JEZ SAN
If his back catalogue of games wasn’t impressive enough, Jez San is also an officer of the Order of the British Empire, an honour bestowed on him for his services to the videogame industry. “I got a letter from Her Majesty’s Office of something or other saying, ‘If we were minded to give you an honour, would you accept it?’” he explains with a grin. “It’s because some people, for political reasons, refuse it at the last minute to get Brownie points. I did assume it was a practical joke by one of my friends. It definitely wasn’t beyond them.” It wasn’t a joke, and in 2002 he received his OBE from Prince Charles, who casually mentioned that his two sons enjoyed playing videogames and liked the Harry Potter titles San had been involved with.
San had been given something of a head start in the field when his father, who was involved in the import-export business, returned from a US business trip in 1977 with a TRS-80 home computer. “I was a geeky kid, into science and magic. Then computers arrived and I must have had one of the first ones in the country.”
San was soon involved in the burgeoning world of computer c lubs and was an early hacker, successfully infiltrating the Micro Live account during a BBC television broadcast and leaving a poem for the bemused presenter, John Coll. His first published game was Skyline Attack in 1984, a decent Defender clone for the C64, and he helped out on the C64 conversion of Elite, which led to him getting a publishing deal with Rainbird for his first major success, Starglider.
San founded UK development studio Argonaut on the proceeds, focusing first on 16bit computers and going on to build a strong and highly productive relationship with Nintendo, which lasted into the mid- ’90s. Though he remains
