From hacking his way into a contract with Nintendo, to late-night snack runs for Shigeru Miyamoto, Dylan Cuthbert chats with us about his 30+ years in the games industry and the reality of running an independent studio today

Words by James Tocchio

Dylan Cuthbert hit the ground running. At age 18, he and others at Argonaut Software successfully defeated the Nintendo Game Boy’s copyright protection mechanism and created a 3D tech demo for the nascent handheld. Weeks later, Nintendo flew him to its Kyoto HQ for a meeting and a contract that would soon have him working shoulder to shoulder with Nintendo legends like Shigeru Miyamoto, creating such iconic games as Star Fox. Over the last 30 years he has been a programmer, director, executive producer and CEO of his own studio, Q-Games. With a new game, Dreams Of Another just announced, Dylan has no plans of slowing down.

The story of how you broke into the game industry is legendary; it goes that hacking a Game Boy won you a meeting at Nintendo HQ, and a contract! Can you share your memories of this time?

I saw an ad in the back of a magazine for a job at Argonaut Software while I was still at school. I applied for that, quit school and began working there. One of the first things I worked on was a Z80 emulator that ran on the Amiga, which I knocked up to emulate what we imagined the Game Boy’s architecture was like. It wasn’t too far wrong and gave us a head start when we began hacking the real hardware to load up our programs.

I developed a small 3D demo called Eclipse which got shown to Nintendo during CES in Vegas. Two weeks later I was flown over to Nintendo HQ in Kyoto with Jez [San], my boss, to show what we’d done. They liked what they saw and signed a deal to develop the demo into a full game in collaboration with them. To get 3D up and running on such a system I drew upon my experience programming the ZX Spectrum while I was at school.

You have worked with legends in the games industry, such as Shigeru Miyamoto, Yoshio Sakamoto, Gunpei Yokoi (the inventor of the Game Boy), and many others. How has collaborating with such accomplished people influenced the way you make games, and can you think of a particular lesson learned from them that you’ve carried with you through your career?

Miyamoto, Sakamoto, ‘Hip’ Tanaka (now nicknamed ‘Chip’ Tanaka), Yokoi, Izushi, Totaka (Totakeke), were all instrumental in my early years and I really enjoyed working with them. They helped settle me into the Nintendo way of making games, which was very different to the way in the UK at the time. The games industry in the UK was still very much a bedroom industry, but here was Nintendo HQ, where they had a large complex of buildings and lots of busy people bustling around. The scale was incredibly different. Sakamoto helped me understand that we shouldn’t make games too hard, since not everyone was as hardcore a gamer as we were. Miyamoto taught me how to re-analyse a feature, and to remove it if it doesn’t fit. No matter how much you are attached to an idea, you need to let it go and move on if it just isn’t working.

The Nintendo composer Kazumi Totaka, who created the soundtracks for such games as WaveRace 64 , Animal Crossing and Wii Sports , has hidden into each of his games an infamous tune called Totaka’s Song and the first appearance of this song was in your Game Boy game X . Did you know about this when the game was released?