I remember playing Starfox in Sears for the first time back in the 90s when FX just came out. I was completely blown away by it and played that demo longer than any other game that ever was featured in those demo setups in Walmart and Sears. After getting the game for Christmas, it inspired me to make a 'simulator' in my room. It was basically a box that was covered with thick blankets to make it dark, with my 34" color CRT TV angled down against one of those low to the ground rocker chairs. Then I combined it with stereo speakers hooked through my radio/tap/CD player head unit. Then I figured a way to split the video from the SNES to an old black and white TV I had so I setup an 'operator' section of the simulator. The operator would flip on and off a flashing red light that was inside the 'cockpit' when you had critical damage, as well as pumping in bursts of smoke and shaking the frame that held everything up to simulate shit blowing up as you took damage (it was just a couple of cans of air freshener that was ducted into the 'cockpit' and a piece of cable tied to the frame that was pulled). We probably killed some brain cells inhaling all the propellant from the air freshener. Between the darkness, the stereo sound, and the TV being so close it took most of your visual field it really go you into the environment and your heart would pump playing. When Starfox 64 came it a few years later, I rebuilt the whole thing and it was even better.
That sounds absolutely amazing. We used to put a blanket over my small tv and play Top gun on nes. Of course my little brother had to sit behind me as my copilot.
@@rossbarr-scragg4076 It was just me or one of my friends watching what was happening on the second monitor outside of the "simulator" and then creating all the effects manually. On the back side there was an operator booth that had a cheap, tiny black and white TV, some light switches for alert lights inside, a pipe where "smoke" aka air freshener was sprayed in, and a few strings tied at various points that could be pulled to make panels and wires fall to simulate damage. Nothing fancy at all and completely manually operated by a human. That said I am very tempted to try and make something like this again now that I am older and understand electronics a lot more, and arduinos and such are so cheap and easy to program.
@@hgbugalou wonderful story. Have you seen that device which is an LED strip you wrap around your TV that responds to the colors being displayed from the TV? For instance, if a fire is displayed the LED will glow bright red and orange and shimmer all about. It's very immersive
I remember LOVING Stunt Race FX as a kid. I tried playing it today and the extremely low framerate actually made me physically ill. It's weird because Star Fox doesn't do that.
It’s insane how much I played both games as a kid and today that frame rate just makes both unplayable. 3D was so novel back then that people would put up with basically anything for it
The composer Hajime Hirasawa had a falling out with Nintendo as well after Star Fox. Apparently over the ownership of the music he composed. The dude ended up basically inventing the technology for ringtones after getting into it with Nintendo, he's a CEO currently at his own company. Amazing that he came up with the major themes for Star Fox on game one, and dipped afterward with Nintendo obviously still using the music for decades. The design process for Star Fox was really groundbreaking and it seems like a lot can be learned about the industry from that game alone. Great work here, WWG that was enjoyable!
Wrestling With Gaming I agree...the only problem I have is how you introduce your topic....it feels as though you are continuing from a previous topic....apart from that....I’m loving it :)
The relocation may not have been so well for the devs... Or they made them do work on a game they knew they will never release, making them loose their time while developping N64... Who knows.
These kids showed up delivering THEE GAMES that expanded the Nintendo player base, DOOM & Star Fox, i can say that their games were the ones that every games playing kid in my school was talking about, how they were possible and the magical upgrade to the playing experience... if it turned out that these kids somehow made Golden Eye... well that would be too much
@* AnimalHeadSpirit * What long history? Their relationship started in the 80s, by then, Nintendo had no history with unfair practices for devs. At all.
Sadly the Super FX was a transitional chip. Amazing nonetheless but short lived. I still remember trying StarFox on a special ship shaped booth on one Nintendo store. The ship had speakers on each side of the cockpit. I already knew starfox but the experience in the booth with stereo sound and a joystick was mind blowing. The most memorable moment, the selected planet zooming in, and it's wooooough! sound. And the "good luck" delayed on each ear....ahh man! I wish more people coded games like that, 3D but still 2D in a way too due to pixelation. It's an art on itself.
To be fair, they did foot that cost on the customer. Star Fox cost a bit more than other SNES games. But still, it wasn't a *huge* price hike, so it's still super impressive that they were basically packing a GPU with every copy.
I was so grateful that Doom came out on the SNES when I was a kid. I didn't have a PC and only had a SNES at best in '97. I saw the game on PC at a friend's house and I needed to have it. So I couldn't believe it when I saw Doom for the SNES behind a glass case at K-Mart back then. It had its shortcomings, but it was certainly better than not having Doom at all. Yes, it was quite an achievement.
Really interesting video. I miss the 16 bit era for this reason; being able to beef up graphics by including additional hardware with the games themselves.
I was hoping for this ability for the Switch. For faster cheaper chips would be able to add extra abilities to it, after a year or two. But I don't think it has that ability.
Microsoft does have that online power thing for the Xbox One but it doesn't seem to deliver what they promised, as for the Switch, with how tech moves nowadays so fast, it's better to just release new consoles in a quicker cycle whiles keeping full compatibility, if Sony, Microsoft and NIntendo sticks to x86 and ARM's, that should be much easier to achieve a bit like how the PC can play pretty much any game going back decades.
