Nintendo NES and SNES console creator Masayuki Uemura dies at 78

He was the architect of consoles that revived the video gaming industry

Masayuki Uemura, who worked as an engineer at Japanese video game firm Nintendo, passed away on 6 December at the age of 78.

As reported by Kotaku, Uemura's passing was announced by Ritsumeikan University, where he became the director of game studies after retiring from Nintendo in 2004.

Uemura is best known as the lead architect on both Famicom/Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and Super Famicom/SNES consoles that became highly popular during the 1980s, making Nintendo the gaming firm as we know it today.

Uemura, born in 1943, grew up in a post-war Japan and attended Chiba Institute of Technology as a young man. After graduating, he joined Sharp in 1972, where he was tasked to sell solar cells and light sensor technology to various companies, including Nintendo, which was primarily a toy manufacturer in those days.

At Nintendo, Uemura met designer Gunpei Yokoi, who was investigating Sharp's technology for use in light gun games.

After joining Nintendo in 1972, Uemura worked with Yokoi to integrate the photocell tech into electronic light gun games. He also worked on Nintendo's early light gun games, which included a home-friendly game called Duck Hunt.

Uemura was ultimately made the head of Nintendo R&D2 division that would develop plug-and-play consoles, beginning with the Color TV Game series.

In 1981, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi called Uemura and asked him to design and build a machine that would let people play arcade games on their TVs. The result was Famicom system in 1983, which was rebranded as NES outside of Japan.

The Famicom/NES performed well, with 61.9 million units sold, of which Japan accounted for only 20 million units.

Yamauchi also led the work on SNES, Nintendo's highly successful follow-up to the NES.

Uemura served as general manager of Nintendo's R&D division until 2004. After retirement from Nintendo, he spent several years as the director of the Centre for Game Studies at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, where he researched and taught about video games.

In recent years, he had spoken extensively about his fondest memories at Nintendo developing early consoles.

"The best time that I remember was when we completed developing [the] Famicom," he told Nintendolife in an interview.

"Back then, we didn't know if it was going to be popular or not, but the fact that we are able to complete the product was very satisfactory.

"That was the first mission; to make sure to complete developing the device and I did it, so I was happy."