Jez San’s first commercial game was, in his own words, “a Defender clone with nice graphics”. His second was Starglider, a 3D combat game that made the Atari ST sing and ran on every demonstration machine in Dixons. By 1990 his team had 3D graphics running on Nintendo’s black-and-white Game Boy, and within a few years his company, Argonaut, had designed the chip that put polygons on the Super Nintendo. San was not the only programmer behind any of it, and by the 1990s he was running the company more than writing code, but he was the one who kept asking whether a machine could do 3D.
Fast facts
- Born: 1966.
- Argonaut: began trading under the name in 1982, at sixteen; a real company once Starglider’s royalties arrived.
- Games: Skyline Attack (Commodore 64, 1984), Starglider (1986), Starglider 2 (1988), Birds of Prey (1992); then as head of Argonaut, Star Fox with Nintendo (1993) and Croc (1997).
- Hardware: proposed the 3D chip that became the Super FX.
- Honours: OBE in the 2002 New Year Honours, “for services to the Computer Games Industry”.
- After Argonaut: founder of the online poker company PKR; revived Argonaut Games as a publisher in 2024.
A BBC Micro kid
San 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, The One for ST Games reported in 1991. A Saturday job at Microage Electronics, which the magazine called “the first BBC Micro shop”, led him and his colleagues to writing books, games and manuals. With his school friend Fouad Katan he wrote a guide to the BBC Micro’s disc system, which C&VG said appeared in 1982, “well before the publication of the official Acorn manual”. In the summer of 1982, at sixteen, he worked alongside Katan at Silversoft. That is the year the Argonaut entry takes as the company’s beginning, though until Starglider’s royalties arrived it was, as San put it, effectively a one-man company trading under a name.
His first commercial game, written in 1984, was Skyline Attack for the Commodore 64, published by Century Hutchinson. San called it “a Defender clone with nice graphics, a bit like Drop Zone in some ways”: a 2D scrolling shooter, with a game of Snake to play while it loaded. Century also published his book on the Sinclair QL, Quantum Theory.
Starglider
San’s break came from a tool, not a game. He and Katan had built a programmers’ development system, and British Telecom’s games business, Telecomsoft, used it to convert Elite from the BBC Micro to the Commodore 64. “I agreed to help them port Elite,” San told Retro Gamer, “if they agreed to give me my own game deal – Starglider.”
He started it on a rented Apple Macintosh, moved to the Atari ST and Amiga, and worked on it from 1984 to 1986, living at home on the advance. It had begun as a bid for a Star Wars licence that fell through. Starglider came out from Rainbird at the end of August 1986: fast wireframe vector graphics with hidden-line removal, a missile you steered from its own camera, and a sampled song on the title screen. The ST’s sound chip could not play samples, so San opened one up, measured its outputs with a voltmeter and built a table of volume settings that let him play waveforms through it. “Back then this was a major technical achievement,” he told Edge in 2000.
The game “flew off the shelves”, he said, and the royalties went back into the business. Argonaut grew to six people, then ten, and made Starglider 2 (1988) in solid, filled 3D. Its next project, the flight simulator Birds of Prey, took four years. “We just thought of doing a flight sim with Starglider technology,” San told The One. “We kept making it bigger and more realistic… It was commercial suicide, and we’re unlikely to do it again.”
3D for Nintendo
At the end of the 1980s Argonaut turned to Nintendo’s machines. According to Retro Gamer’s 2006 history of Star Fox, Argonaut’s team went as far as reverse-engineering a Game Boy, and San then approached Nintendo in Japan with the idea of 3D games for its hardware. “They immediately flew me to Japan to meet with them,” he said. “They hired us to do a few 3D games, starting with the Japan exclusive Eclipse on the Game Boy, which became Lunar Chase. Then we started doing Starglider on the NES, which was codenamed NesGlider.” ACE played Eclipse in September 1990. “We wanted to program Starglider on the Gameboy,” San told the magazine. “The Nintendo Gameboy and NES consoles weren’t designed to run 3D games.”
