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That was actually my first entry into computer games, because I had met, at a dinner party, Jacqui Lyons, who was my agent. I sold that copy protection to AcornSoft. My disc format worked on both, so you could boot the disk on forty track or eighty track. Because in those days, the disc drives were either forty track or eighty track, and you had to buy a disk that was either forty track or eighty track. That was also programmed with a few friends, as well.Īctually, before that, on the BBC computer, I did copy protection, because there was a big piracy problem in the industry back then – there still is today! I designed a disc copy protection system that made it hard to copy the disks it was also my first attempt at doing what’s called 'dual format'.

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It was credited to Argonaut Software but actually it probably came out before Argonaut was actually formed. I started Argonaut in September ’82 but the first game actually came out before then, Skyline Attack. That would have been around the time that Argonaut was officially founded? I didn’t let them know I was some young kid I was working on a 3D shooting game which, at the time, was based on Star Wars, and was actually based on the Star Wars coin-op, and I tried to get the rights to the Star Wars coin-op. I got a BBC computer and a Commodore 64, and some friends and I built a development system called PDS – 'Programmers’ Development System' – which allowed you to program the Commodore 64 remotely, from the BBC. That was my first ever program, and then I started writing simple games.

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So I did a driver that intercepted the printer output and turned it into handwriting. In the old days, printers printed in blocks, with a dot matrix. I learnt to program in Basic in a matter of days and then moved on to Assembly because the processor was so slow, you couldn’t really do anything in Basic, so you had to learn Assembly to do anything. This was in ’77, so it was before the Spectrum and C64. Jez San: I got my first computer quite early – like, twelve, thirteen years old. Nintendo Life: How did you get started in the games industry? We were lucky enough to sit down with San and discuss his amazing career, working with Nintendo, creating amazing 3D hardware and much more besides. San would establish PKR, one of the UK's first online casinos, in 2005, and following a period as an angel investor, is currently working in the realm of gaming cryptocurrency with FunFair. Argonaut would go on to become one of the most notable software and tech firms in the UK, working with companies such as Philips and Apple, before succumbing to the effects of a changing market in 2004. He founded his company, Argonaut Software, while he was still a teenage schoolkid, and his free-roaming 3D shooter Starglider would become a critical and commercial smash-hit, paving the way for a relationship with Nintendo which would spawn the Super FX chipset, as well as titles such as Star Fox and Stunt Race FX. Jez San occupies a pretty unique place in the world of video games.

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