Bertie is a synonym for Eurogamer. Writes, podcasts, looks after the Supporter Programme. Talks a lot.
Japan, 1993, in the city of Kyoto, and two young men are on a bike. They're on the busiest crossing in the city and clearly, they're drunk.. Inside their bags, they have papers they probably shouldn't have - confidential papers. Confidential Nintendo papers. And in a few hazy post-pub moments, these papers are about to be all over the floor for everyone to see. One look at them and you'd see the game Nintendo was making next.
Miraculously, they got away with it. Once they'd collected all of the paperwork up and dusted it off, it didn't look too bad. Tattered, maybe, but far from ruined. So when they returned to the office the following day, no one seemed to mind."Actually," says Goddard,"maybe it worked in our favour because it looked like we were studying them so hard that they got a bit messed up.
Jez San created Argonaut Games back in 1982, and the studio was located at his house. Developers were scattered across a handful of rooms, and most - if not all - were guys of around a similar age. It was relaxed, it was informal, they'd go to the pub every Friday and hang out. Goddard loved it."We just had fun all the time," he says.
Starglider, the game that would start Argonaut on a path that led to Star Fox. Goddard was a huge fan. It's with this level of anticipation that Goddard and Cuthbert walked in. They were excited. They were expecting to be dazzled. But it wasn't the colourful welcome they'd hoped for."Everything was white or grey, the uniforms were beige..." Goddard recalls."You imagine all these colourful sorts of Marios and stuff around, but there was nothing, there was none of that." The only signs of personality were the figurines on people's otherwise identical desks.
They had a nickname for him, he tells me -"Irrelevant". They didn't mean it in a nasty way or anything like that, it was just that he had a knack of"coming out with really weird irrelevant-sounding questions", apparently."We'd be talking about one thing but then he'd suddenly start talking about something completely different," Goddard says. And he shrugs."I think his mind works in a very different way to other people.
Star Fox, the project itself, was mired in technical issues. Because the team were developing both hardware and software simultaneously, it wasn't always clear where the problems came from. Which was to blame? And there wasn't an internet to turn to. There were only books. It meant progress looked like wading around in a quagmire of trial and error.
Nintendo would also work very long hours, and the expectation was that Goddard and Cuthbert would, too."We were just told that we had to stay there until something was done," he says,"or stay there until something was fixed. We couldn't go home, kind of thing." It wasn't called crunch, not then, but that's exactly what it was. And it was mandated.
He remembers one time that he blew up a power supply in a new development PC, because he plugged it in at the wrong voltage. And Miyamoto noticed."And Miyamoto got really angry and said, 'You need to go and apologise to blah-blah-blah now.'" But Goddard had other ideas. Goddard had a decision to make at Nintendo now, because with Star Fox finished, the contract tying him there was done. Did he want to go back to the UK or would he stay at Nintendo in Japan? The offer was there. And, not seeing much back home for himself in the UK, he took it.
"It was interesting because they hadn't really travelled much, so it was all very, very new to them. And obviously the way of working is very, very different from what they were used to," says Goddard."I think a lot of times they thought the work ethic wasn't as good as Nintendo's, as it were." Iwata and Nishida knew Nintendo's way of doing things: regimented order and discipline.
The Mario face, which came about as a result of Goddard messing around with a webcam and ping pong balls. The other N64 milestone Goddard was involved in, and that he takes particular pride in, was 1080 Snowboarding. It's actually a game idea he's come back to a few times over the years - even very recently. He was the lead programmer on it, in a team of only around nine people. But to divide Nintendo at the time into individual games and teams is misleading, because really, everyone worked as one.
But being a second-party studio, so close to Nintendo, had its drawbacks. Goddard was interested in new and emerging game technologies, things like virtual reality, but the contractual obligation to Nintendo meant Vitei couldn't pursue them. Not in the Vitei office, anyway. But what if there was an area there where a separate company could work? And it's this thought which led to the creation of Vitei Backroom. Located, quite literally, in the back room.
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