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TOKYO — Masayuki Uemura, the engineer who developed the Nintendo Entertainment System that helped start a global revolution in home gaming and laid the foundations for today’s video game industry, died on December 9th. He was 78 years old.
His death was announced by Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan, where Mr. Uemura runs the Center for Game Studies. No other details were given.
Video game consoles were momentarily popular in the early 1980s, but the market collapsed due to poor quality control and uninspiring software that couldn’t deliver the excitement of arcade games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders. Game cartridges that weren’t sold by trucks went to landfills, and retailers decided that home gaming systems had no future.
But the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System in the United States in 1985 changed the industry forever. The humble gray box with its distinctive controllers has become a must-have for an entire generation of kids, driving Nintendo’s virtual monopoly over the industry for the better part of a decade as competitors withdrew from the market in response to the company’s dominance.
Mr. Uemura was the mastermind behind the Nintendo system, which was released in Japan in 1983. He also helped create its successor, the Super Nintendo, as well as other lesser-known products for the company.
“Nintendo was successful in the United States because of the quality of its software, but that software would never have entered the hearts of gamers without the hardware Uemura created,” said Matt Alt, in his 2020 book “Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World” chronicles the rise of Nintendo.
“He was a true giant and architect of the global gaming industry,” Mr. Alt added in an email.
The machine made Nintendo one of the most profitable companies in Japan, and the games it ran, super mario brothers and legend of zeldahas become a classic franchise.
Its bootleg success also established the video game console as a viable product and led to the development of today’s $40 billion console gaming market.
Masayuki Uemura was born on June 20, 1943 in Tokyo. His father, a kimono merchant who later owned a record store, was
As a child, he showed an interest in technical pursuits. Mr. Uemura said he and his family made his own radio from components bought for him by a boarding student. Interview with Hitotsubashi University He earned money by hauling piles of wood down the mountains around Kyoto and built his own pachinko machine, a game resembling a mix of slots and pinball.
After graduating from high school, he studied electrical engineering at the Chiba Institute of Technology with the goal of designing color televisions.
He was working as a salesman at Sharp in 1971. Gunpei YokoiNintendo’s chief engineer at the time hired him to join the company. At the time, it was a small manufacturer of playing cards and other traditional Japanese games with the ambition to create innovative new toys.
Mr. Uemura was inspired by Nintendo’s approach to serious gaming. But he had another reason to take the job: He had recently gotten married and Sharp planned to send him to the United States without his wife.
His decision to stay in Japan was transformative for both him and Nintendo.
In 1981, as Nintendo was soaring over the popularity of the arcade game Donkey Kong in the US market, the company’s then-president Hiroshi Yamauchi asked Mr. Uemura to create an affordable entertainment system that would bring the arcade experience home.
The result was a red and white box known as the Famicom, short for “family computer.” While other consoles had blocky graphics that wobble and shake, the Famicom had characters and backgrounds that were fluidly animated, almost like a cartoon. The version of Donkey Kong looked just like the one in the arcade. And unlike other gaming systems that beeping and popping, it could play music.
At first, the console, which was 14,800 yen (about $65 at the time), received a lukewarm reception in Japan – only a few hundred thousand units were sold in its first year. In interviews decades later, Mr. Uemura admitted that he was skeptical of the Famicom’s success. The first version of the system was fraught with problems: Among them were the square buttons that tended to get stuck on the controllers.
His son got the first hint of the system’s potential when he told his classmates that his father was the designer of the machine, and the surrounding kids asked Mr. Uemura to call home to fix their console.
“There was so much desire that I had the realization ‘This thing really sells,'” he told Weekly Famitsu in 2013.
But the system wasn’t really successful until the release of Super Mario Brothers in 1985. Exciting gameplay, catchy music and Japanese animation inspired design was like “gasoline on fire” Mr. Uemura Nintendo told Dream Web in 2013.
He later created an upgraded and redesigned Famicom for the American market and sealed the success of the system, making Nintendo not just a gaming but also a Japanese industry giant. By the early 1990s, the company was using 3 percent of Japan’s semiconductor manufacturing capacity and making more money than all of the American movie studios combined, author David Sheff wrote in his book “Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World” (1993).
The company then asked Mr. Uemura to design another upgrade. In 1990 he delivered the Super Famicom, known in the US as the Super Nintendo. The machine has sold more than 49 million copies worldwide, cementing Nintendo’s reputation as the world’s most influential gaming company and one of the most successful entertainment businesses of all time.
Mr. Uemura retired from Nintendo in 2004 and attended Ritsumeikan University, where he was director of the Center for Game Studies until his death.
Information about the survivors was not immediately available.
in 2013 interview Speaking to video game website Polygon for the 30th anniversary of Famicom’s debut, Mr Uemura said working on the project was transformative.
“I used to be the typical office grunt,” he said, “but then I stumbled upon toys and it changed my outlook on life.”
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