Nintendo then showed Argonaut its next console, the Super NES. “I suggested the idea that while developing 3D games for Nintendo we might be able to design a 3D chip that would make its game console the first one capable of doing proper 3D graphics,” San said. Nintendo paid for the chip. It was called the MARIO chip, for Mathematical Argonaut Rotation I/O, and was designed by Rob Macaulay and Ben Cheese before being renamed the Super FX. It sat in the game cartridge, so players did not need to buy an add-on. Argonaut’s Dylan Cuthbert, Krister Wombell, Giles Goddard and later Colin Reed moved into Nintendo’s offices in Kyoto to make Star Fox with Shigeru Miyamoto, while the chip and the 3D technology were developed in England. Edge put Star Fox’s sales at four million copies in 1998, when San told the magazine that working with Nintendo “got us into hardware and I am eternally grateful to Nintendo for giving us that opportunity”.
Running Argonaut
Argonaut chose to stay independent of Nintendo and worked for everyone: Croc for Fox Interactive in 1997, early work on Sega’s Dreamcast, and processor designs sold as ARC. San told Edge in 2000 that the hardware division had been spun off as a separate company, ARC, which was about to go public. The same article put him 198th in The Times Rich List, with £150 million. He helped set up TIGA, the British trade association for game developers, and came up with its name.
In the 2002 New Year Honours he was appointed OBE “for services to the Computer Games Industry”, described in the list as founder of Argonaut Games plc. He called it “sort of surreal that the government at a moment in time decided to reward someone from the game industry with such an honour”. Two years later, in October 2004, Argonaut ran out of cash and collapsed into administration; the Argonaut entry tells that story.
After Argonaut
San’s next company was Crunchy Frog, which became the online poker site PKR. It launched in 2006 with a 3D poker table: in 2012 San said his 3D work had carried on “even today with 3D poker”. PKR was suspended in May 2017 after admitting it was in severe financial difficulty, and went into administration; PokerStars later refunded its players. By 2012 he had also founded Origin8, a developer of mobile applications, and in 2017 he launched FunFair, a gambling venture built on the Ethereum blockchain.
“I miss being hands-on,” he told Retro Gamer in 2012. “I keep saying that one day I will start programming again.” In August 2024 he and Gary Sheinwald, his producer at Rainbird on Starglider, relaunched Argonaut Games as a small publisher, beginning with a remaster of Croc. “I’m thrilled to see the Argonaut name back after twenty years away,” San said.
Sources
- Computer & Video Games issue 63, January 1987: “Sans of Time”, interview (age 20; the BBC disc-system guide; Skyline; the C64 Elite).
- The One for ST Games issue 39, December 1991, p. 24: profile of Jez San by Laurence Scotford (the TRS-80, the BBC Micro and Microage; Skyline Attack in 1984 and “a Defender clone”; Century Hutchinson and Quantum Theory; the Elite development system; the Macintosh; “trading as Argonaut”; Birds of Prey).
- ACE issue 36, September 1990, p. 12: Eclipse for the Game Boy.
- “The Making of Starfox”, Retro Gamer issue 28, 2006, pp. 27–28: the reverse-engineered Game Boy; Nintendo in Japan; Eclipse/Lunar Chase and NesGlider; the MARIO chip, Rob Macaulay and Ben Cheese; the team in Kyoto.
- “Audience with Jez San”, Edge issue 62, September 1998, pp. 23–27: Star Fox’s sales; independence from Nintendo; “eternally grateful”.
- “The making of… StarGlider”, Edge issue 90, November 2000, pp. 141–144: the Star Wars rights, the ST sound chip, Gary Sheinwald as his Rainbird producer, the advance and royalties, ARC, The Times Rich List.
- “The Making of Starglider”, Retro Gamer Collection vol. 6, 2012, pp. 74–77: Silversoft in 1982; the development system and the Elite deal; 1984–1986; TIGA; the OBE; Crunchy Frog, PKR and Origin8.
- Edge issue 108, March 2002: “Jez San OBE”.
- “2002 New Year Honours”, Wikipedia (web, secondary), reproducing The London Gazette list: “Jeremy San, Founder, Argonaut Games plc. For services to the Computer Games Industry.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_New_Year_Honours
- “PKR.com”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): the launch in June 2006. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PKR.com
- “PokerStars to Refund PKR Players”, PokerNews, July 2017 (web, secondary): the suspension in May 2017 and the refunds. https://www.pokernews.com/news/2017/07/pokerstars-to-refund-pkr-players-28418.htm
- “PKR founder Jez San punts on blockchain-based casino”, CalvinAyre.com, 29 June 2017 (web, secondary): FunFair. https://calvinayre.com/2017/06/29/bitcoin/pkr-founder-jez-san-punts-on-blockchain-based-casino
- “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-