Argonaut Games
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| Proprietary limited company | |
| Industry |
Computer and video games Interactive entertainment |
| Fate | Liquidated |
| Founded | 1982 (as Argonaut Software) |
| Founder | Jez San |
| Defunct | October 2004 |
| Headquarters | London, England, U.K. (Colindale, then Edgware) |
| Subsidiaries | Argonaut Sheffield |
| Website | argonaut.com |
Argonaut Games plc was a British video game developer, founded in 1982 and liquidated in 2004. It was most notable for the development of the Super NES video game Star Fox and its supporting Super FX hardware.
I told them that this is as good as it’s going to get unless they let us design some hardware to make the SNES better at 3D. Amazingly, even though I had never done any hardware before, they said YES, and gave me a million bucks to make it happen.
Founded as Argonaut Software by teenager Jez San in 1982, the company name is a play on his name (J. San) and the mythological story of Jason and the Argonauts.
Its head offices were in Colindale, London, and later in the Argonaut House in Edgware, London. Its U.S. head office was in Woodside, California in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The company produced its first game, Skyline Attack, for the Commodore 64. It later produced the 3D Starglider games for the Amiga and Atari ST platforms.
In 1993, Argonaut collaborated with Nintendo during the early years of the NES and SNES, a notable incident being when Argonaut submitted a proof-of-concept method of defeating the Game Boy's copyright protection mechanism to Nintendo. The combined efforts from both Nintendo and Argonaut yielded a prototype of the game Star Fox, initially codenamed "NesGlider" and inspired by their earlier Atari ST and Amiga game Starglider, that they had running on the NES and then some weeks later on a prototype of the SNES. Jez San told Nintendo that his team could only improve performance or functionality of the demonstration if Nintendo allowed Argonaut to design custom hardware to extend the SNES to have true 3D capability. Nintendo agreed, so San hired chip designers and made the Super FX chip. They originally codenamed it the Mathematical Argonaut Rotation I/O, or “MARIO”, as is printed on the chip's surface. So powerful was the Super FX chip used to create the graphics and gameplay, that they joked that the Super NES was just a box to hold the chip.
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