Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders

by Rebecca Levene

  The victory had also enhanced their credibility, and when Galoob approached Nintendo’s rival Sega about an equivalent cartridge for its Mega Drive console, the company was welcomed into talks and granted a licence. Codemasters leveraged its success to become a truly global publisher, finding developers from around the world. It had the funds to build development teams, acquisition departments and marketing muscle.

  Nintendo might be forgiven for feeling taunted by Codemasters for a while. The UK company’s Canadian licensee, Camerica, used a Taiwanese manufacturer that came up with a way of fooling the lock-chip in Nintendo’s consoles with a series of pulses. ‘When the chip said “Is there a key there?” the cartridge would just shout so loud in its face it would get confused,’ Darling explains. Codemasters was able to publish NES games despite having obliterated its relationship with the console’s maker, and one of its releases, Micro Machines, took its place among the platform’s bestsellers without earning Nintendo a cent. To compound the insult, the Micro Machines brand had started as a line of toy cars, produced by Lewis Galoob Toys.

  Codemasters then took the idea even further. The NES design required that some hardware, such as the key chip and a small amount of memory, had to be reproduced in every single cartridge, and this burden pushed the price up. Codemasters realised that it could use its lock-smashing technology to create its own captive and cut-price games market.

  Through Camerica, Codemasters issued a device called the Aladdin. It included the memory usually supplied in every cartridge, along with the circuitry for fooling the lock chip. Like the Game Genie, the Aladdin sat between the console and the game, but instead of a slot to insert Nintendo cartridges, it used its own unique media, much smaller and sold only by Codemasters, which the company called ‘Compact Cartridges’. Codemasters released half a dozen cartridges for its system, including Dizzy and Robin Hood titles from the Oliver Twins, all at a comfortably lower price than the Nintendo-endorsed games. Not only was there less hardware in each cartridge, there was no licence to pay. The Game Genie might have compromised the integrity of Nintendo’s games, but the Aladdin was a direct assault on the Japanese company’s business model. It literally piggybacked onto the console that Nintendo had sold as a loss leader.

  The Aladdin caught the dying tail of the NES lifecycle, and after its launch titles it faded quickly. But by then Codemasters was a global publisher with popular franchises, and Nintendo was a platform owner that needed to attract the best titles. And while there had been money in prising open gaps in Nintendo’s legal and technological protections, Codemasters’ real business was making and selling games. The successor to the NES, the Super Nintendo, reset the board for both companies.

  Darling flew to Seattle with the sales director of Codemasters, and met the chairman of Nintendo in the US, Howard Lincoln. The discussions went surprisingly well. ‘We said that it’s water under the bridge,’ Darling recalls. ‘Let’s just get on with other things.’ And they negotiated a licence.

  The NES console was on the boundary between a simple computer and a dedicated games machine. It had a widely known processor but only a tiny sliver of memory and it was the developer’s job to conjure up ways around this, or if necessary provide more chips in the cartridge. Where most computers used a ‘bitmap’ – a minute grid of individual screen pixels – for their graphics, the NES used a specialist ‘character map’: it could display pictures built from tiles and slide them about at a decent speed, and simply couldn’t draw anything else. And, character graphics aside, it was very slow.

  Around the world, developers puzzled over the best way to make use of this limited system. In Britain, the head of the innovative developer Argonaut had a scheme that would surprise anyone who didn’t know him. ‘I think it was my idea,’ says Jez San, ‘that you could do 3D on an 8-bit games console.’

  Rendering 3D graphics would still be a challenge on fast, friendly systems. On top of the tortuous work of streamlining the maths for rotation and plotting, complex lines and shapes have to be rendered a pixel at a time onto the screen. Even with all the puzzles solved, a bitmap is essential. Nintendo had designed the NES with entirely different games in mind – it wasn’t simply that 3D wasn’t considered, it had been actively locked out.

  There is a common characteristic amongst coders: they’re energised by challenges, competitively striving to defeat the seemingly unconquerable. Argonaut’s team, hand-picked by a veteran bedroom coder, had this quality in abundance. So they made the NES show 3D graphics.

  It was almost an aesthetic project, a demonstration of their skill, and it’s hard to miss San’s pride as he remembers the moment. ‘It was an impossibility, and yet we did it. We reverse engineered the machine and we did it.’

  The Argonaut team were resourceful and mercurial. When they heard that Nintendo would be releasing a handheld console called the Game Boy, they guessed at its specifications, wrote an ‘emulator’ which allowed them to simulate their hypothetical machine, and developed a game on it. They had followed rumours of the hardware during its development, and their guesses turned out to be fairly accurate. ‘So when the Game Boy came out, we had a game running on it in a day,’ San says.

