Masayuki Uemura, Creator Of The NES And SNES, Dies At 78 (kotaku.com) 26
Masayuki Uemura was the lead architect for the Famicom (aka the Nintendo Entertainment System) and the Super Famicon (aka the SNES). The mark he left on the gaming industry and popular culture is indelible. According to Oricon News, Uemura passed away on December 6. He was 78. Kotaku: Ritsumeikan University, where Uemura became the director of game studies after retiring from Nintendo in 2004, announced his passing earlier today. Originally, Uemura worked at Sharp, selling photocell tech to various companies, including his future employer Nintendo. Once joinging the company, he worked with Gunpei Yokoi to integrate the photocell technology into electronic light gun games. He would go on to work on plug-and-play consoles like Nintendo's Color TV-Game.
But everything changed in 1981 with a single phone call. "President Yamauchi told me to make a video game system, one that could play games on cartridges," Uemura told Matt Alt in an interview published last year on Kotaku. "He always liked to call me after he'd had a few drinks, so I didn't think much of it. I just said, "Sure thing, boss," and hung up. It wasn't until the next morning when he came up to me, sober, and said, "That thing we talked about -- you're on it?" that it hit me: He was serious."
But everything changed in 1981 with a single phone call. "President Yamauchi told me to make a video game system, one that could play games on cartridges," Uemura told Matt Alt in an interview published last year on Kotaku. "He always liked to call me after he'd had a few drinks, so I didn't think much of it. I just said, "Sure thing, boss," and hung up. It wasn't until the next morning when he came up to me, sober, and said, "That thing we talked about -- you're on it?" that it hit me: He was serious."
It's OK (Score:4, Funny)
Not how that works (Score:2)
I am not sure that is how that works. Eating green mushrooms in real life may not work out so well.
Great story (Score:4, Funny)
"President Yamauchi told me to make a video game system, one that could play games on cartridges," Uemura told Matt Alt in an interview published last year on Kotaku. "He always liked to call me after he'd had a few drinks, so I didn't think much of it. I just said, "Sure thing, boss," and hung up. It wasn't until the next morning when he came up to me, sober, and said, "That thing we talked about -- you're on it?" that it hit me: He was serious."
I found this funny - in part because it really doesn't fit my with mental image of the Japanese worker. It sounds more like us lazy drunk Americans.
Re:Great story (Score:4, Funny)
I suspect drunk bosses giving subordinates drunken orders has been a fact of life for workers in technical fields since the first engineer with a clay tablet had a drunken king tell him "I want a tower eighty cubits high, with a groovy bronze roof and tigers!". And the response has probably been the same; "I hope that crazy bastard sleeps it off and forgets everything he said."
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I have a friend who works at an electronics equipment supplier that does business with Japanese companies. Whenever he goes to Japan, he knows he's going to have to go out drinking after work. Well, "after work" is nearly a misnomer, because the drinking is basically part of the job.
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What doesn't fit your image of the Japanese worker? The drinking?
No, the "blow off the boss' request and hope he forgets about it" part.
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That's a very Japanese way of working. It's not uncommon for employees to go for a drink with the boss after work, so sometimes decisions get made at the bar.
Japanese managers tend to be quite hands-off too. Tell an employee to do a project and let them get on with it. Japanese companies tend to hire people for the long haul too, even if they don't have specific skills that they require right at that time. Often they take on groups of people straight out of university, and find a place for them inside the c
A couple of great machines (Score:5, Informative)
The Famicom, later the NES outside Japan, was a clever design that maximized the utility of limited, cheap hardware. It had only 2k of main RAM, and another 2k of video memory. The cartridge interface was very flexible so those capabilities didn't hold the machine back as much as they otherwise would have, often being supplemented by extra memories on the cartridge as memory prices fell.
It had some clever features too, like a sprite system that automatically handled games exceeding the maximum sprites per scanline limit by flickering them in sequence. On other systems the game had to do that itself, or some sprites would simply disappear. It was a bit rough around the edges, with the infamous glitchy scrolling, but it was also built down to an affordable price.
