Dylan Cuthbert talks about his past with Nintendo, says Miyamoto asked him not to work with Sony, and mentions an unreleased Miyamoto project

Dylan Cuthbert worked with Nintendo on multiple projects, but he never officially became part of their team. Cuthbert would eventually end up working with Sony for a number of years as well, much to the chagrin of Miyamoto. Cuthbert opens up about all this, including a secret Miyamoto project, via the blurb below.

When StarFox 2 was canceled we went for a big sayonara meal and Miyamoto explained to me that they didn’t want to be perceived as inferior to the newly released PlayStation and Saturn consoles. But because the contract between Argonaut and Nintendo was over I had to go back to the Uk, and Miyamoto lamented that he couldn’t take me on as an employee because Argonaut had instigated an anti-poach after @giles had left Argonaut to join Nintendo a few months earlier after getting married to a local lass, but he explained that to circumvent that he could get me a job at Hal with Iwata, but Hal was in the middle of nowhere near Mt. Fuji and I loved living in Kyoto so I explained that I would find my own way back to Kyoto and had already put feelers out to other games companies with Japanese links, to which he said sharply ‘just don’t work for a company that ”begins with the letter ‘S’”, to which I just had to smile wryly because of course I was already talking to someone at PlayStation in Foster City. At the time I didn’t realize quite the level of political shit that had gone down between Sony and Nintendo over the SNES CD drive! Six months later I started working in Foster City for PlayStation :-)

I do feel a pang of sadness that I couldn’t join Nintendo back then as that is probably where I would still be today if I had, but then again I wouldn’t give up those years at Sony for anything as they were some of the best years of my life and I made many many friends - and of course I got myself back to Kyoto on my own terms by 2001 to start Q-Games and haven’t looked back since! I reconnected with Nintendo and made many more games with them Digidrive, StarFox Command, Reflect Missile, X-Returns, Starship Command, StarFox 64 3D, and one secret Miyamoto pet project that didn’t see the light of day because of market timing, and a bunch more fun prototypes! One day I’d like to work with them again! Never say never.