just one or two people. Yeah, I think the reason for that is that the audience is like really big now which means you can

do like smaller scope games just like, you know, games like they were back in like the 80s and early 90s. And because the audience is just so vast now, it means if you're lucky, if you're lucky, of course, you can find people who do

enjoy that style of game. And there was a period, say, around the end of the 90s, perhaps, from the early 2000s, where the number of people playing games were still quite low. And it was like a core group and they'd only want one type of game

and it had to be like the latest, you know, like technology or the latest 3D or whatever. And so you can really do much variation on that. And there was like another market forming at the time, which was like the sort of flash player kind of gaming sort of area. of things. And I think

that side has also just really grown really into the current kind of sort of 2D, when anything goes, you know, small games are okay. If the concept is interesting, it can still reach people, you know, and I think it's a really good sign. So you're saying because the gaming audience, the number of people who play video games now is so big, there's more latitude to be able to just kind of jump off and do something weird.

And you still have a good chance of, you know, rolling up some sticky bodies. Yeah, exactly. And the audience is a lot more varied now, I think, as well. Right. So how does that compare to when you were making games in the 80s as just one or two people on a team? Because obviously the market wasn't big back then. It was more like you had to be a small team because of necessity. That was just what the market would bear.

Well, back then, there weren't so many games. so it was kind of a balance so obviously the market wasn't as large but it was a very hungry market so you had really in the early days like with the 8-bit computers and ZX 81 and ZX Spectrum

that kind of thing you had a very hungry market for games and there weren't that many games available like you know they may I mean

even if you see like a big compendium list there aren't that many but each one is actually very diverse so back in like the 8-bit days in the Zedex Spectrum kind of days every single game would be very different to the other games

there were only a few cloned genres really within the gaming side of things I mean you had things like ranging from games like Southern Bell which is like a 3D train simulator to games you know like copies of something like Marvel Madness or something like that

but you know isometric games and people experiment around you a lot of different forms of games and different, you know, it'd be like 3D, 2D, isometric. Some games were like, you know, playing with colours. And it's just a whole range of different types of things. But the actual total number of the games was quite low still. And so you could still reach people, like enough people to, you know, like, I didn't actually make,

I didn't actually make any professional games in that period. But the, a lot of, I know a lot of people did. they would reach, you know, easily enough people to make their money back or, you know, to pay them, I suppose. Yeah, the impression that I've gotten just, you know, not having experienced the spectrum market myself back in the day, but the impression that I've gotten from reading retrospectives and things like Retro Gamer Magazine is that the Spectrum market was actually, and just the 8-bit computer market, especially in the UK, was very sort of freewheeling.

And there were, you know, from my perspective, a lot of games being created by small amateur studios because the barrier to entry was so low and you had, you know, if you could do some fairly simple programming, relatively simple programming and get a game onto a cassette tape, then you could sell it for, you know, three pounds and get it out there. So I feel like the line between pro and amateur development was very, very thin. And in a way, it kind of feels like, I don't know, to my mind, sort of like a, a rough draft for what we have now. Yeah,

basically, yes. So it's like a very similar to that kind of feeling where basically everybody was making games like in their bedrooms or whatever. And everybody was like indie, basically. And the publishers, you know, were there were a few publishers, but they were really just kind of distribution companies really in effect.

They did with the printing and getting the game into the shops and that kind of thing. and not kind of the sort of top-heavy kind of publisher kind of thing you have now and I think it is similar to the indie side of things you have now so actually like for example BitSummit is very similar to the old

gaming shows like in the 80s and 90s where you'd be people who have made their own games and they've just rented a very you know a table and they're just and they're setting the games on the table you know and showing and letting people play them on the table. And it's very similar to that.

So it is actually a kind of a throwback to that old kind of classic time. Right. Which is a lot more fun. So, you know, I think that's why people like being India as well. It is actually more kind of fun and more like how it used to be. Yeah, I have been to Bitsummit once last year. And it was very gratifying to just walk around the show floor and the variety of people showing games was

was really impressive because indie developers who have never made a game before and are like, please look at my game and then you have people who have a lot of experience like Mr. Kimura, you know, was showing off Million Onion Hotel last year and I know he's got a new game this year. Yeah.

And like he's a very seasoned developer. He's been around since 80s, 90s. But you have, you know, like there's not really a line, a hard demarcation there. and everyone is just kind of out there waiting to meet people and just show them what they're working on and see their reactions. Yeah, exactly.

And that's really kind of what it was like back in the day as well. So the parallels are definitely there. And I think in general it's just a lot more exciting to be that way to be like that. Like if you go to Tokyo Game Show or E3 or something, where like that you you end up seeing a lot of very like a lot of marketing basically you know you just see the publishers you don't see the people who are actually making the games and it's all very slick and polished and you know very much a public relation experience kind of

thing but at a bit something you get it's kind of very raw you know the people are just right there sitting there and they want you to play their game you know it's not just someone who who only played the game yesterday you know showing off the game It's actually the people who made it. Showing it off. It's great. So you said, you know, that that's the fun of it, the thing that's exciting. So is that what got you into making games in the first place?

Like, how did you fall into this? Is there just something about the creative process you love or the sharing of it? I'm, like, what really motivates you? Yeah, I think at the beginning, I think this is my theory, at least, for children. is that children always try to find or they try to find a skill that their parents don't have and then try to excel at that skill. So, for example, my son would be, as I've learned the piano, and I can help him a little bit with the piano,

but then he's realized that he can actually be a lot better than me at the piano, and it just kind of encourages him to, it's almost like a rivalry with your parents. And so, you know, when I grew up in the, it's like the 70s, I suppose, at the late 70s. My parents were very untechnical, you know, and didn't know the way around computers and stuff. And then I realized I could, like, kind of show off my skills of just the few things I'd learned from, like, magazines

and typing in programs. And I thought, oh, I can do that. And kind of, like, not show them up, but I can actually excel in this. And it's my own skill, you know, that I can learn myself. and I found that and of course obviously at the time

it was very cutting age so a lot of people you know games were very new and very exciting for kids especially you know you always wanted to go

to I know the local fish and chip shop where they have like the one like lone unit of what would have been back then like

base invaders or Pac-Man or something like that so it's always very interesting but the but you know how do you make a copy of that how do you get to the point where you can make something

that looks like that arcade game at home and you know you had these little 8-bit machines and my friend got a XX spectrum like from his uncle I think and I just go around to his house like every night and we just be typing in programming listings to see what we could get up on the screen and stuff like that and slowly through that process

