finished on the European and competition versions of Star Fox. Argonaut had a contract with Nintendo to create three games; after Star Fox, Argonaut programmers Giles Goddard and Dylan Cuthbert worked on Stunt Race FX (1994) and Cuthbert on Star Fox 2. Cuthbert worked out of Nintendo's headquarters in Kyoto and had little contact with Argonaut during development. He served as lead programmer and was assigned two Japanese Nintendo programmers to work under him. The team was overseen by designers Shigeru Miyamoto and Katsuya Eguchi, with Eguchi as director. Edge reported in December 1993 that development on a sequel to Star Fox had begun. The team decided early on to use the Super FX 2 chip in the game cartridge. It was an enhanced version of the Super FX, a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) for SNES ROM cartridges developed by Argonaut. The original chip was designed to calculate 3D math quickly and was first used in Star Fox. The Super FX 2 had more memory and ran at 21 MHz, twice as fast as the original chip. Argonaut's original proposal for the Super FX used this improved architecture, but Nintendo found it too expensive. Cuthbert also rewrote parts of the engine to run in parallel in RAM to free more Super FX 2 processing for more advanced features, such as planar clipping and advanced collision detection. These enhancements enabled the chip to manipulate more polygons and sprites and to map textures more quickly, giving the team the computing power needed for free-roaming 3D environments. Such free-roaming gameplay was planned for the original Star Fox, but it was made on-rails because of the original Super FX chip's limited computing powers. Cuthbert also retooled the engine to increase the frame rate from 20 to 30 frames per second, but it was not steady so they locked the frame rate at 20 FPS. Freely explorable environments were the only gameplay element planned for the original Star Fox carried into Star Fox 2; all other ideas were new. Miyamoto considered the Star Fox series a platform for experimenting with new gameplay ideas. The team experimented more with Star Fox 2 than Star Fox. This creativity led to gameplay ideas such as the platforming sequences with the robot walker. Miyamoto took great interest in Cuthbert's platforming gameplay (before Super Mario 64's release in 1996). At one point in development, the Walker sequences occurred in