Argonaut is the British company that taught a Nintendo console to draw in 3D. In 1993 the Super Nintendo’s Star Fox, Starwing in Europe, ran on a graphics chip Argonaut had designed and sold inside the cartridge, so the extra power shipped with the game rather than the machine. Seven years earlier the company had been one teenager, Jez San, trading under a name, writing Starglider for Rainbird. Argonaut went on to make Croc and to sell processor designs to the mobile-phone industry. It ran out of money in October 2004.
Fast facts
- Founder: Jez San, who began trading as Argonaut in 1982, at sixteen.
- Addresses: Mill Hill, north London (1986); Colindale (1994); Edgware (1998).
- Games: Skyline Attack (1984–85, San’s first), Starglider (1986), Starglider 2 (1988), Birds of Prey (1992), 3D on the Game Boy (previewed as Eclipse, 1990), Star Fox with Nintendo (1993), Croc (1997), PlayStation versions of the first two Harry Potter games (2001–02).
- Hardware: the Super FX, known inside the company as the Mario chip; later the ARC processor cores, spun off as a separate company in 1998.
- End: administration, October 2004. San relaunched the name as a publisher in 2024.
A teenager trading as Argonaut
The One for ST Games profiled San in December 1991. He got his first computer, a Tandy TRS-80 Model 1, at twelve and a half, and in 1981 was one of the first people to buy a BBC Micro. A Saturday job at Microage Electronics, “the first BBC Micro shop”, led to writing books, games and manuals; Acorn User reviewed a disc-drive manual by “Foudan Katan and Jeremy San” in October 1983. A German magazine later put Argonaut’s beginning in 1982, “in Jez San’s bedroom”, and Edge said he established it at sixteen.
His first commercial game was Skyline Attack for the Commodore 64, credited to Jeremy San, Fouad Katan and Andrew Glaister. San called it “a Defender clone with nice graphics, a bit like Drop Zone in some ways”. Century Hutchinson published it at £7.95, along with his book on the Sinclair QL, Quantum Theory. Its selling point was a game of Snake to play while the main program loaded.
Starglider
San’s break came through British Telecom’s games business, Telecomsoft. He worked on the development system used to convert Elite to the Commodore 64, and people at Rainbird suggested he write a game of his own. He began a 3D game on the Apple Macintosh, then moved it to the Atari ST and Amiga when they appeared. That game was Starglider, a fast vector-graphics space combat game, published by Rainbird in 1986. The 8-bit versions came from Realtime Games, and CRASH gave the Spectrum one 95%, and 97% on the 128K.
While he worked on it, Argonaut had a sideline. Commodore Computing International reported in November 1986 that Argonaut Software, of 129 The Broadway, Mill Hill, was the British distributor of NewTek’s Digiview video digitiser for the Amiga, and estimated it had supplied 17% of all British Amiga owners with one in its first month. San, “Argonaut’s MD”, had sold his whole stock apart from the unit he was using for Starglider’s titles.
Until Starglider’s royalties arrived, San told The One, he “had been trading as Argonaut, even though he was effectively a one-man company”. The money let him set up a proper company and hire teams. Starglider 2 (1988) swapped the wireframes for solid, filled 3D and flew both above and below planet surfaces; ACE rated it 927 out of 1000 on the ST and Amiga. The next project went less well. The flight simulator Birds of Prey took four years: “We just thought of doing a flight sim with Starglider technology. We kept making it bigger and more realistic… It was commercial suicide, and we’re unlikely to do it again.” By late 1991 Argonaut had 30 staff and was moving into 10,000 square feet of offices.
3D on a Game Boy
The route to Nintendo ran through its black-and-white handheld. In September 1990 ACE previewed Eclipse, a 3D space game for the Game Boy. “We wanted to program Starglider on the Gameboy,” San said. “The Nintendo Gameboy and NES consoles weren’t designed to run 3D games.” The One called Argonaut the first team to get 3D running on the Game Boy.
Retro Gamer later described what followed. On the strength of the Game Boy game, two of Argonaut’s programmers, Giles Goddard and Dylan Cuthbert, went to work at Nintendo’s headquarters in Kyoto on the game that became Star Fox. The chip it needed, the Mario chip, a co-processor built into the cartridge that let the Super NES draw polygons, was designed at Argonaut in England, in San’s own account and in the patent that names San, Ben Cheese, Rob Graham and Pete Warnes as its inventors. Edge confirmed in 1994 that “Mario chip” was “the real name for the Super FX”. The first game to use it was Star Fox, made with Shigeru Miyamoto. Nintendo’s development manual gives the Super FX a clock of 10.74 MHz, “six times as fast as the Super NES CPU”. In 1993 Super Play reported that the chip and the game had both been designed for Nintendo by Argonaut.
By February 1994 Edge found Argonaut working on Super FX games for American publishers, a 3DO and PC shoot-’em-up, Creature Shock, for Virgin, and a game for Sony. Nintendo had taken the sequel, Star Fox 2, in-house, while FX Trax was being made in Kyoto under Miyamoto by “two temporary Argonaut defectors”. A faster version of the chip, the SFX II, ran “approximately 30% faster than the original Mario chip”. Star Fox 2 was finished but not released at the time; Nintendo finally put it out in 2017, on the Super NES Classic Edition.
Edge was not convinced by everything in the catalogue. “Apart from Starglider and its technically stunning sequel,” its profile said, “it’s difficult to find” a reason for “the company’s spectacular success. Some of the games that followed were poor.”
