Dylan Cuthbert, now-president of Q-Games (developer of the Pixeljunk series), was just 17 years old when he was employed at Nintendo to work on the original Star Fox. He quickly went from hacking Spectrum computers in the UK to being one of the first people outside of Japan to work with Nintendo at their Kyoto headquarters, before even hitting his 20s.
This is an amazing story to explore in itself, but the journey Cuthbert embarked on just to get there is just as compelling.
A year prior, Cuthbert had found employment at British developer Argonaut. The studio was so impressed by his ability to take limited hardware and coax seemingly impossible, next-gen displays out of them that they tasked him with an appropriately ambitious goal: to create a 3D engine for the Game Boy.
This was especially difficult because, back then, official Nintendo development kits were not easy to acquire. Argonaut had no choice but to make their own, and to do that, they had to reverse-engineer the Game Boy to figure out how it worked.
In a fascinating interview with USgamer, Cuthbert said, “We hacked together a Game Boy development kit with a camera pointed at the Game Boy. We took a cartridge — I think a Tetris cartridge — and unscrewed it all.
“We connected up wires to chips and connected them to this circuit board one of the guys at Argonaut had [made]. They’d gotten into circuit printing and were printing the circuit boards in this bath full of acid.”
“They’d gotten into circuit printing and were printing the circuit boards in this bath full of acid.”
As unlikely as this — a group of British guys hacking together Game Boy games in a bathtub — may seem like the beginning of a huge technological advancement for Nintendo, it was from these bizarre beginnings that Cuthbert quickly made a breakthrough. “I got to the point where I could actually program, compile, and get code on the screen within a very quick time. So, I started developing a 3D engine on the Game Boy.”
When Cuthbert made his first prototype with the engine — a 3D space shooter with full 360-degree movement — it quickly caught Nintendo’s attention. It even impressed the Game Boy’s creator, Gunpei Yokoi, so much that he requested that Cuthbert be flown over to meet him.
Argonaut were quickly brought in to work alongside Nintendo’s in-house division, which were responsible for designing the Game Boy. Cuthbert’s project soon evolved into an official release on the system, launching in Japan in 1992 under the name X.
X is what paved the way for the hit Nintendo game Star Fox, which in turn spawned a franchise which Dylan Cuthbert has been involved with ever since — he also programmed Star Fox Command, Star Fox 64 3D and the canceled Star Fox 2, which finally saw an official release worldwide with the recent SNES Mini.
I love stories like this, of humble beginnings and unsung heroes in the games industry. It resulted in a significant technological discovery for Nintendo, spawned a big franchise for them, and marked the beginning of their willingness to collaborate with external developers. It all started because a group of British guys were tearing up Game Boys and connecting them to circuits made from a bath full of acid — and Nintendo gave them a shot.