  Once again, Nintendo had designed the machine to lock out unlicensed cartridges, but this time part of its mechanism used conventional copyright law. When a game was slotted into the back of a Game Boy, it read a Nintendo logo from the cartridge and dropped it from the top of the screen. If it couldn’t be found, the console rejected the game, and if it was there without a licence, Nintendo could sue the game-maker for breaching its trademark. It elegantly shifted the defence from a patent to copyright infringement, and the ‘key’ from costly hardware to a software graphic.

  Within days, Argonaut had beaten it. ‘I had this idea that with one resistor and one capacitor, which cost less than a cent, I could defeat that protection,’ San says. These new components switched the console’s attention at a vital moment. It read and acknowledged the word ‘Nintendo’ and then, just before loading the graphic for the opening animation, swivelled its gaze onto Argonaut’s logo. ‘They made a mistake in their code,’ San explains, ‘that it read the logo a second time to display it on the screen, so we took advantage of that. Argonaut dropped down, and it still booted.’

  At the 1989 CES trade show in Chicago, San showed his trick to Nintendo. He had written some hit games and ran a company, but he was still only one of a crowd of developers, and in his early twenties, amongst the youngest. The man he showed it to ran Nintendo in the US – he was employee number five in the company. ‘I cheekily showed them the Game Boy with the word Argonaut dropping down, and it had a 3D game running,’ San recalls. ‘Just to say, “Hey, look what geniuses we are, that we could defeat your protection and build a game on your machine, without any instructions from you on how to do it.”’ Jones laughed, and agreed that it was cool.

  But he remembered Jez San. On his return to the UK, San received a call from Tony Harman from Nintendo UK. The head office wanted to speak to him; there was a flight leaving for Japan the following day. They would pay, but he should be on it.

  San agreed. He flew to Kyoto, and found that his meeting was with the then president of Nintendo, Hiroshi Yamauchi. Yamauchi was rarely seen but had an intimidating reputation, leading a company that was notoriously protective and controlling. ‘He’s the old man, the godfather,’ says San. ‘He’s very old and not very mobile, and doesn’t speak a word of English.’ San was led to his room, ‘which was boiling hot, I was sweating like a pig,’ and Yamauchi spoke to him through a translator.

  ‘We want your 3D technology. How much do you want?’ Yamauchi asked.

  ‘And at this point,’ says San, ‘I had no idea what I was doing.’

  He didn’t have a business agent with him, or any warning that a deal would be offered. He certainly didn’t know how to value his technology. ‘I thought of the biggest number I could possibly think of, and I said two million dollars. And he said fi
ne.’

  It would be natural to wonder, as San has, how much higher that number could have been. Should he have asked for ten million, or a hundred million? But the deal had already been closed. When he returned to his hotel room, his brother called to ask him if he knew why two million dollars had arrived in Argonaut’s account.

  Nintendo has sometimes been portrayed as distant, even secretive, with high cultural and legal barriers confronting outsiders wanting to learn more about it. But this doesn’t wholly fit a company that would pay a stranger a small fortune without a contract. As San observes, ‘this is the Japanese way – they either trust you or they don’t’. There is another way to think of Nintendo. Perhaps more than any other games platform maker, it is a company centred on intellectual property. It has brands, Mario and Zelda in particular, that it protects jealously and promotes ahead of other software. From its entry to the market onwards, it has cared more about controlling the content than impressing with hardware – its machines are often the least powerful of their generation. The battles it fights most fiercely are those where its brands, or its control over its intellectual property, are threatened. Nintendo’s most public face to western audiences during the nineties – US Chairman Howard Lincoln – didn’t emerge from gaming, but was the company’s attorney in its defining copyright lawsuits.

  Nintendo embraced Argonaut. San’s team had techniques to share, and were taken deep into the heart of the Japanese company, physically installed in the Kyoto offices and treated like Nintendo employees. And they worked directly with the most important designers in the company, including Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario and Zelda and almost certainly the most respected games-maker in the world. ‘I think Nintendo had had Japanese companies doing that,’ says San, ‘but we were the only western company ever allowed to work directly with Miyamoto-san.’

  San had signed a deal promising to teach Nintendo how to make 3D games and to produce them for the NES at Argonaut. He and ‘fellow geeks’ from Argonaut commuted from London to Kyoto for a week every month, and held classroom lessons in 3D technology. ‘We taught them the look, the feel, the matrix multiplications, everything,’ he says.

  Argonaut’s first game for the NES was a version of Starglider, its hit 3D space combat game for the Amiga and Atari. Although ‘solid’ 3D graphics were becoming common on the 16-bit platforms, the team used the wireframe graphics of the first game. Given the constraints of the platform, this technology was remarkable, but Nintendo didn’t want to use it. At least, not yet.

