Giles Goddard (video game programmer)

Afterwards, Goddard left Nintendo and became a freelancer, porting Doshin the Giant from the Nintendo 64DD to the GameCube. In 2002, Goddard founded the Japanese video game developer Vitei, Inc. as a Nintendo second party studio. Vitei produced its first game, the Japan-exclusive Nintendo DS title Theta, in 2007, and the WiiWare title Rock N' Roll Climber in 2009. He served as the head programmer for Steel Diver, and Vitei would also develop its sequel, Steel Diver: Sub Wars, as well as Tank Troopers. In 2020, Vitei Backroom was rebranded as Chuhai Labs to expand into micro-publishing and to position the company to be more forward facing. Chuhai Labs developed Carve Snowboarding, which launched on May 27, 2021. Carve Snowboarding is a virtual reality-focused spiritual successor to 1080° Snowboarding for Oculus Quest.

When Goddard was 18 or 19, he moved to Kyoto to work for Nintendo, where he, alongside fellow Argonaut employee Dylan Cuthbert, helped develop Star Fox and Stunt Race FX. Goddard remained with Nintendo during the Nintendo 64 era. He assisted with the demo of Link fighting an enemy, which would be shown at the Shoshinkai 1995 trade show. To show off skinning, he programmed the interactive Mario face in Super Mario 64 by attaching painted ping-pong balls to his face and using an Indy camera to track movement. His next project, 1080° Snowboarding, saw him as one of the two lead programmers, alongside fellow Argonaut colleague Collin Reed. This game used frame interpolation and inverse kinematics to make character movement feel more realistic.

Giles Goddard (born March 30, 1971) is an English video game programmer. He was one of the first Western employees at Nintendo, programming the Mario face in Super Mario 64, and working on titles such as Star Fox, 1080° Snowboarding, and Steel Diver. In 2002, he founded Vitei, a video game developer based in Kyoto, Japan, for which he serves as CEO.