Grand Thieves & Tomb Raiders (29 page)

Using Canadian sales as a guide, the court decided that the injunction had cost Lewis Galoob Toys 1.6 million sales, and when multiplied by the profit per unit, lost earnings were found to be
slightly higher than the amount held for the injunction bond. Over Nintendo’s protests, the entire $15 million was paid directly to Galoob.

With the injunction lifted the pent-up demand for the Game Genie hit like a tsunami. ‘It had had so much publicity because Nintendo were trying to squash it,’ says Darling.
‘All the magazines were interested, saying: “Why are you trying to stop it – it sounds like good fun.” So when they eventually won the court case they sold millions and
millions of them. I think it sold 140 million dollars at retail.’

The publicity from the injunction acted like an extra stretch on a loaded catapult, and in 1991, the Game Genie was the US’s fifth bestselling toy. Codemasters’ duel with an industry
giant hadn’t simply enriched it; it was a step-change in the size of the company, and gave it access to the console market. ‘We were able to use the money to do Sega Mega Drive
games,’ Darling says. ‘We could get into consoles fully. It enabled us to ramp up our development.’

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 fine.’

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.’