Creator of the NES and SNES Masayuki Uemura Has Died - News
by William D'Angelo , posted on 09 December 2021 / 1,593 Views
Masayuke Uemura, the designer of the NES and SNES, has died at the age of 78.
He joined Nintendo in 1972 and started by helping develop physical light gun games. When the Nintendo was divided into different esearch and development divisions, Uemura was the leader of R&D2. This division was responsible for creating Nintendo's hardware.
"The number of workers [Yokoi] had was increasing. Meanwhile, I had the R&D2 department, whose numbers were decreasing, so I had time on my hands and was going home fairly early," said Uemura in an Iwata Asks interview in 2010 and transcribed by VideoGamesChronicle.
"There really wasn’t anything to do! I even wondered if Yamauchi-san had called me out of consideration for that. He said the next thing would be video games for play on home television sets and asked if my department would develop them.
"But such games had been around for a while. I understood that it would be an extension of those, but Yamauchi-san made various stipulations.
"He said the games wouldn’t be built-in, but rather we would adopt the cartridge system, which was just then becoming mainstream. What’s more, he told me to make a machine that wouldn’t have any competitors for three years."
Uemura and R&D2 after two years of work had created Nintendo's 8-bit console that could play cartridges. The console would be called the Family Computer, or Famicom. It launched with Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr and Popeye in Japan.
The Famicom, also known as The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in the west would go on to sell nearly 62 million units worldwide.
R&D2 would later work on creating Nintendo's next system, the 16-bit Super Famicom or SNES in the west. It would go on to sell 49.10 million units worldwide.
Uemura retired from Nintendo in 2004.
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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RIP Mr. Uemura. You are forever immortalized in gaming history.
Few people in this medium have had a greater impact on it. He’s a large part of the reason video games are ubiquitous now
...A moment of silence...
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Atari, Colecovision and then NES (Masayuki Uemura )
no, just the order of importance.
Interesting tidbit: Uemura's team that developed the SNES worked together with Ken Kutaragi, the later lead designer of the Playstation,
PS2, PSP and PS3.
Rest in peace Uemurasan.
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