Interview Transcript: Giles Goddard, November 2024
Giles Goddard was one of the first western employees at Nintendo, having moved to Japan from his native England along with fellow Argonaut Software programmers. At that time, he helped create and develop Star Fox, then programmed the stretchy Mario face in Super Mario 64, 1080 Snowboarding, and more.
For Retro Gamer Magazine number 266, I interviewed Giles to discuss his work on the second Super FX Chip game (following Star Fox), Stunt Race FX. Due to scope of focus and space, much of the interview was not included in the Retro Gamer piece. Here’s the full interview transcript.
James: Before I launch into the interview, I’d like to take a moment to thank you for your work and career.
I’ve read and listened to many interviews that you’ve given over the years, and I feel that you don’t take much time for professional retrospection, preferring to finish one project and get right on to the next. But I hope you know that your work has brought millions of people a lot of happiness.
I don’t want to miss the opportunity to thank you personally. I spent many happy days as a child playing your video games with my brother, and Stunt Race FX was a favorite of ours.
Giles: Many thanks for the kind words about the game and how much fun you had playing it with your brother. Its always really cool hearing from people that enjoyed playing one of my games in their childhood. I can honestly say I don’t think any of us thought people would still be talking fondly about the game 30 years later.
James: Starting at the beginning, where did the initial idea for Stunt Race FX come from?
Giles: I can’t remember exactly who’s idea it was originally but I think the idea was to make a sort of Super FX chip Mario Kart game. I always loved Geoff Crammond’s brilliant Stunt Car Racer so was very eager to make a racing game of my own using realistic physics. The characteristic vehicles with their googly eyes came much later in development I seem to remember. Like a lot of projects at EAD at that time it sort of evolved organically.
James: In interviews, you seem to be very pragmatic in your thinking and not prone to nostalgic reminiscence. But do you have any personal feeling toward Stunt Race FX or your time working on it?
Giles: I think I was just really eager to make a game using some ideas for car physics that I had been working on. I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing so it was very much a case of making it up as I went along. Also while I was at Argonaut I made a prototype game that I called XLR8 (I thought it was a cool name at the time:) but accidentally lost the entire thing when I wiped the wrong disk. This was long before the days of source control but I still think its good to start from scratch again sometimes.
James: Stunt Race FX was the second FX chip game released, following Star Fox. Did the experience of working on Star Fox influence Stunt Race FX, and in what ways?
Giles: Very much so. During Star Fox we were literally ironing out the bugs of the chip itself while trying to make the game so we learnt a lot of how to get the best out of the chip. By the time we started Stunt Race most of the bugs had already been fixed, or we had already figured out ways around the hardware bugs that remained. Also because the FX chip (we called it the MARIO chip at the time) was a very good general purpose RISC chip you could do things that it wasn’t really designed for in the first place. So we were still discovering new things it could do while making the game. One of the things we realized with Star Fox was that the FX chip was really good at scaling and rotating bitmaps, so we turned all of the wheels (and the eyes) into sprites instead of using polygons. That saved us a lot of draw time that using polygons would have taken up.
James: The cars of Stunt Race FX have very distinct handling characteristics. The 4WD truck feels top-heavy and disconnected from the road, for example, while the F1 style car is nimbler and more planted. It has been written that this is due to each car having a different center of gravity. Is this accurate? How were the different handling characteristics created?
Giles: When I made the original prototype it was great because I could work with a sort of blank slate when it came to the physics. It was just a single car on a flat track with no UI and nothing else slowing the FX chip down. It was a lovely 20-30 FPS and it allowed me to add all sorts of parameters to the physics to get different kinds of car handling. Of course with vehicles a big part of the way they handle has to do with their suspension and their CoG, so those parameters were good to fiddle with to get the feeling of different cars. I had a simple way to edit all the parameters in real-time without any real constraints so we definitely pushed them way beyond what was “realistic”.
Also I discovered that if you put the CoG under the ground it acts as a sort of keel of a boat and helps to keep the car upright, so I used that for the bike because I hadn’t found a good way to keep a two wheel vehicle upright by then.
James: Given the technical challenges of the time, can you mention any features or ideas that needed to be cut during development?
Giles: I think we might have had talk about a four-player mode before doing two- player but that was already pushing the FX chip to the max. So much so in fact that we were having to make each player’s screen smaller and smaller to keep the frame rate acceptable.
I think we also wanted more complex tracks but we were very much fill-rate limited by the FX chip so drawing the track alone was taking up a huge chunk of our frame time - we kind of cheated with Star Fox and drew dots instead of ground polygons and that freed the chip up to draw more enemies etc.
James: Obligatory Shigeru Miyamoto question; Miyamoto is credited as the producer of Stunt Race FX. Do you recall any input from the Nintendo legend on this game?
Giles: I think the eyes may have been his idea. By the time we had several cars driving around a track with effects and a UI we were a long way from the smooth 20 FPS of the prototype. But the problem was I hadn’t really built any of the physics with frame rate independence in mind so the physics started behaving in a odd ways. So I think we decided to lean into that instead of trying to fix it and it also gave all the cars some personality - as if they were alive and struggling to keep themselves together.
James: Stunt Race FX included a split-screen multiplayer mode, which seemed ambitious for the time. Was it difficult to implement multiplayer in a game which (presumably) pushed the limits of the SNES hardware?
Giles: The biggest problem with split screen multiplayer is that each view has to draw the entire world, including all the other cars. So effectively you’re drawing twice as much as you would with single player and we were already maxing out the frame rate in single player mode. So we had to do all of the tricks to get it anywhere near acceptable - lower res shapes, simpler tracks, closer draw distance, letterbox screens etc. I think I kind of hated two-player mode because it felt like there was hardly any game left after all of the hoops we had to jump through. It was a crucial part of Nintendo’s racing games at the time though so it had to be done one way or another.
One of the things I think I was actually quite proud of at the time is oddly enough the water drops that appear on the screen when you go through water. That was one of those things that I knew the FX could theoretically do fast but I just had to figure out how to code it efficiently. I should probably go back and look at the code again though :)
James: Did anyone within Nintendo react to Stunt Race FX in a memorable way?
Giles: It was a long time ago so my memory is somewhat fuzzy, but if I can think of something I will let you know :)
James: The visual design of Stunt Race FX is very playful, almost toy-like. Was a more realistic aesthetic ever considered?
Giles: I think in the beginning we may have had ideas of making it realistic looking, but the way the physics behaved especially with the low frame rates ended up dictating the look of the game. Also it meant that we didn’t need to come up with player characters because the players could be the cars themselves.
James: Who came up with the idea of giving the cars eyes?
Giles: I vaguely remember it being Miyamoto san’s idea. But I could be wrong :) Everything looks better with eyes and I think we were all a fan of Herbie :)
James: Nintendo illustrator Wataru Yamaguchi created clay models of the game vehicles for Stunt Race FX’s box art and instruction manual. Why aren’t these models preserved in the Louvre?
Giles: Maybe not the Louvre but definitely the new museum that Nintendo have opened recently in Kyoto. Nintendo used to make physical models for several of their SNES games at the time so it would be amazing to see them all together again in real life.
James: You mentioned that you don’t often get asked about Stunt Race FX. The game sold over a million copies. Are you proud of this game?
Giles: My tendency to look at the flaws or things that I could have done differently end up quelling any thoughts of feeling proud of the games I worked on. But hearing from people who grew up playing my games and even some of them being a favorite game does make me very proud of what we made. At the end of the day people enjoying what we make is what really matters the most.
James: Thank you once again. I truly appreciate you.