Moving from passively cooled systems to actively cooled ones, pretty much killed the idea (and of course the fact that games are now just digital). Adding any passively cooled system to an actively cooled one would see only minimal gains and be way more work and cost.
Gotta say, man, just discovered this channel yesterday and it's one of my favorite gaming channels already. Really good content. Look forward to seeing more of your output.
Nintendo is like the cool kid in school, but he's really a douche towards everybody but he's soo good at sports and everything. Sega is like the friend you had that OD'd
And your friend SEGA always had the best indie movies, and the newest anime, and the coolest music you'd never heard of, and you had tons of fun with him even though he didn't have much money because that didn't matter, you could just hang out and have more fun than anywhere else anyway. RIP Sega, I didn't have a Genesis growing up but I had a Dreamcast in adolescence and I loved it so much.
On a related note: Still no Tetris? What is wrong with Nintendo? Pay the damn licensing fee and include the most popular Nintendo game of all time already!
How exactly would you pay them? The original contract was for Argonaut, not the individuals. That meant Argonaut would get the money and they decided who would get what? In order to give these individuals a paycheck, a new contract would have to be drawn up. Since StarFox 2 isn't being sold separately, that means that they would have to get a cut of the SNES classic edition profits. On top of that, the worth of the individual game in the collection of games might have to be determined. Unless they sued, which they would have no case for, they're not getting a paycheck.
Starfox...ah what memories for my 13 year old self. It was quite an experience playing for the very first time. The graphics of course, but the game play, music, variance of courses, and for the time fast screen rendering was an experience I'll never forget. Today if a teenager showed a company he had hacked their system they would immediately lawsuit him out of existence as the video game industry today is stifled as the indie game developer movement has shown.
6:30... the worlds first GPU? I don't know if it was the first but Silicon Graphics had a chip doing hardware accelerated triangles, transform, and lighting in 1982. They added texture mapping and other advanced features soon after. SGI was built around graphics hardware from day one and they had been producing generations of their chips for 10 years by the time the FX chips came along.
I'm with you. That's why in the video I say that "Jez San (the founder of Argonaut) considers it the world's first GPU." It's something he's said in interviews before. I'm not saying that it actually is the world's first GPU. In hindsight I probably could've been a little more clear by adding something like, "although others disagree, Je San personally considers it the world's first GPU." I can see how someone might miss that I say it's JEz's opinion.
I briefly tried it, but was unimpressed. I don't know if it's just because it's so many years later or that it wasn't similar enough to the first title which I beat many times.
what a fascinating story... It kinda seemed they had genius stroke of luck, but didn't have the experience to negotiate a more promising deal. The lack of success seemed to have made them choose to mostly produce license games - crap options but sure cash flow. Who knows what might have become of them, if Nintendo would have been more fair or more inclusive.
Hey my dude, awesome video but you forgot to mention that when the Nintendo/Argonaut deal ended Nintendo took some of the best people from argonaut with them and screwed them. The head of Argonaut said that he disliked Nintendo from then on in a Eurogamer interview. I would have been pissed as well
Glad to learn about all these technicalities behind the development of some of these outstanding games. Wish parents & primary school science teachers had videos like these back then so they’d fully disregard the hobby of gaming and actually appreciate that it took really intelligent people to make those games that kept us captivated in from our CRT TVs back then.
I'm a big Starfox fan from growing up, the first title (known over here in the UK as Starting) was the first game I ever played and completed. I never actually knew about the importance of the FX chip until a retrospective article I read in Nintendo Official Magazine in 2005, to celebrate the review and release of Starfox Assault, and how it was a group of young English developers that got the chip and the groundwork for the first game going, and then learning about the (then) unreleased sequel. I'm pretty open with the series in terms of loving 64 just as much as Adventures (Rareware fan also) through to Assault and Command, but I always appreciate learning more and more about Argonauts and how they got Starfox up and running :)
Well done. I only learned a few months ago that the FX chip was built into the cartridge , I always thought it was in the system. Really amazing engineering.
One of the things I recall from the early 90s with the fx chip was constant reminders of not having to buy an add on for high level graphics. Of course in America we never got anything to expand hardware but in Japan there were all kinds of things out but each one let Nintendo not have complete control on everything how they liked it
The FX chip claiming to eliminate the need to buy an add-on for high level graphics was a lie. You were buying a hardware add-on, it was just embedded in the cart instead of a system module. What's more, you had to buy the same add-on all over again with every single game (because every cart needed its own chip), instead of being able to buy it once and be done. It was a brilliant way to pump gamers for cash by invisibly (and unnecessarily) selling them the same piece of add-on hardware multiple times, while claiming to let them "avoid add-ons."
Nintendo should have included the SuperFX co-processor on the SNES mainboard. It'd have been worth a $30 price bump, given that it's inclusion would have really pushed the SNES far above and beyond the capabilites of the Mega Drive/Genesis and the PC-Engine/TurboGrafx
I can't express how massively hyped i was for star fox, as a teenager who was dreaming about games looking more real , star fox was that leap forward. The woman at the videogame store must have been tired of me always showing up nearly every day in the store to play the version she had long before it was released here.