I learned how to program and how computers work and found that I could learn a skill here that not many people or my friends didn't really have. And it just kind of felt exciting, sort of cutting edge. And I kind of got hooked to that process of trying to get stuff looking interesting. So back when I started, I suppose, you could say there really wasn't,

there weren't really any computer shows or anything like that. It was really just magazines, really. looking at magazines, typing in stuff, just trying to get something appearing on the screen and just enjoying the process of a very limited, you know, 8-bit computer. Was there any motivation there to get your game into other people's hands, or was it really just the, you know, the thrill of saying, I did this, I made things move on a computer screen and you can control it? I think, even as a young kid, I think the, I did always want to get. something that I'd made onto like

cassette tape in the packaging and back then the packaging and the inlays you know the games were so well made you know and surprisingly good quality and the art sort of artwork on the boxes is always really nice and yeah so I really wanted

it probably wasn't immediate but like after like maybe a year of just playing around on these things because initially you know in those days it wasn't like a console. So there weren't, when you got one of these things, you didn't really get any games with it. And so you just had to make the games yourself and you didn't really think about buying games. And it took like a maybe like a year of like just typing in programs and doing stuff that way to realize, oh, I can go to a shop and spend some pocket money and get, you know,

like a professionally made game. But it took a little while to see that. And then once you saw that kind of, that kind of thing and you started reading in the magazines where it is only just like one guy making it or you can see the interviews and read and you think oh well actually I could probably do something like this and you know you start thinking about how you want to um make your own like game studio or whatever

and uh by the age of probably 13 maybe even younger than that I was already sketching like logos and stuff so I was thinking oh I'll you know I want to make a game studio I can program you know I can make these little games and I hadn't made any that were professionally sold at that point. But I felt like I really wanted to get into that. And so I started thinking about, you know, branding and stuff like that to, for my company,

you know, company in quotes. And I think a lot of that's just like the creative thing. You know, when you kid, that's kind of, that's where your imagination goes. You kind of imagine being part of this kind of community of, you know, game creators that you're reading about in the magazines every day, you know. you mentioned that when you look at the spectrums library

all the games are different from one another so I'm assuming your approach when you were starting to come up with the games game concepts

was to say what hasn't been done before yeah yeah so how did you can you talk about some of the ideas that you did come up with

and how you arrived at those yeah in the early days I would just try different techniques for I don't know ideas for games

really. I wasn't really, at that point, I wasn't really going for like the technical side so much because the spectrum was quite limited. But I mean, there are a few technical things you could play with like little like hacking hacking it so you could display graphics in like the border around the screen and stuff like, very simple stuff like that.

But the main thing was really just like raw game ideas, like thinking about what you want to do. So I made like, for example, I made one game which was like a platformer. But there were, in the stage there were lots of balls, for example, and the balls would have very crappy, like, physics simulation. Not really physics, but, like, just, you know,

they would either fall or for the left or right. If they fell on another ball, they'd fall to the left or right, and if there was a space there and that kind of thing. And then you had to make your way around the level and knock out blocks and try and get the balls out of the way so you could escape the level, that kind of thing. And so it was kind of fun just trying to do that kind of simulation. and one of the first things

I did in the early days was like make a copy like really just copy something like Pac-Man and just try and clone it and just made a very very slow frame rate version of Pac-Man on the ZX-81 actually

and then a bit later on I went into these are all kind of unreleased stuff of that idea of course and I made like a 2D sort of It was like a sort of Turrican style

sort of shooting platformer kind of game as well and that was one of the games that I first took to Argonaut Software when I was about when I was like 16 I think to see if I could get a job but because it was 2D I didn't get the job at that point and then then I went back and I had an Amiga and I thought well okay I'll see if they need 3D

I'll see if I can do 3D on the Amiga and so I just thought about it myself and I remember trying to work out how to for example rasterize polygons onto the screen and I remembered from the ZDX Spectrum

there was a really good book called the ROM Disassembly and it had like it was like a disassembly of the entire ZDX Spectrum basic ROM basically and I remember in that there was and it was all annotated it's all very well commented so it was telling you

what it was doing and remember in that there was a a nice little bit of code that would draw a line, basically, you know, from one point to another and stepped properly, you know. And at that time, there wasn't really any kind of

reference material where you could learn how to do that kind of thing in a neat way. And it's called the, I think it's called like the Brezinum. Brezinum, I think it's a Brezinem algorithm, I think. And I'm going from memory there. But I thought, well, if I use that, I can probably rasterize the edges I can work out what the edges of the polygons are

and then I can use the Amiga's blitter chip to actually draw the polygons from start point to end point per scan line as I went down and so I kind of knocked up this crazy sort of 3D system to do this and I chained all these blitter interrupts and all this kind of weird stuff

and kind of just went a bit crazy on it and at the end of the day I had this kind of rotating in 3D kind of game logo it's like a company logo kind of thing that had rotating

on the screen and I sent that into Argonaut by post and about the next day Jess called me up and said okay do you want a job

tomorrow? Okay that's a quick interview process because it had already interviewed me a few months before and but yeah it was pretty interesting so it's definitely worth trying that kind of thing

if it does get your foot in the door you know I realized that when I was you know at that time I was 17 I'd just turn 17 and I realized when I was doing this 3D stuff on the Amiga when I went to ask my math teachers at school I would ask them about the you know like how do I rotate and project these points in 3D

and you know how do I do this and there and they would just kind of look at me blank because they hadn't really thought they didn't really know much about computers so they hadn't really kind of mapped the two together and I thought well okay this isn't going to be much used to me because I want to learn more about math with computers

and when I looked around I saw that the most advanced company at the time at least was either Argonaut or there's another company called Real Time and I thought well okay if I want to learn more I should just quit school and join one of these companies

and just learn from the people who are actually making these very advanced technology games, you know. What did your parents have to say about that plan? Were they all for it? Yeah, no, it's surprising. I think my mom at least had just given up by that point because

she knew how much I was into programming and I think she realized, she probably just realized that in the future this stuff is probably going to be quite big. and you know it was me getting in on the ground level and I was doing stuff that other kids couldn't do you know and certainly other adults couldn't do and so I think she probably saw the potential in that and let me chase that which was a you know quite good I never had any complaints you know like people try and my parents have never tried and stop me sort of doing that kind of thing so the you're your focus on creating 3D graphics on systems that really shouldn't have been able to do 3D graphics was pretty much just prompted by that rejection

by Argonaut. Yeah, basically, yeah. I mean, I'd done some 3D stuff very early on on the spectrum just because there was a, it's quite interesting, on the spectrum, but maybe in 1982, Inclare actually released a 3D modeling package kind of thing, like in 1982,

which is called VU3D. and it was actually like a monochrome but solid shaded kind of modeling package I shouldn't say package but you could make

3D objects and it would render them in shaded like a dotted kind of you know like a monochrome

style and it was quite impressive so I thought oh how are they doing this you know on the so I did actually

play with it a little bit back then but then later on you know with games like Glider and Star Glider 2 on the Amiga and also F-18

interceptor on the Amiga those games really impressed me and also on the spectrum there were two games there was one called Micronaut 1 and another one called Academy by the same guy Peter Cook or Pete Cook maybe and they'd always just very

very much impressed me like and I always wanted to try my hand at them but what the rejection from Argonaut did was kind of trigger that a little bit stronger. I thought, okay, I'm just going to have to do it by myself. So I just went ahead and

do what I could do and managed to put it off. So once you started with Argonaut, I'm assuming that was a no-brainer and you were like, yes, I'm starting tomorrow. Once you started with them, did you, were you immediately basically just put on your own original game concepts and like just told go for it? or were you kind of brought in as, you know, sort of like auxiliary help to help people, you know, with their projects? Initially, they were finishing up probably like the last half or so of StarGrider 2 on the PC. And initially to, like, warm me up, they assigned me to that.

