 Jez San had to admire the absurdity of the situation. Here he was, a British kid just barely out of his teens sat in front of probably the biggest video game rock star on the planet, who was asking for his help. Shigeru Miyamoto was desperate to create a powerful 3D game for the Super Nintendo, but he just didn't know what to do. Nintendo's greatest designers had tried their hardest to boost the power of the snares to create powerful games with rotating sprites and polygon effects, but they had failed to achieve their goals. In desperation, they had begun looking outward and were willing to do something unprecedented. The only way to advance Nintendo's 3D gaming capabilities was to trust an inexperienced young Westerner. Your problem is hardware, Jez explained. Your computer chip just won't run fast enough. Let us design a chip for you, and I guarantee it'll be ten times faster than what you're currently using. This was a lie. It was a terrible, enormous bluff. Jez didn't have any idea how to make a chip that powerful. He'd never built anything like this before, and his small team of fellow gaming enthusiasts were similarly out of their depth. But Nintendo needed this chip, and Jez figured that if he acted confident enough, he could figure out the specific details a little later in the process. Besides, all he needed to do was completely revolutionise 16-bit gaming technology. How hard could it be? Argonaut Games wasn't exactly a big company. Jez San had founded it at age just 16. Initially, the company existed just so that Jez could start making his own video games for fun. Over time, he hired his friends as well, setting them to work building and experimenting with emerging games technology. Jez named the company after himself, albeit with a twist. His nickname, Jez San, sounded a bit like Jason, which led him to a Greek myth reference for his team of Argonauts. The company was living hand-to-mouth. Making games without much experience wasn't easy. Jez's team were operating in London, which was hardly a world centre for gaming at the time. The Argonauts were just making enough to scrape by, but not much extra. They were having fun, though, and were seeing some moderate success, which was nice. But Jez had bigger goals in mind. Jez loved playing around with gaming hardware to see what he could achieve. He found himself fascinated by the Nintendo Game Boy and its bizarre copyright system. In order to play a game, the Game Boy needed to load Nintendo's logo on-screen. Any game that used this logo without Nintendo's permission was quickly served with a lawsuit. It was through this method that Nintendo maintained complete control of the games that were published for their platform. Jez was determined to break this protection. After playing around with the system for a while, he found a hardware solution that let unlicensed game cutters skip the opening logo, defeating Nintendo's licensing trap. Meanwhile, one of Jez's friends, Dylan Cuthbert, was working on another Game Boy project that seemed promising. A few years younger than Jez, Dylan was a genius with programming hardware, and he wanted to see how far he could push the Game Boy. Dylan built an arcade-style 3D shooter prototype for the small green screen of Nintendo's popular handheld. This had initially seemed impossible. It seemed there was no way that the Game Boy could handle such a complex piece of processing. Nonetheless, Dylan succeeded in making it work, and he and Jez combined their creations onto a single cartridge to show off the Argonauts programming triumphs. Emboldened by his team's success, Jez decided to use the cartridge as a way of getting Nintendo's attention. At a local games fair, he approached the Nintendo booth to show the company's representatives his prototype Game Boy game, complete with his legal bypass of Nintendo's security. Jaws hit the floor. Phone calls were made. Nintendo went into panic mode. A kid had beaten the software designed by Nintendo's best and brightest, and the company needed to know how. While the chaos raged, several of Nintendo's employees took notice of Dylan's game prototype as well. Clearly, these kids knew what they were talking about. Nintendo was going through a period of transition at the time. While their NES console had proven popular, gamers were requesting bigger and better graphics. With rival games companies making technological strides forwards, Nintendo was having a hard time adjusting to new demands. What's more, the rise of Western games developers made Nintendo nervous. There was a danger that English-speaking teams could steal Nintendo's hard work and take a chunk out of the company's audience. Despite a general policy of never dealing with outsiders, Nintendo's bosses admitted that they needed new talent to keep on top of the games market, wherever that talent came from. It was for this reason that soon after his meeting with Nintendo representatives at the games fair, Jez and Dylan found themselves on a plane to Japan. To be honest, Jez could certainly get used to the lifestyle here. Nintendo had paid for him to stay in the fancy Kyoto Royal Hotel and he was thrilled to be meeting with some of the biggest names in video gaming. Meanwhile, Dylan was enjoying the warm, subtropical weather of Kyoto. Initially, the heat and humidity had come as a shock, but everything was bright and sunny, which felt like such a wonderful change compared with the drizzly, overcast life in London that Dylan was used to. Little did Jez and Dylan know that Nintendo had big plans for them, if only they could be convinced to trust them. The first time the pair arrived at Nintendo's headquarters, they were ushered into a room that was filled to the brim with around 13 Nintendo employees, engineers and designers, all of whom were wearing identical Nintendo uniforms. Jez and Dylan were somewhat taken aback. Here they were, a pair of newbie developers from far away, and it seemed that Nintendo's plan was to pick apart everything they'd made and try to learn as much as possible about how they built their games. In lengthy business meetings, the heads of Nintendo scrutinized Jez and Dylan heavily. Many of the higher-ups were amazed at how much the pair could do considering their age. That said, youth shouldn't necessarily count against them. After all, plenty of Nintendo's biggest stars had come from humble beginnings. The