The SNES is still the most recent console I own. I am very happy the Super FX chip was made because it meant I didn't have to buy a new console to play the new 3D games. There are still many games on the SNES I have yet to play. I love it!
Well, you got a new subscriber. I've watched 2 of your vids now and I'm hooked. Love the history of gaming (both video and tabletop) so I'm happy to have found your channel.
+Austin HasAgun thanks man, I appreciate it! It just takes a long time to build up subs unless RUclips decides to heavily promote your channel. Hopefully the subscribers will eventually come. I'm just glad that the people that have found the channel generally seem to enjoy the videos.
It's unfortunate that Nintendo didn't just buy out the small Studio and turn them into in-house developers. They seemed to have a lot of really good ideas.
My teenage mind was blown by Starfox. Now, I look at it and think, "Wuzzat? 10? Maybe 15 FPS?" I love watching emulators outrun the soundtrack in the intro sequence now. Fantastic game, though.
I grew up literally around the corner from Argonaut House, a building they bought and were based at in Edgware (North London); had no idea what they did at the time
Not to defend Nintendo but a lot of people don't realize that the monopoly Nintendo had on video games in the late 80's and 90's was only a thing in North America. In Europe and other parts of the world Nintendo had MUCH more competition. There was never a video game bubble burst outside of North America that left a void for Nintendo to fill. So all the gaming publishers had strong sales outside of NA which gave Nintendo less leverage.
I also thought that Super Mario RPG used the Super FX chip, but apparently that's another chipset. According to Wikipedia 34 SNES/Super Famicom titles used an enhanced chip.
I'm surprised that Star Fox was a commercial success. Back in the 90s I couldn't tell if anyone actually liked it since they would sneer at the mention of Star Fox or its commercial as well as the announcement of Star Fox 2. I felt as if I was the only one who liked the franchise. A few years ago I was so excited to secure a pre-order for the Super NES Classic so that I could finally try Star Fox 2 after 20 years of waiting and I did not feel disappointed. As dated as that game is I still enjoyed it more than Star Fox Zero. Like Star Fox 64, Star Fox 2 was designed for multiple playthroughs. Shame that Argonaut went under because they developed a great game. I would love a Star Fox 3 to continue with that series instead of its two reboots, Star Fox 64 and Star Fox Zero.
While the 3D effects would later be trumped by the N64, the sprite rotation could actually be seen in the GBA allowing Yoshi's Island to run without any enhancement chips.
Thanks. Appreciate it. This video is one of my oldest and way behind production quality of my current stuff so I'm really glad you liked it lol. This is my latest ruclips.net/video/SjCivnt5t50/видео.html
Star Fox was and still is my all time favorite game. I was alive during Atari, grew up with Nintendo but nothing ever blew me away like Star Fox did the first time I played it. Contra and Tecmo bowl series was my go to before that. Powering up my launch series XBOX and Halo the first time is the only thing that rivals it for me.
It’s insane that Nintendo let these guys go by the wayside. Especially with there experience in 3D games, and the Nintendo 64 just a few years away from releasing?
I wonder if Nintendo made the SuperFX2 an add-on cartridge if it would have helped the SNES live longer. Not like the 32X exactly, no additional power or video cables. Just a small cartridge containing the SuperFX2 chip and maybe a few other enhancement chips. Seeing how game with the chip were around $60, just the add-on could have been maybe $20-$30. We might have seen more games that took advantage of the chip if the add-on sold well.
I remember the first time I saw StarFox, my jaw dropped. At the time the graphics looked incredible. I just had to get a copy of StarFox, and the game not only looked great but it played great as well.
Imagine these kids going to Japan to work for one of the biggest companies in the industry. In 1993! They probably couldn't even speak a single word japanese.
i remember my mom buying this with game for me and me explaining the new thechnology in it to convince her to buy it lol. When I first played it i was in amazement, one favorite games ever.
yoshi's island didn't JUST use it for sprite scaling. it DID have some 3d polygons, in at least 2 levels. there's a large rotating 3d cylinder you have to jump on repeatedly so it doesn't roll you off, and a section of a castle (i think) that had large rotating rectangular prisms that you use to climb up a tower.
Absolutely love your channel! Have been extremely sick, but the bright side is, I have had the time to binge watch nearly all your videos. Definitely earned a sub and a like on each. Keep up the great work, I look forward to many more!
The only drawboack of the super fx2 chip was, it can only accept a max size rom of 2MB, in theory it might be possible to rank that up to 4MB or more by putting a 2MB chip on to it instead , then putting 2 2MB rom chips next to it, sothat rom A could load in it’s first 2MB data into it ,and once it knows all it’s data has been read, it then can clear out that 2MB ram chip and tell rom B to load it’s own data into it etc,,, this way you might overcome that 2MB limit, would be great for games witch potential extended patches for it.
This discovery actually blew my mind. When I was watching a video about corrupting Stunt Race FX, *yes the Super FX is corrupted and glitchy too* I found a hidden checksum. It checks if the Super FX Chip is corrupted or old. If it detects that, it says this !! OLD MARIO CHIP DETECTED !! !! FAILED TRYING TO MAKE CAR WITH BAD TYPE !! Try that for yourself folks, it's really true.