And so I kind of, me and one other programmer, we basically went through and cleaned it up and fixed a ton of things and debugged it and made sure it shipped and it didn't have any sound so I also implemented all the sound as well at that point and that was not much fun with the PC sound chip at the time

it was like a buzzer and well I say chip it wasn't even a chip that's what sound was like on the PC in the I think it was like 89 maybe I thought the Amiga had a sound chip that's the Amiga right no but it's PC

oh okay so you were just working on yeah yeah yeah yeah And it was, you know, it was kind of fun for a few months. And then what came up was the Connix multi-system, which was like this twilit-shaped console. Have you seen pictures of it? I have, but for whatever reason, despite your vivid description, it didn't stick with me.

It's kind of like a, it was like kind of a hoop shape with a steering wheel. And kind of like a flight stick, kind of like an air. aircraft kind of like controller and you plugged it into the TV and you play games you could use this nice analog controller and the company that made it was a company called Connix and the they got famous making like a very nice ergonomic joystick in those days a very interesting design and they sold like three million of these joysticks I think maybe even more than that and made a fortune from it and this is this Welsh company

from South Wales I think and the guy said okay we're gonna make a new games machine and he just

come up with this idea and he got all these ex-engineers from from Sinclair who had just kind of

just gone under I think and so he got these engineers all together and they built this machine with custom chips

and stuff and it's pretty good and it had like a graphics chip and a 12-bit DSP sound chip and and you can do some pretty interesting things with it

and initially Jez said to me okay set up a 3D system on this get polygons rendered and use this 12 bit DSP chip to do the rasterization for speed when I was thinking well if you use the sound chip

for rasterization how are you going to get any sound out of the thing but he didn't think about that but he said just use that to do the rasterization. So I thought, okay, I'll go ahead and try this. And it was quite crazy. I mean, it's a 12-bit chip. Very fast, but kind of crazy to program. And I kind of did a combination.

I used the, they had like a sort of blitter kind of chip in there, and also this sound chip. And I kind of combined the two together to create this 3D engine. I started doing 3D experiments on it. And then we knocked up like a, to begin with we kind of knocked up this bike racing game and we went to show it at the ECTS show in London at the time and next to me was like Jeff Minter and he was working on it as well

and he was making probably some game with llamas or something but he was there as well tempest with llamas yeah basically that kind of thing and and they had even it's quite crazy the they had a like a full what's called like the chairs like oh like the yeah the

you know they would move as you play the game so you'd put the the conics on your lap and then you'd the chair would be like hydraulic and it would actually

move around as you're playing the game and it's actually pretty amazing and they had all this stuff like this show but then suddenly I know they reached the end of their budget or something and they just suddenly stopped

and said oh we're not making it anymore and so like Arvonaut's kind of left in the lurch and I was kind of left in the lurch and we're, oh, what we're going to do now then? And then, um, about that point, uh, jess, uh,

had seen the game boy, um, maybe it, um, CES maybe, you know, um, um, he'd seen that and he said, okay, we're going to make games for that. And you're going to make a 3D engine for that. And so, and so we hacked together, um,

like a game boy, um, development kit. with like a camera pointed at the Game Boy and then all wires. We took a cartridge, I think the Tetris cartridge and unscrewed it all and then just connected up wires to the chips and connected them to this circuit board which one of the guys at Argonaut had kind of just felt like making. Like they're going to circuit printing and they were printing the circuit boards in this bath full of acid. We were working in a house at the time and there's this bath full of acid. This is the weirdest version of Breaking Bad of everything. Yeah, right, right?

And so I was, this is a three-story house in North London, and I was in the top kind of attic room. And there was a on-street bathroom in the attic room, and the on-street bathroom was basically a tub of acid where they were printing the circuit boards and itching the circuit boards to do this very basic, like, very basic, like, hacked dev kit

using like a Tetris cartridge and it kind of worked and so I got like a to the point where I could you know I could actually program compile get code onto the screen

within a very quick timing like maybe you know 10 or 20 seconds and it just get this really good working cycle going and so I started developing a 3D engine on the Game Boy and it had an awful

you know the Game Boy screen and this you know the graphics ship is pretty basic it's fun but it's very basic I mean you've got you know like I think it was like 40 sprites but only 10 sprites 10 sprites on a line and stuff like this

I can't quite remember but it's like there's not actually enough V RAM to display like a unique tile yes right yeah the entire screen like you can't fill the entire screen with unique graphics no exactly so I mean So obviously, you know, I reduced the screen area

until I got an area which I could use and still have space. And then have, and then the surrounding, like, you know, the GUI would be using the tiled system. And then I'd, and then I wrote a system which transfers like a bitmap from memory into the character map data. Using,

because you could only transfer in the H-bank, which is the, you know, the gap, the timing-wise, under the gaps on either side of the screen when it's taking data. So when it's not reading from the memories, the only time you can write into it. And so there was this one flag

you had to like pole and then you could transfer like six bytes or something. It may be a bit more than that, but it's like you just rush to transfer as much as you could and then when the flag cleared again and you could no longer write to the memory so you have to stop and then you wait for the next one, et cetera, et cetera.

And by doing this, you could actually transfer just enough data over maybe two or three frames I think to update a bitmap on the screen and on top of that

I used I used that to transfer like a very simple black and white bitmap and then I also used the each character had like a four color

palette or color for gray palette or tone yeah four tone and I use used data in the background of that to do a light gray horizon. So I could have a horizon which was just kind of shifted.

It couldn't rotate around properly because it wasn't proper 3D, but it could be offsetted, so it looked like it was roughly 3D. And that gave it like an extra level of parallax. And then I had the straight black and white 3D graphics on top of that. and so I developed that and it was kind of running quite nicely in the graphics of wireframe and Nintendo

saw it at the next CS because there were two a year back then and so the next CS sort of jazz went around and showed it to them and then they were like showed them that and also we're doing a nest demo as well one of the other guys was doing a nest demo

and then they had a very simple kind of style glider not really style but it had a few like a few 3D objects moving around in a fairly something that looked a bit like Star Glider and then they showed my game which at the time was called

it went through a few names I think it was called Eclipse at the time and at that time it was already signed to Minescape so Jaze was very quick at getting it signed up you know he had an agent but even back then for Argonaut and the agent had quickly signed it up

for him to Minescape to get money coming in and and then Nintendo saw it so one of the business managers or business development guys at Nintendo saw it

a guy called Tony Harmon saw it and then he said okay no you've got to go and show this to the Nintendo HQ guys because they'll be

you know really surprised and he sent them a ROM of it and the guy who kind of made the Game Boy you know Yukui San and also Isouc San who's like one of the guys

who was the engineers one of the engineers behind they saw it and they when they first saw it they were they were so blown away by it they asked for us to be flown over to meet them and then it was probably like two weeks later that we flew over and then I was my first time in Japan and there was a how old was I was pretty 18 I think at that point um it was just after the summer CES so yeah um in uh probably 1990, maybe, I think. And they flew us over and it was really hot and humid.

