The Designer Of The NES Dishes The Dirt On Nintendo’s Early Days – Kotaku Australia

When discussing Nintendos rise as a digital dreamsmith in the 80s, game designers like Shigeru Miyamoto and Gunpei Yokoi get most of the limelight. But it was the hardware designed by Masayuki Uemura that served up their fantasies to millions around the globe.
I spent 2019 criss-crossing Japan researching my book Pure Invention: How Japans Pop Culture Conquered the World, in search of the countrys architects of cool. In March of that year I came face-to-face with a true legend: Masayuki Uemura, the engineer who designed Nintendos first cartridge-based game system, the Family Computer, aka the Famicom, aka the Nintendo Entertainment System.
With a design based on the arcade hardware that powered Donkey Kong, the Famicom quickly revolutionised home gaming in Japan when it was released in 1983. As the NES, it revitalised the home video game market in the United States after the Atari market crashed. From then on, it proceeded to deliver a steady stream of Japanese fantasies into the hearts and minds of people around the world. Its hard to imagine a world today without Uemuras machine.
Masayuki Uemura joined Nintendo in 1972. Gunpei Yokoi, the inventor and toy designer whose products like the Ultra Hand had transformed Nintendo from a humble maker of hanafuda, Japanese playing cards, into a well-known toy and game company, recruited Uemura away from his previous employer, the electronics company Hayakawa Electric, known today as Sharp. Uemura retired from Nintendo in 2004, and currently serves as the director for the Centre for Game Studies at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. The universitys leaf-covered Kinugasa campus is a quiet oasis in what is or was, before COVID-19 a bustling and tourist-packed city. It is also a 10-minute walk from the ancient Zen rock garden of Ryoan-ji temple, whose evocatively arranged boulders and artfully raked gravel seem to me one of Japans earliest virtual realities.
Departments that teach students how to make video games abound in higher education today, but the Ritsumeikan Centre for Game Studies is one of only a handful of academic efforts specifically designed to preserve home video gaming equipment and ephemera. Its archives contain everything from early home versions of Pong to the latest consoles, every controller variation under the sun, and an ever-expanding library of software on tapes, cartridges, and discs. The packed shelves of its climate-controlled storage facility look like something out of a kids dream, organised with the obsessive rigour of the Library of Congress. The scent in the air is that paper from countless magazines and strategy guides, tinged with the nostalgic ozone smell of vintage electronics.
Uemura was 75 years old at the time of our interview, but seemed much younger. A benefit of a life spent making playthings for the world? Whatever the case, there is no mistaking the amusement and restless curiosity in Uemuras eyes as we sit down over a round of Famicom Donkey Kong to talk about the little beige and burgundy machine that touched so many lives.
Kotaku: What was Nintendo like when you joined the company?
Masayuki Uemura: One of the things that surprised me when I moved from Sharp to Nintendo was that, while they didnt have a development division, they had this kind of development warehouse full of toys, almost all of them American.
Kotaku: What were your impressions of Nintendos former president Hiroshi Yamauchi, who ran the firm from 1949 to 2002?
Uemura: He loved hanafuda and card games. I remember once, early on, a birthday party for an employee and he showed up and got right into hanafuda with everyone.
He was a Kyotoite. Its a city with a lot of long-running businesses, some maybe five or even six hundred years old. In the hierarchy of the city, traditional craftspeople rank at the top. Nintendo, as a purveyor of playthings like hanafuda or Western playing cards, originally ranked down at the very bottom. Doing business in that environment made him very open to new ventures. He wasnt interested in specializing. He was keenly interested in new trends.
Heres an example of what I mean. In 1978, he bought around 10 tabletop versions of Space Invaders and placed them in headquarters and our factory. The idea was that wed playtest them as a form of research. But what ended up happening was the entire company got so obsessed playing it that we couldnt get a turn in. It was like a fever. Everyone abandoned their posts and stopped working. I was just bummed out that we hadnt made it ourselves. Shocked and annoyed

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