Actually, the SNES Doom port was based on the SNES Wolfenstein 3D port, which lacks external chips. It uses the same engine, in fact I doubt the 3D is actually using the hardware 3D plotting capabilities of the Super FX chip, and maybe it's just using the chip for the automap, which may be slowing the game down.
I remember playing Starfox in Sears for the first time back in the 90s when FX just came out. I was completely blown away by it and played that demo longer than any other game that ever was featured in those demo setups in Walmart and Sears. After getting the game for Christmas, it inspired me to make a 'simulator' in my room. It was basically a box that was covered with thick blankets to make it dark, with my 34" color CRT TV angled down against one of those low to the ground rocker chairs. Then I combined it with stereo speakers hooked through my radio/tap/CD player head unit. Then I figured a way to split the video from the SNES to an old black and white TV I had so I setup an 'operator' section of the simulator. The operator would flip on and off a flashing red light that was inside the 'cockpit' when you had critical damage, as well as pumping in bursts of smoke and shaking the frame that held everything up to simulate shit blowing up as you took damage (it was just a couple of cans of air freshener that was ducted into the 'cockpit' and a piece of cable tied to the frame that was pulled). We probably killed some brain cells inhaling all the propellant from the air freshener.
Between the darkness, the stereo sound, and the TV being so close it took most of your visual field it really go you into the environment and your heart would pump playing.
When Starfox 64 came it a few years later, I rebuilt the whole thing and it was even better.
That sounds absolutely amazing. We used to put a blanket over my small tv and play Top gun on nes. Of course my little brother had to sit behind me as my copilot.
Mate, this sounds amazing! How on earth did you make a unit respond to instances in the game??
@@rossbarr-scragg4076 It was just me or one of my friends watching what was happening on the second monitor outside of the "simulator" and then creating all the effects manually. On the back side there was an operator booth that had a cheap, tiny black and white TV, some light switches for alert lights inside, a pipe where "smoke" aka air freshener was sprayed in, and a few strings tied at various points that could be pulled to make panels and wires fall to simulate damage. Nothing fancy at all and completely manually operated by a human. That said I am very tempted to try and make something like this again now that I am older and understand electronics a lot more, and arduinos and such are so cheap and easy to program.
@@hgbugalou Absolutely love the creativity of 'Friendgineering' you had together. Get it up and running again! 'GOOD LUCK'⭐🦊🪐
@@hgbugalou wonderful story. Have you seen that device which is an LED strip you wrap around your TV that responds to the colors being displayed from the TV? For instance, if a fire is displayed the LED will glow bright red and orange and shimmer all about. It's very immersive
Amazing that the Starfox franchise was essentially started by a couple of teenagers.
If that's not inspiring I don't know what is
Dude. Codemasters were already publishers when the darling brothers were 12 and 13 years old and multi millionaires
And now the franchise is deader than dead.
@@charlie1234500 We need a movie.
if only they couldve had better follow ups after 64.
I remember LOVING Stunt Race FX as a kid. I tried playing it today and the extremely low framerate actually made me physically ill. It's weird because Star Fox doesn't do that.
because star fox runs smoother than stunt race FX. stunt race fx puts a heavier load on the super FX chip
Star fox still looks like 15fps LOL
It’s insane how much I played both games as a kid and today that frame rate just makes both unplayable. 3D was so novel back then that people would put up with basically anything for it
@@beemrmem3 you get used to it tho
The composer Hajime Hirasawa had a falling out with Nintendo as well after Star Fox. Apparently over the ownership of the music he composed. The dude ended up basically inventing the technology for ringtones after getting into it with Nintendo, he's a CEO currently at his own company. Amazing that he came up with the major themes for Star Fox on game one, and dipped afterward with Nintendo obviously still using the music for decades. The design process for Star Fox was really groundbreaking and it seems like a lot can be learned about the industry from that game alone. Great work here, WWG that was enjoyable!
This is beautifully edited and written and definitely gives you the full picture. I actually learnt quite a lot from this. Nice work man.
+CactusErebittsu Thanks for the kind words. I really enjoyed making this one. Thanks for checking the channel out.
Wrestling With Gaming I agree...the only problem I have is how you introduce your topic....it feels as though you are continuing from a previous topic....apart from that....I’m loving it :)
Apparently Nintendo didn't really appreciate those guys work.
+Riz2336 I tend to agree.
The relocation may not have been so well for the devs... Or they made them do work on a game they knew they will never release, making them loose their time while developping N64... Who knows.
These kids showed up delivering THEE GAMES that expanded the Nintendo player base, DOOM & Star Fox, i can say that their games were the ones that every games playing kid in my school was talking about, how they were possible and the magical upgrade to the playing experience... if it turned out that these kids somehow made Golden Eye... well that would be too much
@* AnimalHeadSpirit * What long history? Their relationship started in the 80s, by then, Nintendo had no history with unfair practices for devs. At all.
Ikr
Sadly the Super FX was a transitional chip. Amazing nonetheless but short lived.