Remember that? And I went to the offices and like this just row of like Nintendo people came out. You know, like all in their Nintendo jackets. The work uniforms. Yeah, and I'd never really been to like a company like that before or even, you know, any company in Japan. And suddenly, I'm really not really met any Japanese people before, even. And suddenly there's this big row of like maybe 30, maybe 20 or 30, like, you know, Japanese people who came to see the demos. And, you know, amongst them was like, you know, Miyamoto and there's Yokoy and just a whole, you know, group of those kind of people.

Yamuchi wasn't in that meeting. He was more just the business level. Right, sure, sure. He was still pretty, he was already pretty old then. So. My understanding was that he was like games, okay, sure, make them, I don't care. Yeah, he still made some pretty strong executive decisions. Oh, yeah, I agree.

It's quite interesting. He, yeah, I feel like the sort of outsider perspective to the medium gave him sort of a dispassionate approach that made, you know, he could just look at it as business. Exactly, exactly, yeah. So, yeah, so that's really how I got to Japan first, you know, that, I was here for a week. And Kyoto just kind of blew my mind. I was like, yeah, this is, I want to be here. It's much more interesting than where I am. And also just because the people are so friendly.

It was just, everything was very exciting, you know. There's so much stuff. It was such an assault on the senses that it kind of, like, addicted me to the place. It's like, you know, it's almost like, you know, take like a drug shot or something. It's like, whoa, like, you know, this place is kind of really different to, you know, what I knew. And, yeah, that must have been really interesting because that was right at sort of the tail end of the bubble economy when everything. was just like, ah,

so great, everything could happen. Yeah, yeah, I never got to experience Japan during that era. So it must have been

very intoxicating. Yeah, no, it's pretty crazy. And I, I didn't really see like any of the, the more sort of

adult past times because I didn't, didn't drink at all back then. So, but I, it was still, I still felt the energy, you know,

and also, Nintendo are really kind of, still fairly small, and every's very hungry, kind of, you know, they're very, um,

like, uh, forward thinking and you know and and trying to do different things and still they were still very uh that very small hungry kind of company mentality which is you know really good i think Hmm. Pluto TV is the leading free streaming television service. Watch more than 100 TV channels and thousands of movies on demand, all completely free. Pluto TV never asks for a credit card you don't even need to sign up to watch free.

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Check out Collider Sports, Jedi Council, one-on-one with Christian Harloff, movie Shmodown, movie talk, and so much more. Check out the Collider Network every week on Podcast One or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. My new 499 sourdough patty mount combo with two types of melty cheeses is the perfect comfort food for the uncomfortable things in life. Like guys named Ronald, there's just something about that name. Try my 499 sourdough patty melt combo. Only a jack in the box. Limited time only, price and participation may vary, small fries and small drink. And then in that week, we made, oh, they were showing us, early prototypes of F-0 and, like,

Super Mario World and pilot swings on this prototype Super Nintendo, which we'd never seen before. So this was summer 1990? Yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah. So the Super Famicom launch was like four or five months away at that point. Yeah, right. So, and

you know, we played a very, very buggy. It was very buggy actually, a version of Super Mario World. And they showed us pilot swings, which was the most completed version, completed one of those games. And it's pretty much much finished up and they said oh we had to use a

DSP chip in this to do like the 3D calculation for the horizon and stuff like that and we basically looked at it and we said well you know you could probably use like our 3D math know how to do that without the DSP chip we were saying

and then then MiMoto said well actually we see this plane we actually want to rotate this around in any angle but we can't because we have to draw every frame and it uses too much VRAM or you know too much memory to do this and we can't really draw every frame we can't get all the angles we want

and what we really wanted is to render this you know using this kind of polygon technology that you guys have you know it's what you know it's kind of what he said and so we ended up thinking about that for a bit and then jazz suddenly came up with the idea

of well why don't we make a 3D you know chip on the cartridge that will do this kind of stuff for future games for the Super Nintendo and actually pushed a 3D potential of the Super Nintendo and it all connects back to the Connix stuff because when we were doing the Connix stuff he got friendly with the people who were doing the chips

on the Connix and he knew the number for one of the main chip engineers who was now out of work because the Connix had just been a few months earlier had been cancelled and so he called him up directly from the Nintendo office from the meeting room there was a phone in the corner

and he went to grab the he went to the phone he said I'm going to call how do I get an international number and he called directly to England from the corner of the room with all these Nintendo guys sitting there right and he basically says so Ben his name is Ben she is the guy

he passed away unfortunately and he said Ben So, do you think we could make a, you know, do you think you could design a chip to go on to this cartridge? And hold a second, hold on, I'll just get, I'll get the pin layout from the guys, and he got the pin layout for the cartridge from the Nintendo engineers. And then he listed up all the pins to Ben.

And then Ben said, well, okay, yeah, you've got the address bus. And if we put a chip on there, throw some memory on the, in the chip as on the cartridge as well we can do it and they can just

transfer it out and so that that was it that's how it got born and then everybody in the room was like oh okay let's do it

and then Jayes obviously went and then presented it to Yamuchi with more detail I think like a month later or so and got it all kickstarted but it really was just born

in that moment that's crazy I didn't realize the FX chip was conceived before the Super Famicom even launched. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That it, you know, basically predated the system itself. I mean, obviously, the hardware was, you know, in production at that point, so it was much too late to change it to add that capability to the hardware, but...

That's what they actually tried to do first. They were thinking about it. Wow. But, of course, he wouldn't have to make the chip in time, but that was before we knew, because, I mean, at that time, at that point, we didn't know when they were thinking of releasing this, and it still seemed a bit kind of like in a buggy kind of state. and we thought maybe there was a way to rush it and get a chip on there even quicker

than that if we just used like something from like say the conics directly. You know, just just bring the blitter chip from the conics and put that in there or something. But they didn't have enough time to do that because it's already building up to like final production runs. Right, right.

And so that's, so yeah, they thought about everything, you know, any kind of, any way to get that performance, performance into the, into the Super Nintendo. So before we talk too much about the Super FX chip and, Star Fox. I want to go back to your Game Boy Project, which eventually came out

with the name X. Yes, yeah. Which, I think that works in Japanese, but man, like finding information on that game in English. That title is really hard to work with in Google. Yeah, that title was decided by Yamuchi. Okay. Yeah, so he just suddenly called up

Sakamoto San, who was the director on the game. Like, really, like a month before we finished it, maybe. and just said, you're calling it X. Like, it's like a really early phone call, he said. Sakamoto said it's like, like Yamuji didn't care. It was like 7 a.m. in the morning or something.

And he just called Sakamoto directly and just said, you're calling X. Okay, well, I mean, you don't argue with him. No, exactly. So, so I met Sakamoto in that, in that week. So that's when he got assigned to try and help, you know, make this game. Okay. with this strange, young, foreign kid. Yeah, so I've spent some time, you know, kicking the tires with X.

And, you know, since it's in Japanese, I haven't made as much progress in it as I'd like. But it's a very, very impressive game. Yeah. Knowing that you guys created that by completely reverse engineering the hardware from, you know, like this crazy photographic process with bathtubs full of acid makes it even more impressive. Like, companies would develop. them in kits that, you know, were kind of nursed along by Nintendo, couldn't do stuff like that.

