Japan, 1993, in the city of Kyoto, and two young men are on a bike. They’re on the busiest crossing in the city and clearly, they’re drunk. Westerners. Inside their bags, they have papers they probably shouldn’t have – confidential papers. Confidential Nintendo papers. And in a few hazy post-pub moments, these papers are about to be all over the floor for everyone to see. One look at them and you’d see the game Nintendo was making next. One look at them and you’d see the 3D chip Nintendo had designed for it. One look, and you would see Star Fox.
“Err it’s all lies. Nothing happened,” one of the men, Giles Goddard, tells me now. He’s smiling. “I don’t think we’ve told Nintendo about this, but yeah, we were taking them home to study over the weekend, and we went to the pub on the way back home.
“Dylan [Cuthbert] didn’t have a bicycle,” he goes on, “so he was standing on the back of mine. I was pedalling and we went over, right in the middle of the biggest crossing in Kyoto. And we fell over because we were a bit drunk – actually I think it was on the way back from the pub. And all the papers came out of the basket. And it was a windy day so they just started blowing all over the place, and then the light turned green for all the cars to start moving, so we had to scramble and pick up hundreds of pieces of paper for 10 minutes.”
