The Kid Who Trained with the Masters of Nintendo During a Gaming Golden Age
By Alex Chen | January 01, 0001
It was the hot, sticky summer of 1990. Japan’s bubble economy, the period of rapid growth during the 1980s, would be over in a year, but Japanese gaming showed no signs of ending its dominance. Dylan Cuthbert, then an 18 year-old programmer at PC gamer developer Argonaut Software, was in the lobby of a Kyoto hotel, wearing a cheap suit he hastily purchased. He fumbled with his ponytail and wondered about his family back home. It was his first time in Kyoto. He was visiting a Japanese company he’d barely heard of. And in the lobby of Cuthbert’s hotel was a game designer whose games he’d never played and whose name he’d never heard. That man was Shigeru Miyamoto. The company? Nintendo.(new Image()).src = 'https://capi.connatix.com/tr/si?token=995c4c7d-194f-4077-b0a0-7ad466eb737c&cid=872d12ce-453b-4870-845f-955919887e1b'; cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "995c4c7d-194f-4077-b0a0-7ad466eb737c" }).render("79703296e5134c75a2db6e1b64762017"); }); Back in his native England, Cuthbert had figured out how to render 3D graphics on the Game Boy—something that Nintendo didn’t even envision for the machine. The Game Boy was a sprite-based system and didn’t provide game developers the luxury of bit-mapping. Cuthbert recently recalled in his typically nonchalant manner that getting the Game Boy to run 3D graphics “just took a bit yono business sbi of work”, punctuating his remark with a chuckle. But there he was, in Kyoto with Argonaut founder Jez San and Nintendo of America’s Tony Harman, being met at the hotel by people from Nintendo, including a then-38-year-old game designer named Shigeru Miyamoto. Shigeru Miyamoto, father of Mario (Paul Sakuma | AP) “When I met him, I thought, ‘Oh that’s cool’,” Cuthbert told Kotaku at Q-Games, the Kyoto-based game developer he founded in 2001, best known for the popular PixelJunk series of games. Cool? Miyamoto was the man who invented Donkey Kong and Mario, a legend in his own right and not the kind of guy who usually needs help from an 18-year-old from England. For the rest of the week, Nintendo developers like Miyamoto, Yoshio Sakamoto of Metroid fame and Gunpei Yokoi, who created the Game Boy, were playing host to young devs from the UK, taking them to local restaurants and showing them the city. Cuthbert was getting a guided tour of Kyoto by some of gaming’s greatest legends. But for Cuthbert, they were simply some Japanese game colleagues he just met. While Nintendo began its tear through North American living rooms, the PC was still king in Britain. Mario and Nintendo didn’t yet have the same impact in the UK that PC games did. Cuthbert didn’t grow up a Nintendo gamer, but a PC gamer, through and through. “In the 80s, a lot of people were making games in their bedroom, as they were going through school,” said Cuthbert. He had been doing double math and physics at school, but his free time was spent making games on the ZX Spectrum 8-bit personal computer and learning how to make them on the Amiga. (Left: X, the 1992 Game Boy game programmed by Cuthbert, featuring 3D graphics.) “The childhood dream was to send your game off to a publisher and get your game out there,” he said. At age 14, Cuthbert sent off a tank battle game to six game companies. He got six rejection letters on beautiful letterhead from companies like Ocean or Imagine, companies that do not exist anymore. Those weren’t badges of shame, but pride. Cuthbert conceded that no doubt his first effort wasn’t his best, adding, “The frame-rate wasn’t so good.” Whether he was hacking servers to run a text-based dungeon at his summer network programmer job at Lloyd’s of London or simply in his bedroom, he continued to dream of running his own studio, thinking up names like “Unique Productions” and designing logos. More importantly, he kept making games. The games he made as a teenager ranged from one in which players ran around shooting enemies to another in which the player had a “charged jump”. Years later, that game he made as a kid would serve as the basis for 2008’s PixelJunk Eden Even before he had a computer, Cuthbert was making board games to play with his family. “They were pretty awful,” he said. But after getting a computer, he found a way to combine his love of games, drawing and math. Compared to making games on the Amiga or ZX Spectrum, school was a drag. Cuthbert remembered telling his math teacher that he wanted to take a set of data and render it onto a 2D screen. He needed help. “The math teacher couldn’t answer me directly,” he said. “He should’ve known the information right off the top of his head.” The information he got from his teacher was too academic and not practical for making games. “Because of that, it kind of disenchanted me to the whole school thing.” “It kind of disenchanted me to the whole school thing.” Universities now treat the industry with tremendous respect, giving students the tools and teaching they need. But back in the 80s, gaming still wasn’t recognized as a proper job, and it wasn’t nearly as lucrative as it is now. Budding game designers like Cuthbert had to make hard choices: Do I go to university and get a big-paying non-gaming job? Or do I ditch school altogether, get a real gaming education and make games for