Maybe it's about being in the right place at the right time. How else to explain how Masayuki Uemura, an engineer born in wartime Japan to a humble background, came to change the course of video game history? Uemura is the man who designed the Famicom, a pivotal piece of plastic whose legacy can be seen throughout the modern industry; in many ways, it's the machine that defined modern Nintendo. "You know, it's only when someone like you comes along and asks a lot of questions that makes me think maybe I was a part of some big thing," he says with no small amount of modesty as we chat in a small, quiet space on the ground floor of Sheffield's Castle House.
The right place to be late last month was most definitely The National Videogame Museum, where the 76-year-old Uemura made the long journey from Kyoto to give a talk. The museum presents a thoughtfully curated collection with plenty of fascinating offshoots, from casual ephemera to a real, live Nintendo Dolphin devkit. And there are NES consoles, of course, the western version of the Famicom that took the world by storm throughout the 80s and established Nintendo as a giant of the entertainment industry.
The Nintendo that Uemura joined in the early 70s was still focussed on the trade it had been plying for the previous 80 years. "Back then they were only really manufacturing hanafuda cards," says Uemura. "That was it. They had top share for the hanafuda, but that was limited in terms of the size of the market, and it was decreasing constantly. That's why Nintendo decided to move into a new direction and into the toy industry."
from Eurogamer.net
No comments:
Post a Comment