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The Designer Of The NES Dishes The Dirt On Nintendo's Early Days

When discussing Nintendo’s 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.

kotaku.com

When discussing Nintendo’s 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.

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 Center for Game Studies at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. The university’s 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 Japan’s earliest “virtual realities.”

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 didn’t have a development division, they had this kind of development warehouse full of toys, almost all of them American.

check the link for more

 

[Hawks Eclipse]

This was a good and fun read, I suppose my enjoyment was bolstered by some other thoughts that cropped up while reading it.

Kotaku: How did the Famicom project come about?

Uemura: It started with a phone call in 1981. President Yamauchi told me to make a video game system, one that could play games on cartridges. 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.

This reminded me of another interview I read a long time ago...

EGM: Whose idea was it to alert the guards when you touch the girly poster in the locker room?

HK: Mine [smiles and makes knocking gesture and 'boing' sound]. Whenever you see something jokey or silly in the game, it's always my idea. I always include all these little details in the game plan.And my staff, when they read this they say, "Ah, this isn't going to happen." I tell my staff, "You've got to do that poster thing, so when you hit the breast you hear 'boing.'" I go back to them in a week and I ask, "Well? Why isn't it here?" and they say, "What, you weren't joking?"

Courtesy of http://madjackyl.tripod.com/Kojima-int4.html

Uemura: In the 70s, we had no idea what was going on with companies like Namco or Atari because we were here in Kyoto. If you lived in Tokyo, you’d probably pick up lots of things about companies like Taito or Sega or Namco or even what was happening in America. But none of that filtered down to Kyoto at all. That’s Kyoto for you—a little standoffish, going its own way, and proud of it. To a certain degree, not even caring about the outside world. A little conservative when it comes to new things. When I worked for Sharp, I took many business trips to Tokyo. But when I started working for Nintendo, that completely stopped. It’s pretty shocking when I think back on it, but Kyoto has always been kind of closed off that way. So no, there wasn’t any sense of us being behind.

This passage is so Nintendo it hurts, though sometimes it brings us some real gems as a result.

The number of dots you could use to draw the characters was extremely limited, so Miyamoto was forced to use colors to differentiate them.

This quote made me think of a tweet I came across a few days ago:

 

[NeoIkaruGAF]

The corporate environment at Nintendo was crazy competitive in those years. There was definitely some rivalry and bad blood between Yokoi’s R&D1 and Uemura’s R&D2, as recounted in this excellent book. Uemura isn’t being sincere here - or rather, he may be speaking strictly about the years leading up to the Famicom, but after that, when the console became a huge success and Nintendo started the Game Boy project, things weren’t as lovey-dovey as he seems to imply.

 

[Hawks Eclipse]

The corporate environment at Nintendo was crazy competitive in those years. There was definitely some rivalry and bad blood between Yokoi’s R&D1 and Uemura’s R&D2, as recounted in this excellent book. Uemura isn’t being sincere here - or rather, he may be speaking strictly about the years leading up to the Famicom, but after that, when the console became a huge success and Nintendo started the Game Boy project, things weren’t as lovey-dovey as he seems to imply.

If you have the book and are able to, could you provide some translated excerpts that elaborate on the rivalry around the Gameboy-development era?

I've been searching the web and found this, though it is in the period of developing the Famicom.

The entire linked article is worth reading, however I'll quote the relevant excerpts from https://www.usgamer.net/articles/ne...n-the-birth-of-nintendos-first-console/page-2:

Uemura credits Yokoi's Game & Watch line as crucial influences for the Famicom hardware. The cross-pad controller that appeared on certain Game & Watch units ended up being a key element of the Famicom's appeal. Fittingly, given that the Famicom team's fundamental design goal was to be able to recreate Donkey Kong as faithfully to the arcade experience as possible, the cross-pad had debuted on the Donkey Kong dual-screen Game & Watch handheld. At first, however, the Famicom/Game & Watch relationship was a bit more frictional.

"At the time," says Uemura, "the engineers at Nintendo were kind of split between two teams: The one making games for arcade, like Space Invaders (which wasn’t ours, but we had Donkey Kong). And then there was Mr. Yokoi’s team, focused on making the handheld Game & Watch devices.

"The Game & Watches sold like hotcakes—it was surprising. I was kind of at my wits’ end and people were leaving my team to go to Mr. Yokoi’s team because there was such popularity around the Game & Watch. In the end, I was left with just three people on my team!

A silver lining:

At this point, Uemura says, the attrition his group had suffered from engineers defecting to the Game & Watch team paid off in an unexpected way.

"There were, as you can probably imagine, a lot of difficulties we faced in doing things for the first time in building this hardware, but one of the most difficult was, 'What shape and layout will the controller have?'

"This has a touch of coincidence about it, too, but some of those people who had gone to work with Gunpei Yokoi’s team eventually found their way back to our team. So one of the ideas that came up because of that was, 'Well, we’ve got this Game & Watch multi-screen Donkey Kong that uses the controller format of a plus control pad and buttons.' So we hooked that up and got it working.

Uemura says his team experimented with several different controllers, including something closer in style to Atari's 2600 joystick. Yet none of them felt entirely comfortable. The 2600 design, for example, seemed too unstable for fast action games, and there were concerns that children might leave the controllers on the floor to be stepped on. Eventually, one of engineers who had worked with Yokoi's portable LCD games rigged a cross-pad plundered from a Game & Watch device to the Famicom for a trial run.

"At the time, we were prototyping various ideas for the Famicom hardware, as well as controllers," says Uemura. "When we took this idea that had been used for controls with the Donkey Kong Game & Watch and got it working on the Famicom prototype with that same style of controls, we immediately knew, 'OK, this feels right; there’s something good about this.' That means that there are actually a few people who can claim that they invented the controller for the Famicom!

Uemura's lovey-doveyness extends beyond his senpai:

Uemura: "I may have made the decision, but in the end, it’s something that whoever worked on the Game & Watch for Donkey Kong had a hand in, whoever brought the idea to try out the prototype had a hand in it—it was really a team effort."

And it's not as though he doesn't get a little salty, but for a different reason:

While everything worked out for the Famicom hardware project, both inside and out, the controller's crosspad design doesn't come without some small regrets. "You know, we didn’t patent that technology at the time," admits Uemura, somewhat ruefully. "Once it was established, you kind of started to see it pop up everywhere, and now it’s kind of become a standard for controls in games."

I think there are numerous possible reasons as to why Uemura didn't acknowledge a rivalry. For now I'll assume that he simply didn't perceive any beef between him and Yokoi on a personal level.

 

[Alter_Fridge]

Mario isn't Italian???

 

[SlimeGooGoo]

.

 

[#Phonepunk#]

This is a good interview.

One reason I like Nintendo is they have a very unique and particular way of doing things, they are kind of isolated from the rest of the industry. Very idiosyncratic.

Also there seems to have been a lot of enthusiasm and things done on a whim! This is how you keep things fresh I suppose.