I still remember trying StarFox on a special ship shaped booth on one Nintendo store. The ship had speakers on each side of the cockpit. I already knew starfox but the experience in the booth with stereo sound and a joystick was mind blowing. The most memorable moment, the selected planet zooming in, and it's wooooough! sound. And the "good luck" delayed on each ear....ahh man!
I wish more people coded games like that, 3D but still 2D in a way too due to pixelation. It's an art on itself.
What I find most impressive is that they made the chip cheap enough to include a GPU with every copy of the game
was thinking the same thing!!
Definitely that's some soviet style engineering lol.
To be fair, they did foot that cost on the customer. Star Fox cost a bit more than other SNES games. But still, it wasn't a *huge* price hike, so it's still super impressive that they were basically packing a GPU with every copy.
Doom on snes is quite an achievment.
Domm can run on a Printre, but is more an arechivement due to the number of sourceports.
you think that's impressive? check out FX fighter which was gonna be basically Virtua Fighter on the Snes, and commanche..both unreleased
I was so grateful that Doom came out on the SNES when I was a kid. I didn't have a PC and only had a SNES at best in '97. I saw the game on PC at a friend's house and I needed to have it. So I couldn't believe it when I saw Doom for the SNES behind a glass case at K-Mart back then. It had its shortcomings, but it was certainly better than not having Doom at all. Yes, it was quite an achievement.
Like Doom on the switch
Viral Killer FX fighter was released on pc
When I was a kid, I lied and told people that they invented the Super FX Chip by dumping a regular chip into apple juice.
Lol what the hell?
lol k Om0
Haha very NOT funny.
That's because it was, Nintendo just didnt tell you, trust me, my uncle works at nintendo
Whang!
Really interesting video. I miss the 16 bit era for this reason; being able to beef up graphics by including additional hardware with the games themselves.
I was hoping for this ability for the Switch. For faster cheaper chips would be able to add extra abilities to it, after a year or two. But I don't think it has that ability.
Microsoft does have that online power thing for the Xbox One but it doesn't seem to deliver what they promised, as for the Switch, with how tech moves nowadays so fast, it's better to just release new consoles in a quicker cycle whiles keeping full compatibility, if Sony, Microsoft and NIntendo sticks to x86 and ARM's, that should be much easier to achieve a bit like how the PC can play pretty much any game going back decades.
Moving from passively cooled systems to actively cooled ones, pretty much killed the idea (and of course the fact that games are now just digital). Adding any passively cooled system to an actively cooled one would see only minimal gains and be way more work and cost.
Very well structured and planned out. I enjoy how you stick to theme and story - keep it up and keep making documentaries and you will have 100k subs!
+jblsucks321 Thanks! 100k would be nice but what I really want is a limo with giant horns on the hood like JBL used to have. Haha.
Gotta say, man, just discovered this channel yesterday and it's one of my favorite gaming channels already. Really good content. Look forward to seeing more of your output.
+7thHanyou Thanks! Really appreciate it. I had a long list of topics I want to cover so there will be plenty more to come.
Nintendo is like the cool kid in school, but he's really a douche towards everybody but he's soo good at sports and everything.
Sega is like the friend you had that OD'd
And your friend SEGA always had the best indie movies, and the newest anime, and the coolest music you'd never heard of, and you had tons of fun with him even though he didn't have much money because that didn't matter, you could just hang out and have more fun than anywhere else anyway.
RIP Sega, I didn't have a Genesis growing up but I had a Dreamcast in adolescence and I loved it so much.
Not really an appropriate comment to put your 'haha!' rubber stamp, there.
I agree and deleted my comment. I'm pretty sure he edited his comment after I left mine but either way, I agree with you.
That's dark
I hope they get paid after the SNES MINI CLASSIC since full Starfox 2 is on there.
+jfitnesshealth they're not 😕. Technically Argonaut Games doesn't exist anymore so there isn't a company to pay.
Cut "them" a check? The individuals who worked on the game are not the one who gets royalty from the game, it's Argonaut, which doesn't exist anymore.
On a related note: Still no Tetris? What is wrong with Nintendo? Pay the damn licensing fee and include the most popular Nintendo game of all time already!
They don't own the IP anymore, they got screwed big.
How exactly would you pay them? The original contract was for Argonaut, not the individuals. That meant Argonaut would get the money and they decided who would get what? In order to give these individuals a paycheck, a new contract would have to be drawn up. Since StarFox 2 isn't being sold separately, that means that they would have to get a cut of the SNES classic edition profits. On top of that, the worth of the individual game in the collection of games might have to be determined. Unless they sued, which they would have no case for, they're not getting a paycheck.
Starfox...ah what memories for my 13 year old self. It was quite an experience playing for the very first time. The graphics of course, but the game play, music, variance of courses, and for the time fast screen rendering was an experience I'll never forget.
Today if a teenager showed a company he had hacked their system they would immediately lawsuit him out of existence as the video game industry today is stifled as the indie game developer movement has shown.
It's kind of sad how things fell apart for Argonaut especially given how talented they were and what they were capable of delivering on.
6:30... the worlds first GPU? I don't know if it was the first but Silicon Graphics had a chip doing hardware accelerated triangles, transform, and lighting in 1982. They added texture mapping and other advanced features soon after. SGI was built around graphics hardware from day one and they had been producing generations of their chips for 10 years by the time the FX chips came along.
