He developed the Nintendo Entertainment System in the 1980s, which laid the foundation for today's huge video game console market and franchise operations such as Super Mario Bros.

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Ben Dooley and Hisako Ueno

TOKYO-Uemura, the engineer who developed the Nintendo Entertainment System, died on December 9. The system helped usher in the global home gaming revolution and laid the foundation for today's video game industry. He was 78 years old.

Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan announced his death, where Mr. Uemura led the Game Research Center. No other details were provided.

Video game consoles were once popular in the early 1980s, but the market collapsed due to poor quality control and lack of inspirational software that could not provide the excitement of popular arcade games such as Pac-Man and Space Invaders. A large number of unsold game cassettes are eventually thrown into landfills, and retailers believe that there is no future for home gaming systems.

But in 1985, the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System in the United States completely changed the industry. The humble gray box with a unique controller became a must-have for an entire generation of children and prompted Nintendo to effectively monopolize the industry for most of 10 years, as competitors withdrew from the market due to the company's dominance.

Mr. Uemura was behind the Nintendo system released in Japan in 1983. He also helped create its successor Super Nintendo and other little-known products of the company.

“Nintendo’s success in the United States is due to the quality of its software, but without the hardware created by Uemura, the software would never enter the hearts of gamers,” said Matt Alter, whose book “Pure Inventions” was published in 2020. : How Japanese pop culture conquered the world," records the rise of Nintendo.

"He is the true giant and architect of the global gaming industry," Mr. Alt added in an email.

This machine makes Nintendo one of the most profitable companies in Japan, and the games it runs, such as Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, have become classic franchises.

Its great success has also established video game consoles as a viable product and has promoted the development of today's $40 billion game console market.

Masayuki Uemura was born in Tokyo on June 20, 1943. His father was a kimono businessman who later owned a record store. His family moved to Kyoto (Nintendo’s hometown), hoping to avoid the bombing attacks that ravaged Japan during World War II.

As a child, he showed an interest in technological pursuits. In an interview with Hitotsubashi University in 2016, Mr. Uemura said that he used a student who was boarding with his family to make his own radio for the components he purchased. Pachinko, a game similar to the fusion of slot machines and pachinko.

After graduating from high school, he studied electrical engineering at Chiba Institute of Technology with the goal of designing color televisions.

In 1971, when Yokoi Junpei, then Nintendo's chief engineer, recruited him to join Sharp, he worked as a salesperson for Sharp. At the time, it was a small manufacturer of cards and other traditional Japanese games, ambitiously creating innovative new toys.

Mr. Uemura was inspired by Nintendo’s serious gameplay. But he had another motivation for accepting the job: He had just gotten married recently, and Sharp planned to send him to the United States without a wife.

His decision to stay in Japan was transformative for himself and Nintendo.

In 1981, when Nintendo was hyped by the popularity of the arcade game Donkey Kong in the U.S. market, then company president Hiroshi Yamauchi asked Mr. Uemura to develop an affordable entertainment system to bring the arcade experience home.

The result was a red and white box called Famicom, short for "home computer." Although other game consoles have blocky and jittery graphics, Famicom has smooth animated characters and backgrounds, almost like cartoons. Its Donkey Kong version looks like the one in the arcade. Unlike other gaming systems that emit beeping and buzzing sounds, it can play music.

At first, the game console, which was priced at 14,800 yen (approximately US$65 at the time), received little response in Japan—only a few hundred thousand units were sold in the first year. In an interview decades later, Mr. Uemura admitted that he had always doubted whether Famicom would succeed. The early version of the system had many problems: Among them, the square buttons of the controller were easy to get stuck.

When his son told his classmates that his father was the designer of the machine, he had a preliminary understanding of the potential of the system, and the children nearby asked Mr. Uemura to come and repair their console.

In 2013, he said in an interview with Weekly Famitsu magazine: "I have received too many requests and I realized that'this thing is really selling well'."

But it wasn't until "Super Mario Bros." came out in 1985 that the system really became popular. Its thrilling gameplay, catchy music, and design inspired by Japanese animation are like “gasoline on fire,” Mr. Uemura told Nintendo Dream Network in 1985.

He then created an upgraded and redesigned Famicom for the American market, which marked the success of the system and transformed Nintendo into not only a gaming giant but also a Japanese industrial giant. By the early 1990s, the company used 3% of Japan’s semiconductor manufacturing capacity and made more money than all American film studios combined. Author David Scheff wrote in his book "The Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered the World" (1993) wrote.

Then, the company asked Mr. Uemura to design another upgrade. In 1990, he delivered Super Famicom, known as Super Nintendo in the United States. The machine sold more than 49 million units worldwide, consolidating Nintendo’s role as the world’s most influential gaming company and one of the most successful entertainment companies ever. reputation.

Mr. Uemura retired from Nintendo in 2004 and joined Ritsumeikan University as the director of the Game Research Center until his death.

Information about his survivors could not be obtained immediately.

In an interview with the video game website Polygon in 2013 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Famicom’s release, Mr. Uemura said that the work on the project was transformative.

"I used to be just a typical office idiot," he said, "but then I met toys, which changed my outlook on life."