I've played a lot of Game Boy games at this point in my chronology of this, the system. And, yeah, it's not uncommon to find games by very experienced developers and publishers where, like, I don't know how this made it out the door. It's like, you know, 10 frames a second or something. It's kind of hard to play. Yeah. And, of course, X is, you know, it's pretty choppy, but. considering what it's doing with the hardware.

It's just, it's a, it's a, it's a, kind of a technical tour to force. Yeah, it would have been faster, actually,

but there was a, um, a really annoying problem, uh, at the end of the development, which, um, so Nintendo have this thing at the end of,

uh, where they do a test on, like, all versions of their hardware. And, you know, when they, they do revisions,

yeah, so they're, like, I think they were like, um, seven or eight super Nintendo's, and each one is actually a different revision internally and there's like slight changes you know with each one and on the game

boy had the same thing um and uh they had i know three or four revisions and then they're all fine apart from the very first revision had a bug in the hardware and the bug was really annoying because it was it was a feature that it would show up because of a feature or way i was doing things and it comes back to the transfer of data in the areas at the side of the screen on the original Game Boy there was only 100,000 were sold of the first revision, that's what they said at the time

there was a bug where even if you write in those the H-blank sections at the side of the screen even if you write data in those sections it would randomly splat somewhere on the screen in the tile map

and I mean just randomly like splack some data there and the data was random as well and so this was discovered at the last moment because obviously we didn't have those old Gameboys and I don't think anyone

probably had them at that point anyway anyway because the those original Gameboys had that problem where the screen would kind of peel off you know had the vertical lines go missing and stuff and so it's one of those

really early ones and pretty much everybody, I doubt there were any users at all of those versions, but they still had to make it work on it. And so what I had to do is I had to write a program that scans the tile map and compares it to a copy that I have in memory now, which I had to create, and then repairs it on the fly. For no reason. So, I mean, this code that is running all the time, even on the new Game Boys and whatever,

because I couldn't tell which revision I was on. So it just has to run there all the time, and it just slows down the game by another frame. It was just really annoying, because initially it was all one frame faster, but I then had to do that to fix this, to kind of patch, fix this problem. It was kind of frustrating.

Yeah, I can do that. You weren't just writing graphics. You were also copy editing. Well, kind of, yeah. So I had to actually, yeah, I had to basically double check. all the time where the graphics

are still there and if I didn't do that the gooey the surrounding tiles would just slowly deteriorates changed to random junk

right so you mentioned that Yoshio Sakamoto was brought in as the director of the game so the game's creative process

how collaborative was that I mean were you pretty much there to do the technical stuff and he came up with the design and objectives and everything or was it

was it less of a a hard demarcation than that. It was actually to be honest, the entire game in time was mine. And most of it was in place before we actually talked to Nintendo anyway. But what

Sacamata brought to the table really was the kind of like the fine tuning and adding touches to make it more user-friendly, I suppose. Just interesting things like putting two towers. So there were these these bases that you have to dock with.

There are these bases that you have to dock with. And he designed it so there were two towers, like two spires on either side, so you could actually line it up and work out where to go. Little things like that. Okay. And also just overall kind of gluing things together and that kind of thing.

But in general, like the whole game structure, for example, the missions, a lot of the ideas behind the missions were basically me and then I so I suggest these ideas and then they give me feedback on some of the ideas and then you know it's like a little sort of back and forth and then we you know flesh it out and then get the work done and kind of go from there but it's a kind of

of it was almost like kind of a one-man project in effect but with like a little bit of a little bit of like Nintendo touch and I come over to Japan I came over about seven or eight times during the development of that game and I come over each time for like I know six weeks or seven a week

or live out of a hotel and then going to Nintendo every day and just work right that seems like the relationship that you know like Mr. Tanabe has with retro studios and the projects they've worked on like Metroid Prime and Donkey Kong Country. But was X kind of the trial run for that approach with Nintendo

working with a Western developer and kind of like saying, go for it and we'll kind of guide you from above? I think it goes back to the way Nintendo works. Anyway, they do kind of consider everybody to be creator and so they kind of expect everybody to be you know

creating stuff you know coming up with the ideas and making stuff and that's kind of you know how I try to run your games as well so it's not really like a it's not really like a sort of top down kind of approach it's more a kind of bubble up

approach and then and then with a lot of feedback going back and forth and you know to get games to get the ideas kind of refined and Nintendo's very much like that So you have, like, Miyamoto or someone like that, and they're very strong, you know, strong-minded. And, but the actual team itself, you know,

are fairly autonomous, and they kind of run and they make the games. And then every now and then, like, Miyamoto's, meoto would come and check the title, like for Star Fox, for example. For X, it would be Yokoy San, because that was part of R&D1. But for Star Fox, it was obviously EAD, and that was Miyamoto. And Miyamoto would come in and check,

and then he'd get he'd obviously try and shape the game and give a lot of feedback and then sometimes he'd work very directly on one particular feature for example so like the player controls for example and that was really

Miyamoto and Giles kind of for about two weeks Giles had to deal with Miyamoto like hovering above his shoulder he said he hated it I can imagine I don't like having anyone hover over my shoulder

but especially a known perfectionist. Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's their process. Even on Starbox as well, even though that was an EAD title and a bigger team, pretty much, you know, almost all the ideas, like all the gameplay ideas in that game. Apart from the, yeah, we didn't actually go in and do like layouts and stuff, but like a lot of the movement and ideas and how things work basically came from me and Giles.

and we just brought all that know-how from from the British kind of 3D gaming worlds you know like Starglider Starglide 2 and there were a lot of other 3D games back then as well like carrier command but all these like 3D titles and we kind of knew the things that work and then in the gaming arcades

there was a whole other set of 3D titles like from Namco and stuff like Starblade and of course even further back you know there's like Star Wars you know and we could pull on all those

ideas we kind of knew about but the Nintendo guys didn't really know at that time you know what how to use 3D and how to deal with it and how the camera works and they have to think about the camera now because I mean in 2D game

you don't really think about the camera at all and so a lot of the stuff I mean we were just just going crazy thinking up stuff, showing it to them and then they go, oh, okay, we can slap some graphics on that, change it to be this

kind of looking thing, and then they'd just tune it a bit, and then it would work. It was pretty interesting process, but that was also very autonomous. Interesting. So I've heard that X was going to see an English language release under the name Lunar Chase. Do you know anything about that? Yeah, no, we finished that.

So it was finished? Yes, it was completely finished. We can expect to see that on the Game Boy mini classic. Yeah, I wish. No, it was one of the things that was really disappointing with that because, you know, it was the first game I made professionally, I suppose, that got to release and we made the English version. And then Nintendo America felt it was too complicated for the American audience.

And at that time, there wasn't a Nintendo Europe to kind of stick up. So it probably would have been okay in Nintendo. If there was a Nintendo Europe, it would have been okay. But at that point there, I think maybe it was Bandai who would distribute Nintendo stuff in, Europe at that point. So it didn't even get to them. But Nintendo America basically said all the games

for our audience right now who expect something like Tetris, it's too complicated. And there's too much text and all this kind of thing. And unfortunately, it didn't get released. And you think back, and there wasn't really that much like hungreness for 3D in America at that point.