I'm with you. That's why in the video I say that "Jez San (the founder of Argonaut) considers it the world's first GPU."
It's something he's said in interviews before. I'm not saying that it actually is the world's first GPU. In hindsight I probably could've been a little more clear by adding something like, "although others disagree, Je San personally considers it the world's first GPU." I can see how someone might miss that I say it's JEz's opinion.
I wonder how the release of Star Fox 2 on the mini retro system went over with those that had been involved.
+Cars Simplified Dylan Cuthbert has said in interviews that he's happy it's finally being released. Don't know about everyone else.
having your work being put out is worth more than money i guess
When it is something that happened decades ago, it's easier to get past it, especially since these guys seem to be doing pretty well for themselves.
Like most of us, probably would be happier if he could actually BUY it
I briefly tried it, but was unimpressed. I don't know if it's just because it's so many years later or that it wasn't similar enough to the first title which I beat many times.
That M.A.R.I.O. acronym was a genius on Argonauts' part
what a fascinating story... It kinda seemed they had genius stroke of luck, but didn't have the experience to negotiate a more promising deal. The lack of success seemed to have made them choose to mostly produce license games - crap options but sure cash flow. Who knows what might have become of them, if Nintendo would have been more fair or more inclusive.
I dont think the Japanese pay that much to anyone, like Shigeru Miyamoto is only worth 40million even after all the great games hes released.
Starglider 2 for MS-DOS is a childhood favorite of mine. It makes sense that these guys did the SFX and Firefox. It all looks so similar.
very nice advertisement in spanish, that was on a VHS on the magazine "hobbyconsolas"
Hey my dude, awesome video but you forgot to mention that when the Nintendo/Argonaut deal ended Nintendo took some of the best people from argonaut with them and screwed them. The head of Argonaut said that he disliked Nintendo from then on in a Eurogamer interview. I would have been pissed as well
Glad to learn about all these technicalities behind the development of some of these outstanding games. Wish parents & primary school science teachers had videos like these back then so they’d fully disregard the hobby of gaming and actually appreciate that it took really intelligent people to make those games that kept us captivated in from our CRT TVs back then.
Have you noticed that many 2D games from the old days have aged much better than early 3D games?
That’s because polygons don’t age very well
Yeah, but to be fair, 2600 games also don't age like a Monkey Island.
Idk every game for the magnavox odyssey kinda sucks
I like Mario Kart and Star Fox for 64 but the SNES versions are almost unplayable for me.
Early 2D games didn't age too well either. New things take time to get right.
I'm a big Starfox fan from growing up, the first title (known over here in the UK as Starting) was the first game I ever played and completed. I never actually knew about the importance of the FX chip until a retrospective article I read in Nintendo Official Magazine in 2005, to celebrate the review and release of Starfox Assault, and how it was a group of young English developers that got the chip and the groundwork for the first game going, and then learning about the (then) unreleased sequel. I'm pretty open with the series in terms of loving 64 just as much as Adventures (Rareware fan also) through to Assault and Command, but I always appreciate learning more and more about Argonauts and how they got Starfox up and running :)
i remember being blown away by starfox and out of this world on snes as a kid
"all it took was putting a little faith in a couple of kids"
man, if only the inspirational speakers in highschool were that good.
Art blender
The Alex Ferguson effect
Well done. I only learned a few months ago that the FX chip was built into the cartridge , I always thought it was in the system. Really amazing engineering.
+ckent23 thanks man. Yeah, it's pretty incredible what they were able to do with it.
It just shows you Nintendo isn't quite as wholesome as you think it is. Very well made and informative video, I enjoyed a lot.
F Zero was 3D, I was a child when I first played it 1991, I remember getting dizzy trying to play it, took me a while to get used to it
2D with scaling and rotation.
One of the things I recall from the early 90s with the fx chip was constant reminders of not having to buy an add on for high level graphics. Of course in America we never got anything to expand hardware but in Japan there were all kinds of things out but each one let Nintendo not have complete control on everything how they liked it
Meanwhile on PC...
The FX chip claiming to eliminate the need to buy an add-on for high level graphics was a lie. You were buying a hardware add-on, it was just embedded in the cart instead of a system module. What's more, you had to buy the same add-on all over again with every single game (because every cart needed its own chip), instead of being able to buy it once and be done. It was a brilliant way to pump gamers for cash by invisibly (and unnecessarily) selling them the same piece of add-on hardware multiple times, while claiming to let them "avoid add-ons."
Nintendo should have included the SuperFX co-processor on the SNES mainboard. It'd have been worth a $30 price bump, given that it's inclusion would have really pushed the SNES far above and beyond the capabilites of the Mega Drive/Genesis and the PC-Engine/TurboGrafx
I can't express how massively hyped i was for star fox, as a teenager who was dreaming about games looking more real , star fox was that leap forward. The woman at the videogame store must have been tired of me always showing up nearly every day in the store to play the version she had long before it was released here.
