Bertie is a synonym for Eurogamer. Writes, podcasts, looks after the Supporter Programme. Talks a lot.
Japan, 1993, in the city of Kyoto, and two young men are on a bike. They're on the busiest crossing in the city and clearly, they're drunk.. Inside their bags, they have papers they probably shouldn't have - confidential papers. Confidential Nintendo papers. And in a few hazy post-pub moments, these papers are about to be all over the floor for everyone to see. One look at them and you'd see the game Nintendo was making next.
Miraculously, they got away with it. Once they'd collected all of the paperwork up and dusted it off, it didn't look too bad. Tattered, maybe, but far from ruined. So when they returned to the office the following day, no one seemed to mind."Actually," says Goddard,"maybe it worked in our favour because it looked like we were studying them so hard that they got a bit messed up.
Starglider, the game that would start Argonaut on a path that led to Star Fox. Goddard was a huge fan. The pitch would go something like this:"If you fund us," Goddard summarises,"we can make an actual chip that goes on the cartridge to speed all of this up, so you get proper good frame rates, proper 3D, with filled graphics 3D, not just wireframe." But imagine delivering to a boardroom of now legendary Nintendo faces. It must have been daunting to say the least. Whatever San said, though, it worked."I think they just said yes there and then," Goddard says.
It's with this level of anticipation that Goddard and Cuthbert walked in. They were excited. They were expecting to be dazzled. But it wasn't the colourful welcome they'd hoped for."Everything was white or grey, the uniforms were beige..." Goddard recalls."You imagine all these colourful sorts of Marios and stuff around, but there was nothing, there was none of that." The only signs of personality were the figurines on people's otherwise identical desks.
And inevitably, when spending so much time with people, there wriggles in a little space for small talk. Even with Miyamoto."Especially Miyamoto-san," Goddard corrects me,"because he was always interested in the culture of the UK, and the Beatles, and all the stereotypical English things that people in Japan love. He was always really curious about all that."
A playthrough of Star Fox on SNES. If you jump to the credits at 1:08:19, you'll see Giles Goddard's name. Rules like working until exactly 12pm, when a bell would ring to signal that everyone had to take their lunch hour now, thank you very much. Except, there was no thank you very much, there was just a bell. And then another bell, and then another one."I don't want to say 'it was like a prison'," he says, and then laughs, realising he's said it now.
He remembers one time that he blew up a power supply in a new development PC, because he plugged it in at the wrong voltage. And Miyamoto noticed."And Miyamoto got really angry and said, 'You need to go and apologise to blah-blah-blah now.'" But Goddard had other ideas. But Goddard wasn't entirely satisfied with it. Perhaps it's the programmer in him, but what bothered him was the frame-rate."When you start making the game, you design it for twenty frames a second because there's not a lot of content in there and it feels really nice - the movement's really nice," he says. And then the design team comes in and ruins everything - read: makes it look pretty.
"It was interesting because they hadn't really travelled much, so it was all very, very new to them. And obviously the way of working is very, very different from what they were used to," says Goddard."I think a lot of times they thought the work ethic wasn't as good as Nintendo's, as it were." Iwata and Nishida knew Nintendo's way of doing things: regimented order and discipline.
The Mario face, which came about as a result of Goddard messing around with a webcam and ping pong balls. That N64 period would also be his last at Nintendo, and there are two reasons why Giles Goddard decided to leave. One was because his interest was waning. He'd been there more than a decade and, ever the curious type, there were new technological advancements in the world he was interested in. Like the PDA - the personal digital assistant. Or as Goddard calls it:"The iPhone of the nineties.
As you've probably discovered reading that, though, the distinction between Vitei and Vitei Backroom was rather confusing. That's why, a few years later, the company was rebranded
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