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It has been revealed that NES and SNES lead architect Masayuki Uemura passed away on December 6th at the age of 78.

The Famicom – the system that would become the NES in the west – was the brainchild of Uemura, who joined Nintendo as an engineer from Sharp in 1972 at a time when it was tentatively exploring the possibilities of electronic entertainment. One of his first roles was to help with Nintendo’s range of location-based light-gun games.

When Nintendo R&D2 was created, Uemura was placed in charge, and he was instrumental in the development of Nintendo’s ‘Color TV-Game’ systems – the company’s first tentative foray into the realm of domestic video games. These were very basic gaming systems that had relatively crude built-in titles… read more >