The Super Famicom or SNES was the other extreme, featuring very powerful video and audio subsystems. People often forget the audio, but the SF had a fairly advanced audio system for the time that could handle some real-time DSP effects. It once again included the capability to be dramatically expanded via special hardware in cartridges, but the base hardware itself was kind of like a greatest hits of 16 bit technology. It had powerful DMA, a something similar to the Amiga's co-processor that was synced to the display hardware so that it could do scanline effects. The scanline effects became a signature trick on the SNES, enabling games like Mario Kart and pseudo-3D with relative ease.
Uemura san was one of the greatest engineers of the era.
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Let's put this way. Nintendo was doing fairly well with cabinet games and the like, but his systems basically made them a company where new consoles are a license to print money. There have been outstanding figures in the video game industry, but man, having Famicon/NES under your belt, that's an Olympian accomplishment. By the late 1980s, pretty much everyone I knew had an NES, and you went to the rental shop as early as you could manage on Friday to get the best games.
Re:A couple of great machines (Score:4, Informative)
More importantly, Nintendo learned what happened in North America when creating the NES - the internal architecture is the same, but the NES and Famicom are different in many ways. The primary difference is the NES10 lockout chip which meant Nintendo was in control of who could make games for their console. The reason being the Video Game Crash was caused by people flooding the market with crappy Atari 2600 games to the point retailers and consumers got so fed up spending money on crap that they stopped buying altogether.
The crash was so bad many people thought that videogames were a fad and it had run its course - attempts were made at releasing other videogame systems but they failed because retailers were too gunshy to invest in anymore videogames.
It's also where the NES has created a problem - to sell the NES, Nintendo couldn't call it a videogame system because no retailer would carry it, so they called it a toy - electronic toys are common in the era. But the problem was, toystores were basically divided in two - you had boy's toys, and you had girl's toys. No toy could go in both sections, so you had to decide. NIntendo chose boys and well, we're stuck with the decision today. You can see it reflected in the advertising - the Atari shows an entire family with mom, dad, son and daughter playing it, while Nintendo shows just a boy playing it, leaving us with a stereotype of "videogames are for boys".
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Video games are marketed to men because men buy more games. My wife would, frankly, be perfectly happy playing the original The Sims today. It's no different from her playing with Barbie dolls as a
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The other issue that arose from the decision to market the NES as a toy was that they changed the design to be more like a VCR, with front loading. That proved unreliable as the cartridge socket would wear out over time, more so than the one in the Japanese Famicom. The cartridges and the NES itself were unnecessarily large too, a strange trend that continued with the PC Engine, known as the Turbografx in the US. The US one was twice the size of the Japanese model, and most of it was empty space.
Re:A couple of great machines (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh, one other interesting factoid. The NES was made to look more like a VCR to avoid it being associated the video games crash. In Japan the cartridges are actually called cassettes.
So while the Famicom didn't look like a VCR, it took cassettes. The NES looked like a VCR but took cartridges.
Correction regarding sprite limit (Score:3)
The NES hardware did not automatically flicker sprites. Instead, the graphics chip set a software-readable flag saying that sprite overflow occurred, and game programming could react by cycling sprites. Games typically did this by cycling the order in which sprites were added to the sprite list during each frame's logic; the graphics chip would use the first 8 it saw on a scanline.
See here: https://wiki.nesdev.org/w/inde... [nesdev.org]
Audio (Score:2)
The sound/music in Super Metroid was and still is amazing. Just hearing that brings back so many "speed run" memories.
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The Super Famicom's sound is very clever. It supports ADPCM to reduce the size of sound samples, important with cartridge based games. It also supports effects like reverb and envelopes, so they can be applied in realtime rather than having to record the whole thing into a single sample.
For a lot of people it was the first major upgrade over FM sound.
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The sound subsystem is by Sony, Ken Kutaragi of PlayStation fame designed it.
What a time, the 90s (Score:3)
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Even the later NES games like Super Mario Brothers 3 were pretty much the height of 8-bit gaming. And yeah, I remember the first time my buddy and I rented an SNES and Super Mario World, plugging in, we were just blown away.
Did they try taking him out. (Score:5, Funny)