The New Yorker:

It isn’t quite fair to call the engineer Masayuki Uemura, who died on December 6th, at the age of seventy-eight, an unsung architect of the global game industry. He is widely known among gamers for his work designing the Family Computer, the game console that became the Nintendo Entertainment System abroad, and its successor, the Super Famicom, known outside of Japan as the Super Nintendo. After retiring from Nintendo, in 2004, he remained deeply engaged with the industry, directing the Ritsumeikan Center for Game Studies in Kyoto until stepping down in March of this year.

Despite the cravings that Uemura’s machines invoked in the young—and not so young—customers who coveted them, his creations were inevitably overshadowed by the content that they were designed to serve up: the games themselves, the virtual adventures that were eagerly consumed by countless players around the planet. But these games would not have reached their destinations without Uemura’s consoles. Like bridges between worlds, his fantasy-delivery devices linked the Japanese and Western imaginations, with repercussions that are still being felt today.

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