  Nintendo revealed that it was on the verge of releasing the ‘Super Famicom’, a successor to its breakthrough platform, to be known as the Super Nintendo in western markets. This console continued the philosophy of low-cost, dedicated gaming hardware, but was much faster, with more pictures moving at once and in more colours, and plenty more space for developers to build their games. While still principally intended for 2D gaming, it now included an option Nintendo called ‘Mode 7’, in which a detailed image was warped, stretched and rotated into a fast-moving landscape that disappeared into the horizon. It was a jaw-dropping gimmick, but was really only of use for games designed around it.

  Argonaut was given one of the first pre-launch consoles to be entrusted to a company outsider – Jez San claims to be the first person in the world to complete its tent-pole game Super Mario World – and the British company got to work with another conversion of Starglider. It was a fine attempt, reasonably optimised for the hardware, but still fighting with a character-mapped screen, and an 8-bit processor with very little mathematical capability.

  Nintendo liked it, but it wasn’t a huge advance on the NES version and they asked if Argonaut could do more. San was blunt: ‘We said: “No! You’ve got a crappy processor in there, you haven’t designed it to do 3D maths, it’s really poor at multiplications. Your machine can only do it at this level.”’ Then, on the spur of the moment, he made a suggestion: ‘But we could do much more if we design a chip.’

  San can’t now remember if he had been mulling over the idea in advance, but he certainly didn’t plan to pitch it. If he had, he would have made some calculations of the improvement in speed he might realistically deliver. Instead he committed himself, for a second time, to a figure chosen on the spot. ‘I made up the number ten times. I had no idea, but I thought ten times sounded about right.’

  Having promised a ten-fold speed improvement, Argonaut started recruiting chip designers. Its first hire was a man called Ben Cheese, the engineer who had finally managed to make Sinclair Research’s microdrives workable. He was brilliant – ‘a genius,’ says San – with a smart wit: he drew the subversive cartoon in Sinclair’s in-house magazine. ‘He was actually related to John Cleese,’ according to San. Other designers, Rob Macaulay and James Hakewill, joined to design the hardware, while Argonaut’s Rick Clucas took charge of the software for the project.

  Argonaut had a plan for the design process. Processor experts, who thought in terms of silicon performance, usually devised microchips, and by the time the software makers saw them, the chips were set in concrete, complete with any aggravating quirks and shortcomings. This, though, would be the ‘dream 3D chip’, conceived from a software perspective. ‘Wouldn’t it be good if it could do this? If it had an instruction to do that?’ San remembers the team asking. It was the same philosophy that he had applied when he commissioned the Demon modem in his teens – Argonaut made hardware to run the software that had already been written.

  The company christened its chip the MARIO 1, rather tortuously standing for Mathematical, Argonaut, Rotation and Input/Output. It ran so much faster than the Super Famicom processor that later developers would write their entire games for Argonaut’s chip, relegating the console hardware to housekeeping. It automated 3D maths, while fully half of the chip’s circuitry was devoted to translating the images to appear on the console’s specialist 2D graphics hardware – Argonaut’s ‘impossible’ breakthrough was now a standard feature. The chip was a masterwork, filled with the kind of technical triumphs that thrill aficionados of silicon hardware.

  For Nintendo, what mattered was that Argonaut delivered. ‘We promised ten times the performance, which we had no idea if we could achieve,’ says San. ‘When it arrived, it had a hundred times the performance.’

  Nintendo recognised that the MARIO 1 chip could become a vital business weapon. The company had a head start on a gaming technology that would be very attractive to players, and the way that it had been implemented, both the notion of a 3D accelerator and the technology on the chip, was very patentable. And those patents could be used to bludgeon competitors.

  They formed a joint company called A/N Inc, for Argonaut slash Nintendo. It held the rights and patents for the chip, and earned the royalties that Nintendo paid for it. Nintendo, with a fifty-one per cent share, retained a controlling interest, and used this for leverage wherever rivals emerged. For instance, it considered applying for an injunction against an entire hardware line from Sega, which was pushing into 3D gaming with a Game Genie style add-on for the Mega Drive called the 32X. This time it was unnecessary: the 32X was badly timed and overpriced, and letting Sega continue was far more damaging.

  The 3D technology was a trailblazing way for Nintendo to differentiate itself from the competition. Even though the Super Famicom had already been released in Japan, the company seriously considered including the chip in the hardware for the US and European launches. It attached to the cartridge interface, and could easily sit inside the machine. Eventually Nintendo decided it cared about cost and compatibility more, so the chip would appear in the cartridges themselves. It was branded the Super FX chip, a badge of technical wizardry for the games packaging.

  Of the Nintendo staff with whom the Argonaut team had been working, the most famous, and the one who influenced San the most, was Shigeru Miyamoto. It is difficult to overstate his stature in gaming – he is the author of Nintendo’s most cherished mascots, and for decades his games have gat
hered 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.’