Later on, after Star Fox came out, there was a lot more. But back before Star Fox, there wasn't as much, you know, amongst the sort of younger, the Nintendo demographic. Yeah, X was 92,

so, you know, Doom was still like a year away. That was December 93. Oh, right. Yeah, so I guess that craze hadn't really caught on, and 3D gaming was still pretty niche over in the U.S.

Yeah, and even Wolfenstein was PC, So it's still not the Nintendo demographic. Right. Well, I mean, Doom, I think, was, you know, kind of transcended the PC, even though it, you know, was there. But yeah, that was kind of the breakout title. So, yeah, I guess I can understand that. But it is, it does seem kind of strange that you had this, just this piece of technology that that transcended the hardware that did something that, you know, you look at and you're like, how is a Game Boy doing 3D?

And that they wouldn't want to put that out just to be like, yeah, you're not going to find this on Game Gear. Like, Links can't do this. Yeah, I was quite disappointed. They wouldn't budge on it, you know? Just they, I mean, it could be just that they, back then the shops were quite strong. So, you know, they could have been that they showed the purchases at the shop

and the shops were saying, well, I don't know if we can sell that. And that's, it got stopped there. You know, I don't know. I don't actually know the backstory very much. but it was all fully localised and had some really funny English in it as well so I thought it was pretty it played really well in English

do you have a copy of it? No, no, no, no. Wow, unfortunately. I should have kept one. But back then, I mean, it was we developed on the Amiga and I can't remember if I put, you know, back then I was so young

I just didn't really think about it about keeping like a legacy, you know, in that way. I should have. Right. So, yeah, obviously that was a big letdown, but of course, Star Fox made it out in all regions. Yes. So the title is, you know, X, Star Fox, the Super FX chip.

Are those meant to be connected, or is it just like X seemed cool? So that's what they went with. I'm wondering if there's like some sort of branding there. Because if I'm not mistaken, the Super FX chip was originally called Mario, right? Yeah, I think there's Mario on it as well. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's codename. But it's like a zero instead of an O.

Yeah, the code name is a Mario chip. And I think, yeah, it's I-O, isn't it? I think it, I think it stands for something. I don't know what it stands for now, but advanced rendering maybe, I don't know. Advanced rendering and I-O-chip, I don't know, something like that. But anyway, the, I'm not sure. I think the Super Effects thing was just, like, just pure branding by probably, probably Nintendo America at first. I should think, but I don't know.

We didn't really have much back and forth with marketing people back there. Right. It does seem like a very American 90s kind of name as opposed to something from Japan. Yeah, because they did a massive thing. Was it CES? I think it was CES. They did a massive booth for Star Fox. I think that's right. Yeah, with laser renderings and stuff.

Yeah, because E3 wasn't until 95. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, CES. But I've seen a video of it somewhere, I think, on YouTube and it looked pretty cool. I wish I could have gone, but you know, I was too busy doing the competition cartridge. Right. The competition cartridge. I didn't realize you were working on that. Yeah, I did. I made the competition cartridge as well for Europe. Oh, okay. Yeah. They suddenly came to me after, when I got back and I started working on Star Fox 2. And they said, oh, can you just take a few weeks out and knock up a scoring system and make sure the game only runs for, I think it was like

five minutes, maybe. I can't remember what the time was, but it's like this set time and then show the score and can you make that? And so we made it. Because they made Nintendo UK who they kind of made that company at the time they launched

Star Fox, or Star Wing at the time. And so Nintendo UK was pretty hungry to do new things. And so they set up this competition. cartridge for the UK audience and that made it sell really well in the UK as well I guess it never occurred to me that those competition

cartridges had to be created by someone it wasn't just like here you go here's this game like the Nintendo World Championship card had to be developed by someone yes yeah you were the guy who did the I did the Star Fox one yeah and then

went back straight to doing Star Fox 2 basically but it was it was interesting I didn't even know what the cartridge was for because I wasn't in the UK there's no internet at the time so I couldn't really you know look up stuff easy I couldn't you know

just didn't know what was going on back there and afterwards I heard about the the full extent of how popular it was and now like a load of people said they played it and tried to win the I think you got like a flight jacket

I think oh yeah oh yeah I wish I'd have got one but I just made the cartridge that didn't give me anything so With Star Fox, you mentioned that you and Giles came up with a lot of the concepts for it

and drew on previous ideas or things that you had played or seen. So were there some non-video game influences in there as well? I feel like the asteroid field is very Star Wars, down to the triangle rocks. There's a scene in Empire Strikes back where you see like a rock formation just like that. there was definitely a lot of influence from movies

definitely and I think that shows through especially on that kind of asteroid people I mean it's kind of thing when you were at that point you know in the early 90s and you were making video games that would be the thing you would always be trying to do like you know copy scenes from Star Wars

and stuff like that and I think you know or scenes from like 2001 you know just just so sort of like basey movies and I think there's a lot of that in there a lot of the influence though

a lot of the primary influences probably came a lot from Starblade and then quite a hefty mix from StarGlider as well stuff like having the enemies flash

when they hit and stuff which wasn't that common back then especially in the 3D games at the time was all a very arcadey thing that was in Starblade and it was kind of fun and so he thought well we should put that in our game for sure

because it just works so well and little touches like that here and there how much of the sort of the personality of the game was Argonaut and how much of that was Nintendo coming in and saying we need to

we need to give this a little character like the final boss should be a giant cubic space monkey yeah the final boss is one of one of the things that they came up with primarily because they wanted to tie into the

the whole animal theme, which was very late in the day. So it became like, you know, Star Fox probably in the last few months of development, really. And until then, there wasn't so much emphasis on like

the sort of animal brigade, you know, the team of animals and all that sort of messaging stuff went in really in the last 30% of the game really so until because we started on that iteration where it was like parallel scrolling going through you know tunnels we started that version around the beginning of the year so around the beginning of 1992 with the we had the engine from the previous year and we were working on like something that was a bit more all range

a bit more standard kind of 3D sort of shooting game before that but we came back from after that new year and Miyamoto had been up to the Prishimi in Ali Shrine in Kyoto which is the shrine with all the gates that go up into the mountain

and every a new year in Japan the Japanese go to the shrines and they pay their respects or whatever and he'd gone to that one which was near his house and it was near Nintendo and as he was walking through the gates he got this image of

oh well if we flying through this it would actually be kind of fun in 3D and it's kind of you know it's fixed and it's controllable game design it's kind of controllable which he likes he likes a very controllable kind of game design

and he came back and we came back like you know like a week after that from England from taking a vacation and and he said um he said well i want to make the game just scroll forward and we were like what because you know we you know we we assumed 3d was like all range all roaming kind of you know and it never occurred to us um to limit it to just scroll in one

direction and it really surprised us and at the time there was a little bit backlash you know when star fox came out there was like um it'd be like you know internet trolling now there was like it's kind of like a lot of comments about like oh it only scrolls in one you know it's just a scrolling direction why doesn't it let you fly everywhere you know there are a lot of comments back then like that

and so when we first heard that we said oh okay well let's make a demo of it let's see what it's like and we re-engineered our systems to do that within you know within a couple of weeks or so and it works really well

and we could see that You know, we get a lot of speed performance out of it and it would just be a really good, you know, play on things and it would just work, you know, in a better, cleaner way, I suppose, and make it a lot easier for us to make the game. And so it became an iteration at that point. And then late summer is about the time when they started doing, or bringing in the fox characters and all the animal characters

and going, oh, this can actually be a game about these, you know, anthropomorphic breaches in this, you know, flying spacecraft. And we were like, okay. And that's, so that's why they got to the final. So we made a lot of the bosses up until that point. But the final boss was not made at that point. And so they used that to kind of tie it all up and make it all about, like, the animals. And that's kind of what happened, I suppose. And all the other bosses were kind of made by us.

