Masayuki Uemura

Masayuki Uemura

Date of Birth: 1943

Home Town:

Occupation: Professor

Bestselling Game:

Development Teams

R&D 2

Key Franchises

Masayuki Uemura is an employee of Nintendo's. He's best known for his work on Nintendo's home consoles.

Biography

Born in 1943, his family was forced to move to Kyoto due to the bombings. Uemura attended Risumeikan University.

Uemura original worked for Sharp, working on solar cells. While selling them, he meet Gunpei Yokoi. Yokoi recruited Uemura. The worked together on Nintendo Beam Gun Games. They used the technology to create a laser clay shooting game and opened the first range in Kyoto in 1973. A year later, the same technology was used in Wild Gunman.

When Nintendo wanted to make TV games, Uemura suggested they strike up a distribution deal with Magnavox. They agreed to distribute the Odyssesy in Japan. This allowed them to become more familiar with the inner workings of home consoles. Since they didn't know how to make microprocessors, they had to depend on Mitsubishi for them.

When the development group was divided into three groups, Uemura was put in charge of R&D 2. They worked on Nintendo Entertainment System and Super Nintendo. The two systems are sometimes called the Uemura series because of his hand in them.

When he developed the NES, the biggest obstacle he faced was price. Hiroshi Yamauchi wanted the NES to sell for around US$75. In order to keep the price down, Uemura decided to use a cheaper 8-bit CPU, even though more expensive 16-bit CPUs were available.

When developing the Super Nintendo, Hiroshi Yamauchi asked Uemura to make the Super Nintendo backwardly compatible with NES games. However, the first priority was keeping costs down. Uemura discovered that it would cost an extra $75 for the Super Nintendo to be backwardly compatible. It was decided that they would later produce an adaptor, which never saw the light of day.

In 2004, Uemura retired. He is currently a professor at Risumeikan University and acts as an advisor to Nintendo.