peanuts? Cuthbert chose the latter. “For me, learning at home from books was far more efficient.” Still in high school, Cuthbert was in London, the heart of the country’s game development community. He had moved from outside Manchester to live with his father. “It was actually quite a good move for me,” Cuthbert said, “because it put me closer to all these game companies.” While flipping through the latest issue of a computer hobbyist magazine, he found a job advert for Argonaut Software. He whipped up a resume and showed Argonaut a 2D game he’d made on the Spectrum. While Argonaut was impressed, the studio wanted programmers who had done games with 3D graphics. Cuthbert then taught himself how to render 3D graphics on the Amiga with his “Unique Productions” logo rotating on the screen and sent it off to Argonaut. The next day, Argonaut founder Jez San wanted to give the 17-year-old Cuthbert a job. A week later, he was punching the time clock as a professional computer game programmer. After working on space simulator Starglider 2, Cuthbert was tasked with creating a 3D engine for the ill-fated Konix Multisystem console using the system’s sound chip—meaning that any game using it would have no sound! The Konix Multisystem never was released due to lack of funds, and Argonaut shifted its focus to the Game Boy, which had been just released in Japan. While home consoles didn’t catch on in the UK, Argonaut began making an unofficial development kit for the Game Boy. Cuthbert was once again trying to make a 3D graphics demo for Nintendo’s portable. He was urged to go to Japan to show the Game Boy’s creators 3D graphics running on their handheld—something they never imagined when they designed the machine. Kyoto at night. (Junko Kimura | Getty) There Cuthbert was in Japan’s ancient capital Kyoto in a meeting room at Nintendo headquarters, surrounded by 30 people, including Shigeru Miyamoto, Takehiro Izushi and Gunpei Yokoi, and demoing the 3D graphics he’d created on the Game Boy. There was only one person at Nintendo who spoke English and who didn’t speak it so well at the time. The rest of the creators did their best to communicate. They did share a lingua franca, though: the language of games. “Nintendo showed us a prototype of the Super Nintendo running a really buggy version of Super Mario World.” “That week was the birth of the Super FX chip,” said Cuthbert. Co-developed with Nintendo, the chip powered the 3D game graphics in the Super Nintendo. Throughout the 1980s, Japanese game developers, especially Nintendo, were focused on the 2D game experience. It was European developers who were experimenting with 3D graphics. Nintendo, however, realized the importance of 3D graphics and decided to collaborate with Argonaut Software to bring 3D graphics to the SNES. “Nintendo showed us a prototype of the Super Nintendo running a really buggy version of Super Mario World,” Cuthbert recalled. Some stages were just junk covering the screen—a far cry from a finished title. Besides Super Mario World, Nintendo showed Pilotwings and F-Zero, which was finished by that point. “They even gave us a ROM of F-Zero,” said Cuthbert. “They’d never do that nowadays.” Nintendo not only gave Argonaut unreleased games to take back to England, but its still unreleased, unmarked gray console that would later be known to the world as the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Cuthbert working on StarFox 2, 1995 After playing through F-Zero, Cuthbert played Super Mario Bros. 3. It was his first Mario game. He was instantly hooked. “You couldn’t save the game, so you had to leave it on,” Cuthbert said. Finishing the game took a solid 24 hours of play. It was the first title he completed 100 percent. What impressed him most was that the second half of the game got better—compared to many British games that started out with a bang, but then petered out. This was before the internet had kicked into high gear. Sure, there were online bulletin board systems, but game demos and pirated copies were traded via stamped letters. “There was no internet to leak the ROMs out on to,” said Cuthbert. “Even if you were to leak it, where would it go?” Sure, they had to sign a nondisclosure agreement, but the idea that Nintendo, who in recent years has become increasingly protective and secretive, would give another company its unreleased games and hardware is inconceivable. But it wasn’t merely Nintendo being reckless; it was a show of good faith. Nintendo wanted to go into business with Argonaut. It wanted to make a 3D chip and 3D games. Cuthbert at work on Star Fox for the SNES. At Miyamoto’s urging, Nintendo wanted to know how to make the 3D graphics in Pilotwings better. The aircraft itself was a rendered sprite, but there was talk at that time of making the aircraft out of polygons. It didn’t happen, but this laid the groundwork for the dedicated 3D chip that would ultimately become the Super FX chip. Argonaut co-founder Jez San had the contacts to make the chip, which would ultimately be used in select SNES cartridges like Star Fox. Argonaut signed a deal with Nintendo to make games, and Cuthbert, with his 3D graphics expertise, was assigned to program the games. Cuthbert set to work on X, the first game on a portable Japanese system to feature 3D graphics. In a way the game was a precursor for the next