The SNES is still the most recent console I own. I am very happy the Super FX chip was made because it meant I didn't have to buy a new console to play the new 3D games. There are still many games on the SNES I have yet to play. I love it!
Super interesting! Love learning about the business/technical side behind beloved childhood memories.
It is amazing how they could make such great games was so very little. Even just a few seconds of this video is bigger than most super nes games.
Well, you got a new subscriber. I've watched 2 of your vids now and I'm hooked. Love the history of gaming (both video and tabletop) so I'm happy to have found your channel.
+lojakz thanks! Glad to have you aboard.
How do you not have more subscribers? Great videos
+Austin HasAgun thanks man, I appreciate it! It just takes a long time to build up subs unless RUclips decides to heavily promote your channel. Hopefully the subscribers will eventually come. I'm just glad that the people that have found the channel generally seem to enjoy the videos.
It's unfortunate that Nintendo didn't just buy out the small Studio and turn them into in-house developers. They seemed to have a lot of really good ideas.
My teenage mind was blown by Starfox. Now, I look at it and think, "Wuzzat? 10? Maybe 15 FPS?" I love watching emulators outrun the soundtrack in the intro sequence now. Fantastic game, though.
This was the most informative video I’ve seen on the SuperFX chip history. You’ve earned another sub Sir. Kudos!
+Aaron Soderholm thanks man! Glad you liked it
These series are so great. I hope your channel gets huge. Definitely underrated.
+A Ham thanks!
Damn ! What a story... Never knew it was that crazy. Great work ! I'm pretty sure it was a long and hard work to go and dig for all those details !
I grew up literally around the corner from Argonaut House, a building they bought and were based at in Edgware (North London); had no idea what they did at the time
Thanks for this entertaining mini doc. Quite an interesting story around this particular chip and you even covered some of the technical aspects.
+Torgrimm@YT thanks a lot!
In 2017, The final finished build of Starfox 2 was shipped as an unlockable on the snes classic.
Not to defend Nintendo but a lot of people don't realize that the monopoly Nintendo had on video games in the late 80's and 90's was only a thing in North America. In Europe and other parts of the world Nintendo had MUCH more competition. There was never a video game bubble burst outside of North America that left a void for Nintendo to fill. So all the gaming publishers had strong sales outside of NA which gave Nintendo less leverage.
+DoomFinger511 that's a good point actually.
What kind of geniuses were those guys at Argonaut anyway lol.
A developer fairy tale.
It was a generation of miracles
"But Nintendo's input was limited to the creative side of things'.
Pretty important part of the thing to be fair.
The lesson here is beware of getting your shit ripped off by large companies.
One game that stands out for me was Faceball 2000 for Gameboy 1991, it was impressive graphically.
*Wow! 2 teen made the Supet FX chip!* ⭐️
Anyone notice the Back to the Future theme music in the Spanish SuperFX promo clip?
+Demeterkitty I know, right? So strange.
Demeterkitty they were probably too lazy to make their own music
I noticed that too; I wonder if/how they got away with that. The movie was pretty recent back then.
wel lit suits it
Maybe the Copyrights where not so hard back than or they just licenced it :>
I also thought that Super Mario RPG used the Super FX chip, but apparently that's another chipset. According to Wikipedia 34 SNES/Super Famicom titles used an enhanced chip.
'The SFX Chip was rare example of both an overpromise and an overdelivery.. And all it took was putting faith in a couple of kids.'
very informative and well edited, you got a new sub
+F thanks a lot. Glad you liked it!
I'm surprised that Star Fox was a commercial success. Back in the 90s I couldn't tell if anyone actually liked it since they would sneer at the mention of Star Fox or its commercial as well as the announcement of Star Fox 2. I felt as if I was the only one who liked the franchise. A few years ago I was so excited to secure a pre-order for the Super NES Classic so that I could finally try Star Fox 2 after 20 years of waiting and I did not feel disappointed. As dated as that game is I still enjoyed it more than Star Fox Zero. Like Star Fox 64, Star Fox 2 was designed for multiple playthroughs. Shame that Argonaut went under because they developed a great game. I would love a Star Fox 3 to continue with that series instead of its two reboots, Star Fox 64 and Star Fox Zero.
I had Amiga, PC and SNES at the same time. Starfox even impressed Amiga and PC users, who were used to Vector graphics since 1980's.
Argonaut also did Swat: Global Strike Team on the PS2, using the microphone accessory in the console.
Star fox 2 was late into development and scrapped but then put back up on the snes mini
Kirby dreamland 3 existed in 1997 and the N64 was already out
I wonder what those two teenagers who founded Argonaut thought now that Star Fox 2 finally got an official released for the Super NES Classic Edition.
I'll be hype as ever when I play Starfox 2 on the mini. ^^
While the 3D effects would later be trumped by the N64, the sprite rotation could actually be seen in the GBA allowing Yoshi's Island to run without any enhancement chips.
Damn... I am so upset I've only just now found this channel. Really great video!
Thanks. Appreciate it. This video is one of my oldest and way behind production quality of my current stuff so I'm really glad you liked it lol. This is my latest
ruclips.net/video/SjCivnt5t50/видео.html
Star Fox was and still is my all time favorite game. I was alive during Atari, grew up with Nintendo but nothing ever blew me away like Star Fox did the first time I played it. Contra and Tecmo bowl series was my go to before that. Powering up my launch series XBOX and Halo the first time is the only thing that rivals it for me.