We'd just be creating them the witty-nini. We just go, we want to try this out. Okay, I've got a scrolling texture routine. So I want a boss where something scrolls on the front of it

and I want a message on the front. And so we just make that. And then it would become the boss. I think that was one of the water stages that had that boss. And I was doing this, like playing with technology with connecting joints and things.

And I said, well, we can make these into these. arms and you know make this like thing with flailing arms you can shoot at and that's you know that's how that boss got made so it's very much from that from using kind of owl ideas and then yeah the final boss was basically that they made it into the you know the androth andorff head you know the andros andorf andross yeah yeah yeah I think it's anddorf in Japan right oh okay

You know, I thought you were going to say that you were going to say that Miyamoto was inspired by the Anari Shrine to make foxes, like the main character, since I know there's like a fox affiliation, like the Kittunae with that shrine, was that connected? Okay, it was connected. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's, I can definitely see where that shrine would sort of inspire, uh, the idea of like a linear path forward because it is just, you know, these gates receding up the hill and down the hill and back into the woods and you, that's, that's where you go.

you have like a path and then it splits off so you like I've been there and I've I've walked that but it's it's just another example of how he keeps finding inspiration and just the every day because I never would have thought like this would be a great video game design but yeah but he went there and was like oh I've got it I know how this crazy 3D shooter we're working on is going to go to work yeah that's great that's um he really pulls most of his ideas from around him. Like for example when he made Nintendo dogs, Nintendo dogs he just recently

bought or looked out, you know, owned a dog and that's what gave him the inspiration to do it. And he never actually owned a dog until that point apparently. And that's, you know, so he's all from his immediate things. Immediate sort of things that are going on around him, I suppose.

So I find that quite inspiring, really. So I kind of try and do the same thing. So I try and get a lot of inspiration from the things I'm seeing and I try and spread my wings a bit and go to places where I wouldn't normally think about going to see or, you know, strange art galleries and stuff like that just because sometimes you get to see something which you go, oh, that's actually that's actually quite interesting, you know, like maybe that could be used in a game somewhere, you know, and quite often I will pull on a lot of all that kind of, I know, sort of

cultural information. And I do actually bring a lot of that into the games that I make sometimes. I mean, I think it does really help. Pull as much as you can in from around you. So where did you pull in the slot machine ending for Star Fox from? That's another one where I had the... So I created this scrolling texture routine

and I wanted a few more places to use it. and they had this idea for this secret stage and I thought well let's see what we can do with this scrolling texture routine here and that's what we came up with

so it's like let's have a scrolling display and have a gambling you have a casino you shoot the arm to set it off and then it gets I think it's just random I think it just gets destroyed when it gets 7777 and every other time it fires missiles at you

I think it's just really simple like that it's just not the last bosses I made the other place I used it was the name of the thing is like this spidery kind of boss on the first course and they used it to like create this effect where fire comes out from the middle of the boss and then it fires

it converts to sprites and then the sprites fire up towards the R wing and that was also like trying to show off the scrolling texture routine which at the time was quite rare at that time there's a lot of these little weird little things we take for granted now but back then it was quite cool to have that extra little bit of flexibility and a little bit of extra technology you could use

so Starfax is interesting to talk about because it's not just a historic matter now it's actually current video game events thanks to the Nintendo unearthing Star Fox 2 and releasing that on the mini. You know, I know that for a long time you were kind of sitting on like a completed version, like a completed build of the game, but having had that finally released legitimately into the wild and let people play the true finished version of that game, how has that experience been, you know, even kind of looking in from the outside as you have been? Like, yeah, how has that been for you?

It's been really interesting. Actually, I only had the, I had the completed version when we were making StarFox Command. And Nintendo forgot to take it back after we finished StarFox Command. And then I left it on a shelf, but it was an E-Prom. And so when I went back to it, like, five or six years later, like, it just didn't work. The data had gone, even though it's covered, you know, because, you know, UV will destroy it. But, you know, just enough UV had got through that it wiped it out. It was a real shame.

I remember going back to it a couple of years ago to try and play it again and it just weren't boot up and I was like oh no wow and so at that point I thought oh well that's it then no one's ever going to play this ever again and then then you know last year

you know it was suddenly announced that they're going to include this and it's just kind of mind blowing really and I thought oh that's kind of amazing you know they've kept the ROM around for that long and they've kept their archives and it was fully QA'd at the time

so there was no problem releasing it so to me it's just it's great you know that kind of sort of vindication after all those years especially after like X didn't get its American release as well

so having Star Fox 2 kind of be canceled and also for the kind of reasons that were a bit more marketing oriented rather than national development oriented was kind of frustrating at the time a little bit

but I was young so I kind of got over it pretty quickly but it's still really good after all those years to actually get the thing out there so people can actually play it right he's definitely got to tell the story

of being drunk with Giles oh yeah yeah yeah you definitely got to do that one all right so what is the story well it's at the end of Star Fox 2 so at the end of Star Fox 2 we'd gone for like a drinks out with

Nintendo guys near the old HQ and it was like a whole bunch of people then at the end of the night we thought oh this going to drink some more in downtown in Kyoto and so we got a and I didn't have my bicycle with me and a child steered

and he was like one of those old sort of like like mama bikes kind of things but he had two steps like two like pegs on the back and so I got on the back of that and we were pretty drunk and I was standing on the pegs and sort of holding his shoulders

and he was like cycling away and I just found it so hilarious that the situation was just so funny and you know he's like working away and I was just standing like like a like a girlfriend on the on the back of this bike

and then and then we and I started laughing and we were going across this this junction and all of a sudden I was just laughing so hard and he kind of twisted

the handlebars and we just collapsed to the ground and in but he didn't tell me but in the front of his basket in front of his bike in the basket there was like all this sheaf of like loosely

leaf paper and it was like the like the secret like NDA'd well not NDA back in that's where it's like you know the secret documents for you know the upcoming what was it codamed back then? The Ultra Yeah the Ultra 64

