We learn with sadness the news of the death, which took place in these days, of Masayuki Uemura, the engineer who joined Nintendo in 1972 helped the Kyoto company to create the iconic consoles with which it has established itself as a gaming battleship for several decades: NES and SNES.
The death occurred on December 6, 2021: Uemura was 78 years old. Nothing more specific about the cause of death was revealed, and the funeral took place privately. The story of Masayuki Uemura is very special: an electronic engineer who passed from Sharp to Nintendo in 1972, a Nintendo that was beginning to take its first steps in the electronic entertainment sector. His work as lead architect, which will then give birth to NES And SNES actually began in 1981, when the then president of Nintendo, Hiroshi Yamauchi, expressed the desire to create a device that was able to play arcade games even in the living room of their home connected to a TV.
Uemura, who was promoted to head of the research and development section of Nintendo, thus conceived and designed the Famicom, known by us as NES, and in the future also made its further improved version, lo SNES or Super Famicom. Although his involvement in some videogame titles is minimal, it is still the producer of some titles appreciated at the time and still famous today by sideways such as Ice Climber (thanks to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate) And Clu Clu Land.
Uemura then left his position at Nintendo in 2004, aware that a talent like his would be best explained in an academic context: he reinvented himself as a professor at Ritsumeikan University of Kyoto, a role he held until his death. In 2020, in a rare interview he gave to a British newspaper during a visit to the UK, he stated that in his opinion, everything that was possible with console games has been achieved. He added that, at the time, the NES was a big leap in the dark: but the fact of having managed to make it, in such a precarious condition, was a great source of pride for the Japanese engineer.
So we join in the grief and sadness for the passing of Masayuki Uemura, aware that the gaming landscape would probably be drastically different today without his creations.
Source: rcgs.jp via Nintendo Life
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