Croc, the crocodile who wanted to be Yoshi and to whom we indirectly owe Super Mario 64
It may not sound familiar to you over the years, but there was a time when Argonauts was one of the heavyweights in the industry. A technical reference that catapulted 3D into consoles with a team of just 12 people led by a precocious genius: Jez San .
Theirs are Starglider , the two Starfox original chip Super FX for Super Nintendo , and a series of great achievements indirect big N. The manipulation of sprites would cause the development of Yoshi’s Island was his thing, for example, and if Jez San didn’t stop braking here, they might also have something to do with Super Mario 64 .
Croc: Legend of the Gobbos: Croc, the crocodile who wanted to be Yoshi and to whom we indirectly owe Super Mario 64
“After the end of the contract we offered them our next game, which was a 3D Mario World with Yoshi as the protagonist. We had designed the worlds of a 3D platform that we called “Yoshi something”, we created a prototype and we showed them what it looked like.
It was basically a Super Mario World in a 3D environment. Their heads exploded with it, but they decided it was a great opportunity to cut us off and do it themselves. That’s when they started making Super Mario 64 and we turned our game into what would later become Croc. “
That Super Mario 64 went down in the annals of history and Croc: Legend of the Gobbos has only remained in the memory of some is, according to the founder of the now-defunct Argonauts , a question of financial muscle.
Nintendo’s financing was not that of that small and ambitious English study, which caused that shortly after that the plumber game was on everyone’s lips, while it took them a little more to get the money to finish the development and put discs to spin on PlayStation, Saturn and PC.
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Jez San acknowledged in the same interview that, yes, during their collaboration with Nintendo they used technique and the Japanese used creativity. Each one was unbeatable in its own way, so although there is a gulf between what was offered by Super Mario 64 and what was delivered in Croc: Legend of the Gobbos , it is no less true that the role of Argonauts at that time was very important.
The Argonauts legacy: Croc, the crocodile who wanted to be Yoshi and to whom we indirectly owe Super Mario 64
If Jez San’s words do not sound crazy, it is precisely because of everything that Argonauts meant for Nintendo at that time. The English studio won the favor of the Japanese company by overcoming the Game Boy’s copy protection system and sneaking a prototype of Starglider , the studio’s first 3D game, onto the laptop .
The sight of the Argonauts logo scrolling across the screen instead of Nintendo’s caused a sensation, and since then the small team sailed between the UK and Japan to collaborate with a company that had found its technical ceiling in the 3D simulation of Pilotwings. and F-Zero with Mode 7.
From that work was born what would later become the great leap of Super Nintendo , the manufacture of the first GPU in history. For practical purposes, that was precisely what the Super FX coprocessor chip offered . An idea that Argonauts sold to Nintendo promising a system ten times faster than what they had, and that ended up being 200 times faster.
“The reality was, at that time – and probably still is in a sense – Nintendo didn’t have that many good programmers. They were mainly creative, and what used to happen was that Nintendo programmed their games there, making them work and were fun. And then they were sent to a company called HAL, which reprogrammed the games with their good programmers.
In all the games we made for Nintendo, all the code was ours and also some of the design. Nintendo did most of the design, the characters, the music. They took care of the creative aspect while we took care of the technician. It was a very close collaboration ”.
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The collaboration between Argonauts and Nintendo was limited to a contract in which the former would make three games for them in two years, but in their passage through Japan there was much more than shaping Star Fox , the first game to use a GPU to function. .
Argonauts would deliver a free-flying first-person prototype, and then Nintendo would make sense of it. Miyamoto clipped the Arwing’s wings by limiting mobility to a flight on rails – thus allowing it to offer a certain structure that would favor level design and narrative – and also added the third-person view to provide the feeling of space in that world. virtual, better showing the dangers and how they damaged the ship.
And so it was with other ideas such as the advanced sprite manipulation system offered by the Super FX , which surprised both Nintendo and to create Yoshi’s Island around the technology. A give and take between the two companies in which the only requirement for Nintendo to move forward seemed to be that they continue to be that small team in the background.
But the Argonauts plans were more ambitious. They wanted to make more games, hire more staff, ditch the exclusive, and work on even more ambitious projects, which in the end ended up causing their paths to diverge, Yoshi becoming Croc, and the push from the Western studio at the same time. Nintendo 3D ended up leading, directly or indirectly, to the launch of Super Mario 64 .
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The words of Nic Cusworth, designer of Croc: Legend of the Gobbos , became another interview in the best way to exemplify how that relationship worked in which some inspired each other until Nintendo took flight and Argonauts ended up being prey to their own decisions.
“I don’t know how much of that is true, but I do think it influenced some aspects of Mario 64. Maybe it was interesting for them to see their world in 3D. In any case I think they would have come to it at some point. I’m not trying to take any credit for Mario 64, but I think it did more good than bad. “