And um Project Reality. Yeah yeah it's probably project reality at that point actually and they the sheets of paper just went like all over the junction like just all over the ground and um and the lights turned

read for pedestrians for us on the bike and the cars were just coming up and just trying to you know just waiting for us to pick up all this paper and I just I couldn't stop laughing and I ended up

just cracking, doubling over and just like laughing my head off at the side of the street just watching because it was like a like a like from an old like black and white you know like comedy movie kind of thing

and he's just running around like trying to get like wind the wind is blowing the paper everywhere you know the sheets and he's running around trying to collect all this stuff

up and like getting us to go and all the cars are like honking their horns and stuff and now it's just laughing to the side of the street but it was a

it was a pretty I know like weird moment where he could have just you know accidentally leaked all the all the specs

all the specs and yeah it's pretty early on I mean that was like 95? So pretty early information. I think we should probably wrap this up now since it's getting kind of late and I don't want to keep you too long. I was hoping to, you know, build into

like a history of Q games, but that didn't actually happen. We didn't get that far. Yeah. Next year. Yeah, I'll have to come back and grill you on the second half of this podcast. All the Sony stories. And Blasto. And Blasto, all the, there's a lot of, there's a lot of, there's a lot of blast of stories. See, yeah, this is the content that people come for. That's like three hours right there.

All right, so that'll be the next three episodes. But yeah, anyway, thanks. This has been really fascinating. You know, I love hearing all this history, especially the sort of nitty-gritty behind the scene stuff on Game Boy. It's just

really sort of fascinating to get these insights because it's not something people really talk about and you don't really hear a lot about for whatever reason. So I I appreciate you taking the time to share these, these memories and experiences. Always fun, yeah, like, remembering all that stuff. Yeah, how involved were you with the, like, the Game Boy beyond, you know, working on X? Because you worked at Nintendo's offices a lot, right?

Yeah, so... With the R&D1 team. Yeah, but it's only really on the, it's only really on X, and I kind of just, you know, I was very friendly with at the time. I think it was like the Metroid team, Metroid 2. Right, yeah, that was, that was 91, I want to say. Yeah, so it's just as I was making X. And also they had Super Metroid being developed as well. Very early stages, though.

I think it took a lot longer time. Yeah, I think that was like an 18-month project, which was crazy one back then. Yeah, yeah. So I saw that in its very early stages as well. And they were doing the first test with like scrolling and sort of backgrounds and tilting the backgrounds and stuff like that. And so it was just a very small team. just got very friendly with them all.

You know, back then it was like Hiptanaka was like the sound guy. And the, now he runs creatures, of course, up in Tokyo. So it's just a really good environment, you know, nice and tight. Yeroy Sound was really friendly and it gave me like a candy budget and stuff. So every day I could go and buy, he's always, you see, he saw how much candy I was buying every day because it was always really interesting, all this weird stuff, right? Sure, sure.

And so I'd just buy different stuff every day. And he saw that and he goes, oh, I'll give you a budget for that. You can buy whatever you want every day and enjoy yourself. Who's that kind of guy? How hands-on was he with the Game Boy development process? You know, I hear different things.

Like some people think that he personally, like, made every game that has his name on it whereas other people are like, well, no, he was more like an ideas guy who would just kind of, you know, advise. It was interesting. It depends on the game, but he would play

the games extensively. Okay. So, I have a lot of memories of him just sitting back, because he was a very open fan office. He didn't have, like, closed office or anything. So he was like with everybody else. And he'd just be sitting back and be playing, I think at the time, it was, um,

what was the first Yoshi's like game? Not Yoshi's cookie? Just Yoshi? No, the puzzle game. I think it was just Yoshi. Yoshi's egg in Japan, maybe? Maybe that was it, yeah.

And he was very hands-on with the design of that. And he was just sitting there playing the game and just thinking, you can see, he was just thinking up what to do with it and how to design it or whatever. So for some games, I think he's very, very hands-on. And I think he just really enjoyed. He was very much a toy.

maker, so he just loved doing that kind of stuff. Yeah, I feel like that, that, you know, that element that he brought to Nintendo is still there. I mean, you look at Labo, and that is such a, like, you know, the progeny of Mr. Yokoy right there. Yeah, yeah. I think, I remember looking at that, and I thought, surely Koto, you know, like,

Yohoi's, you know, his company that he left, I'm sure that must have, I thought, I'm sure that company must have, been involved in it, but they weren't. I don't think they were. But it really felt like it was a Yokoye's DNA kind of in that product. Yeah, I just feel like, you know, the philosophy that he brought just became such a part of the company.

Oh, yes. It's still there, you know, 20 years after he's gone. If anything, like the Miyamoto's side doesn't really have, doesn't really have that side of things. They don't really make the toys much. it was always your Quoids group and the other groups that made like the kind of the little

the more sort of physical interesting stuff right yeah the stuff like the Game Boy camera Super scope yeah the superscope the Zapper Rob yeah yeah yeah like all those things and EAD was always the

just the software right department yeah and only software right yeah they don't make they never really been into the other side of things the hardware side but yeah it was

great you know that I think that that division of talent worked really well oh yeah definitely yeah it's you know the more I study and research and explore Nintendo's past and the the hardware they made and some of the peripherals like it's always fascinating because it's always almost always like you can kind of see where they said we have you know like this much money and we have you know just a tiny amount of money and we have this this you know old technology or this this kind of oddball technology that no one else is really using what can we do with this? How can we make this fun?

Yeah, exactly, yeah. And that's that sort of tinkering mentality is really good, I think. Yeah. They've always, I think that's why a lot of people underestimate Nintendo sometimes when they think of them as just as like a games, like a game console

company. They're much more like a toy company, the way they think. Much more about the novelty. Yeah, absolutely. All right, well, we should wrap this up now so thanks again for your time Dylan

and Mark also doing it so much yeah sorry we kind of crowded you out for Dylan some questions you have do you guys want to give a quick shout out

to your current projects and where people can find you online yeah sure I mean I'm Dylan Cuthbert on Twitter so D-Y-L-A-N-C-U-T-H-B-R-T and yeah I mean right now we're going to be showing

sticky bodies and we also have Monsters Pixel Junk Monsters 2 coming out May 25th on Switch and PS4 and Steam and right now I think that's oh and also we have Eden

Obscura of course which is launching very soon we can announce it here oh that's true well yeah because it's coming out later but yeah that's already out I suppose because it'll be launched May 18th

next week and I'm on mobile on mobile sorry I'm at the Henry demos on Twitter and I did the sound effects for Paxical Junk Monsters 2 and all the music for sticky bodies

yes nice indeed finally I am Jeremy Parrish you can find me on Twitter as GameSpite and at retronauts.com retronauts you can find on the internet places like iTunes podcast one network etc and we're Patreon support

if you want to help us survive patreon.com slash retronauts as usual. So thanks again, Dylan. Thanks, Mark. Thanks, you for listening. That's you, yes, the person at home. We'll be back in a week with another episode, so look forward to it. My new. combo with two types of melty cheeses is the perfect comfort food for the uncomfortable things in life.

Like guys named Ronald, there's just something about that name. Try my 499 sourdough patty melt combo. Only a jack-in-the-box. Limited time-only, price and participation may very small fries and small drink. The Mueller report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town.

I guess, from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officers started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect. the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout have been

charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.