San gave his side of the Nintendo years to Edge in 1998. The two companies had worked “very closely” for two or three years, and Nintendo “more or less said they would do as many games as we wanted to do with them”, but Argonaut chose to stay independent rather than become, like Rare, partly owned by Nintendo. “Firstly it got us into hardware and I am eternally grateful to Nintendo for giving us that opportunity,” he said. By his count Star Fox sold four million copies.
Croc and ARC
Independence meant working for everyone. Argonaut wrote its own 3D programming library, BRender, which San said lost out once Microsoft bought a rival and built Direct3D on it. Its big success was Croc (1997), a 3D platform game published by Fox Interactive on the PlayStation and Saturn. San told Edge it had sold over a million copies, that Argonaut had done “even better with Croc than we ever did doing cartridge games”, and that Sega’s interest in the Saturn version led to Argonaut becoming “the first Dreamcast developer”. San said Argonaut had shown an early version of Croc to Nintendo “about two years before Mario 64 came out”.
The hardware side went its own way. By 1998 the processor group was selling ARC (Argonaut RISC Core) designs “for use in mobile phones and other applications”, and San told Edge the chip business and the games no longer had much in common. According to later public accounts it was separated from Argonaut and renamed ARC that year. The games company, Argonaut Games, went on to develop the PlayStation versions of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) for Electronic Arts.
Collapse
The end came quickly. In 2003 Vivendi Universal dropped Argonaut’s action game Malice, and another game, Orchid, was cancelled. Tameem Antoniades, a co-founder of Argonaut’s subsidiary Just Add Monsters, kept a diary for Edge. On 15 October 2004 Argonaut told them “they’ve run out of cash”: its shares were suspended and half its staff let go. An administrator auctioned off or closed the subsidiaries; Argonaut Sheffield closed on 22 October with 50 more jobs lost, and on 1 November the rest of Argonaut’s staff were let go. Just Add Monsters bought itself out with its founders’ own money and San as a backing director, and carried on as Ninja Theory.
A sequel to Argonaut’s first hit never appeared. In May 1992 The One reported that San had revealed that preliminary design work on Starglider 3 had been done, and that it was “just a question of finding the right deal”.
In August 2024 San and a co-chief executive, Gary Sheinwald, relaunched Argonaut Games as a small publisher, starting with a remaster of Croc. “I’m thrilled to see the Argonaut name back after twenty years away,” San said. Sheinwald had been Rainbird’s producer on Starglider: “I worked closely with Jez on the design and production of Starglider, Argonaut’s first big hit back in 1986,” he said, and the relaunch “brings me full circle”.
Sources
- Retro Gamer issue 28: Jez San on the Super FX chip’s design at Argonaut.
- US patent 5,388,841, filed January 1992: inventors Jez San, Ben Cheese, Rob Graham and Pete Warnes.
- “Star Fox studio Argonaut is back”, Time Extension, 28 August 2024 (web, secondary): Gary Sheinwald as co-CEO, and his own account of producing Starglider. https://www.timeextension.com/news/2024/08/star-fox-studio-argonaut-is-back-and-its-remastering-croc
- Acorn User issue 15, October 1983: disc-drive manual by Foudan Katan and Jeremy San.
- Your Commodore vol. 1 no. 4, January 1985: Skyline Attack (Jeremy San, Fouad Katan and Andrew Glaister). Big K issue 10, January 1985: Skyline Attack advertisement (£7.95). ZZAP!64 issue 10, February 1986: Century’s Skyline Attack and its loading game.
- CRASH issue 36, Christmas 1986, and issue 48, January 1988: Starglider on the Spectrum (95%; 97% on the 128K).
- Commodore Computing International vol. 5 no. 4, November 1986: Digiview review (Argonaut Software as UK distributor; Jeremy San).
- ACE issue 11, August 1988: Realtime and “the 8-bit conversions of Starglider”; Starglider 2 advertisement.
- ACE issue 13, October 1988, p. 76: Starglider 2 review (927).
- ACE issue 36, September 1990, p. 12: Eclipse for the Game Boy.
- The One for ST Games issue 39, December 1991, p. 24: profile of Jez San by Laurence Scotford (early life; Skyline Attack; Elite; Starglider; trading as Argonaut; Birds of Prey; 30 staff; 3D on the Game Boy).
- The One issue 44, May 1992: Starglider 3.
- PC Games (Germany), October 1992: Birds of Prey review (Argonaut begun in 1982).
- Super Play Gold, 1993: the Super FX and Starfox designed by Argonaut.
- Nintendo, Development Manual, Book II: the Super FX at 10.74 MHz.
- Edge issue 5, February 1994: Argonaut profile (“established Argonaut at the age of 16”; the Mario chip and SFX II; Star Fox 2 and FX Trax; the “poor” games).
- Edge issue 62, September 1998, pp. 23–27: “Audience with Jez San” (Nintendo; Star Fox’s sales; Croc; Sega; BRender; ARC).
- Edge issue 126, August 2003: Malice dropped by Vivendi; Orchid cancelled.
- Edge issue 149, May 2005: Tameem Antoniades’s Ninja Theory diary (Argonaut’s collapse, October–November 2004).
- Retro Gamer issue 23, 2005: Giles Goddard and Dylan Cuthbert at Nintendo; the Mario chip. A later retrospective.
- “Argonaut Games”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): ARC’s separation in 1998; the Harry Potter games; Star Fox 2’s release in 2017. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argonaut_Games
- “Classic studio Argonaut Games revived as ‘boutique publisher’”, Game Developer, 28 August 2024 (web, secondary). https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/classic-studio-argonaut-games-revived-as-boutique-publisher-