bigger issue surrounding the Argonauts was that they were outsiders. Their company wasn't in-house, and Nintendo didn't like relying too heavily on third-party developers. Things might have been easier if Jez and Dylan were local to Japan, but because they were British, there were all kinds of challenges to working with them, not least a decidedly painful language barrier. Eventually though, the Nintendo bosses decided that they had to take a chance on these young programmers from England. They needed someone on their team who could teach them to create 3D games, and by this point, they were pretty desperate. And so it was that Jez found himself sat in a meeting with Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo's big superstar. Jez showed off his own demo of a 3D game running on the long-obsolete NES hardware, and in turn, Shigeru asked Jez for advice on their 3D project for the SNES. It wasn't great. The game didn't run particularly well, and Nintendo's programmers were really struggling to create something as advanced as they were hoping for. Over several subsequent meetings, and several trips back and forth between London and Kyoto, Jez and Shigeru talked through Nintendo's options. It looked like, in spite of the Argonaut's best efforts and the whole weight of Nintendo's research department behind the project, things were going nowhere. The SNES felt just a little too weak to run the kinds of games that gamers were looking for. Jez was frank in saying so, and pointed out that Nintendo would need a far more powerful effects chip to render the kind of 3D graphics they were hoping for. Jez began pulling numbers out of his head. He suggested calling on a few of his colleagues and friends back in the UK. If Nintendo would give him a slightly longer leash, he and the Argonauts could create a brand new computer chip from the ground up. Jez assured Shigeru that his team could produce a chip that would be 10 times more powerful than anything Nintendo could make without him. This was a huge promise that Jez didn't have any way of delivering on. But Nintendo didn't know that. Despite enormous misgivings, Nintendo elected to trust Jez and work with Argonaut Games, relocating Jez's entire team to Japan so that they could keep a close eye on them throughout the process. Now all the Argonauts needed to do was achieve the impossible. Getting to work with this prize team of Argonauts, Jez began drawing up plans for their new computer chip. The team didn't have a lot of experience at developing computer hardware, so they did things backwards. Instead of creating a chip that could be programmed for use in lots of different games, they tailor-made their new chip specifically for the game that Nintendo wanted to make. Whatever features Nintendo hoped to include in their revolutionary 3D title, Jez and the Argonauts would work to create. As they experimented on the project, the Argonauts affectionately began using the codename Mathematical, Argonaut, Rotation and Input Slash Output. Or Mario for short. While Nintendo didn't really understand what the Argonauts were doing from a technical standpoint, they had plenty of input to give on the story, gameplay and visuals. The inspiration for the game's feel and missions came from Shigeru. It was birthed from a wholly Japanese cultural icon. When Shigeru had visited a sacred shrine that featured hundreds of traditional red arches, daydreaming, as he often did, Shigeru began thinking of himself as a spaceship, flying through these arches to get points. This sensation, he thought to himself, would translate perfectly into the new 3D game that he'd been tasked to design. The new game didn't just have eastern roots, it drew inspiration from an appropriately western cultural icon as well. Shigeru was inspired by British science fiction puppet shows, such as Thunderbirds, who would fly around in advanced rocket ships and planes. Shigeru began crafting a story about animal space fighter pilots. Jers and the team appreciated the puppet sci-fi references that Shigeru was throwing around, and it certainly did help reduce the cultural barrier between the Argonauts and Nintendo. The game design was the perfect mix of British and Japanese influences, which helped connect the two teams that were working on its development. This trading of culture went beyond the two companies work on the game. Shigeru and Dylan spent hours together, teaching each other their respective languages, as they worked. Dylan would speak in faltering Japanese, while Shigeru would talk in English. The two encouraged and pushed each other, correcting mistakes and suggesting areas where they each could improve. Shigeru in particular was pleased to be able to finally gain a better grasp of the English language. He would try and come up with really corny, silly jokes as he practiced, trying to make the Argonauts laugh. He didn't always get everything right, but Dylan and the rest of the team found it hilarious nonetheless. After months of work, the Argonauts special computer chip now renamed simply the FX chip was completed. As it turned out, Jez's promise of the chip's power wasn't as outlandish as he'd thought. Instead of delivering a finished chip that was 10 times as powerful as what Nintendo had been working on with the SNES, the FX chip ended up being 40 times as fast. The chip sat in pride of place within every cartridge of Star Fox, a brand new series that Nintendo launched to show off what their SNES console was capable of. The game went on to receive critical acclaim and tremendous sales, helping to breathe new life into the Super Nintendo. The moral here is interesting. It's good to be confident. While over-promising as wildly as Jez sanded might get you into trouble, there's no harm in trusting your own abilities. Don't doubt yourself. Just because something seems impossible, it doesn't mean that you can't find a way to achieve your goals. The first and most important step in the process is believing in yourself. From there, you can push to overcome obstacles, endure setbacks and make special things happen. If you're confident enough, you can achieve incredible things and others will be inspired by your example. At the end of the day, even if something looks utterly impossible, you can achieve it. If you work hard enough and have faith that you'll succeed, you can do anything you set your mind to.