It’s insane that Nintendo let these guys go by the wayside. Especially with there experience in 3D games, and the Nintendo 64 just a few years away from releasing?
I wonder if Nintendo made the SuperFX2 an add-on cartridge if it would have helped the SNES live longer. Not like the 32X exactly, no additional power or video cables. Just a small cartridge containing the SuperFX2 chip and maybe a few other enhancement chips. Seeing how game with the chip were around $60, just the add-on could have been maybe $20-$30. We might have seen more games that took advantage of the chip if the add-on sold well.
Thanks for uploading. Now I can see what was going on back then.
I had to sub. Been watching several of your videos recently and I'm like damn this is a great channel
Thanks!
I remember the first time I saw StarFox, my jaw dropped. At the time the graphics looked incredible. I just had to get a copy of StarFox, and the game not only looked great but it played great as well.
I love me some gaming documentary playlists, you won me over easily :D
Nintendo has a front that so happy and colorful, but time and again they show to be a ruthless company.
Dude youre the John Petrucci of gaming
+Sperg Ferguson lol!
This is a beautifully made documentary!
Instant sub
+Tim T Thanks man! Really appreciate it.
Imagine these kids going to Japan to work for one of the biggest companies in the industry. In 1993! They probably couldn't even speak a single word japanese.
10:52 sorta. They did design the ARC CPU. Which was used in the Leapster. and a few other things. And the ARC is the spiritual successor to the SFX 2
i remember my mom buying this with game for me and me explaining the new thechnology in it to convince her to buy it lol. When I first played it i was in amazement, one favorite games ever.
A company that felt betrayed and abandoned by Nintendo? Must’ve been a lot of that going around.
I’m loving bingeing these documentaries.
Thanks for watching them Alan. The editing in these older ones isn't quite as fancy as my later videos but The research is still there.
Awesome work! Learned a bunch!
+tin pin thanks! Really appreciate the kind words.
i love your channel. subscribed. this is some interesting video game history. well done man
Thanks for checking the channel out, I appreciate it.
yoshi's island didn't JUST use it for sprite scaling. it DID have some 3d polygons, in at least 2 levels. there's a large rotating 3d cylinder you have to jump on repeatedly so it doesn't roll you off, and a section of a castle (i think) that had large rotating rectangular prisms that you use to climb up a tower.
I love looking at other people's accomplishments while all I do is watch RUclips
I hardly knew any of what the video told. Thank you!
WOW! I wasn’t aware that they felt slighted. Thank you!
Very good documentary, well done. I am always amazed at what some kids are doing at age 16 and 18 my goodness.
That Stunt Race FX footage looked waaaaaaay smoother than the actual game. Is that footage from an overclocked version?
7:12 OMG I always thought that was a hallucination I had during an acid trip way back o_O
i heard the bttf theme in the spanish commercial :D
+mansharker8 so weird right? Lol
Absolutely love your channel! Have been extremely sick, but the bright side is, I have had the time to binge watch nearly all your videos. Definitely earned a sub and a like on each. Keep up the great work, I look forward to many more!
Thanks a lot man! Hope you feel better soon!
The Presentation is of this video is Awesome. I was so captivated i forgot that i was not watching a movie. Great job.
Thanks! I really appreciate it!
I thought for sure X2 and X3 used the FX chip also? Which is why there are so many crazy renderings going on...?
What an interesting story! I always thought that the superFX-IC was developed by Japanese engineers
The only drawboack of the super fx2 chip was, it can only accept a max size rom of 2MB, in theory it might be possible to rank that up to 4MB or more by putting a 2MB chip on to it instead , then putting 2 2MB rom chips next to it, sothat rom A could load in it’s first 2MB data into it ,and once it knows all it’s data has been read, it then can clear out that 2MB ram chip and tell rom B to load it’s own data into it etc,,, this way you might overcome that 2MB limit, would be great for games witch potential extended patches for it.
This discovery actually blew my mind.
When I was watching a video about corrupting Stunt Race FX, *yes the Super FX is corrupted and glitchy too* I found a hidden checksum. It checks if the Super FX Chip is corrupted or old. If it detects that, it says this
!! OLD MARIO CHIP DETECTED !!
!! FAILED TRYING TO MAKE CAR WITH BAD TYPE !!
Try that for yourself folks, it's really true.
what a well made video. you deserve much more attention. now start wathcing your other videos :)
+Marc Tißler thanks! Glad you liked it. This was one of my favorite ones to make.
having an fx game on was kinda like having an Ultra 32, snuggled between SNES and N64
Actually, the SNES Doom port was based on the SNES Wolfenstein 3D port, which lacks external chips. It uses the same engine, in fact I doubt the 3D is actually using the hardware 3D plotting capabilities of the Super FX chip, and maybe it's just using the chip for the automap, which may be slowing the game down.
Argonaut needed lawyers to check out that agreement with Nintendo. They got screwed over.
I think that was the issue, they had no idea how to create a good 3d chipset design