If anyone wanted to produce a game without Nintendo's permission, they would be claiming to use the word 'Nintendo' without a licensed trademark, and therefore Nintendo would be in a position to sue them for trademark infringement. 'The game would only start if the word was correctly in place in the ROM. 1986's Starglider was inspired by San's love of Star Wars

'They had the Nintendo logo drop down from the top of the screen, and when it hit the middle the boot loader would check to see if it was in the right place,' recounts Argonaut founder Jez San. It takes something special to get on the radar, and Argonaut got Nintendo's attention in the most brazen way imaginable - it defeated the copyright protection mechanism on the popular Game Boy console. When you're a tiny team operating out of someone's house, you don't just waltz into the HQ of a multi-million dollar industry leader. How Argonaut and Nintendo came to be partners is a remarkable story of technical wizardry and rule-breaking.

This exploratory thrust wouldn't have been possible without the involvement of Argonaut Software, a small UK-based studio with big ideas famous for its impressive home computer title Starglider. Star Fox - or Starwing as it was retitled in Europe thanks to the existence of a German company called StarVox - marked Nintendo's first tentative steps into the realm of 3D, a world it had - up to that point - been curiously reluctant to explore. The article was originally published in June last year.Ģ0 years ago this month, British engineering ingenuity and Japanese design savvy elegantly combined to create what is arguably one of the most technically outstanding releases of the 16-bit era, and a truly significant entry in Nintendo's impressive library of software. Today, in the wake of Nintendo's mini-revival of Starfox with Shigeru Miyamoto's Wii U experiment, we bring you Damien McFerran's making of the SNES original. Every Sunday we take a stroll through our archives in order to reintroduce to a piece from our past.

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