Masayuki Uemura has been an engineer at Nintendo for 32 years. As the manager of the R & D2 department responsible for hardware, he has overseen the production of NES and SNES and observed that the company's position in the video game industry is almost Fabulous.
For the past 15 years, he has been a professor at Kyoto Ritsumeikan University, trying to figure out how this all happened.
"In the beginning, I planned to develop this console for a Japanese audience, but it gradually became a global phenomenon," he told attendees in a lecture at the National Video Game Museum in Sheffield. "That's why I want to learn about game culture." .I discovered why Nintendo is so popular. "
Nintendo is not the first company to interact with Japanese TV. This distinction is attributed to Epoch, a toy maker that sold television tennis equipment in 1975. Epoch used a long red plastic block to wirelessly connect via an antenna for several months, bringing Atari's Home Pong to the market and providing countless hours of extremely basic back and forth movements on a black screen.
It didn't sell well, but Uemura, a former engineer, took things apart and inspected the components. The Japanese game console market was born.
Shu Uemura attributed Nintendo's initial console success to the fatigue of space invaders. Earth defense games in Taito have dominated consoles since 1978, and toy companies have competed to sell children's handheld space-infringing devices. In this crowded market, Nintendo introduced Donkey Kong at Game & Watch-a miniature multi-screen device that is now surprisingly similar to DS.
Mario's debut has been highly sought after on arcades, quite different from the Space Invaders, enough to make Nintendo an innovator. Its animated action is as appealing to Japanese children as the first wave of anime, "Animated Manga." It brings important lessons to Nintendo.
"One of the challenging things about the toy industry is that children get tired of them easily," Uemura said. "So we can't treat them with the same game over and over again-we have to come up with something new."
Nintendo's position was quickly threatened by rapid industry changes, a common theme in its subsequent history. Even if Game & Watch became popular, the United States was preparing for the rise of the PC. The saturation of the market led to the collapse of video games in 1983, and home computers were expected to replace the dominant Atari 2600, thus completely ending the era of gaming consoles.
In response, Japanese manufacturers started installing keyboards on their machines. But as Game & Watch sales started to decline, Nintendo once again disguised its own path and designed the gamepad-based Famicom.
The company hopes that Famicom will be as popular as all other toys for a few years before being eliminated. It believes that selling the device in the US market will extend the sales period, but faces a problem: the crash has stigmatized the console. In fact, American toy makers were not interested in Famicom until after Nintendo repackaged it as a street cabinet (two-player VS). System-Coins hovered from American pockets throughout 1985.
Uemura concluded: "The fact that Atari failed is not only because of the hardware, but also because of the poor quality of the software." Nintendo's software is second to none.
However, if Famicom is to succeed domestically, it will need to rebrand. The idea is to keep Nintendo as far away from the existing video game industry as possible. Famicom's appearance has been modified to resemble a VHS player that has become a US home fixture, with a front-mounted cartridge system.
Instead of imitating Atari's joystick, Nintendo insisted on using a gamepad because they knew that Japanese children might step on them after putting the controller on the floor. The company wisely removed the microphone from the second controller to include karaoke to take full advantage of its popularity in Japan, but only one karaoke game was released on Famicom and bombed.
Eventually, the company renamed the home computer Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES for short. It is a Trojan horse that secretly takes video games home with a different name and a convenient lounge.
Nintendo realized that it couldn't promote all of its games through TV commercials, so it opened a call center in the United States to answer questions from fans and began working with game media: Nintendo Power operated from 1988 to 2012, and the official British magazine was from 1992 It has been in operation until 2014. Today, we are just waiting for the next Nintendo Direct, desperately wondering where the company's next left-field hardware will take us.
Uemura no longer plays video games. "I'm sorry about that," he said. He has always been an engineer. But he is still amazed by the great success of NES, which he believes proves Japan's place in the world: a small group of islands adjacent to continents, ready to assume international influence, make it have its own influence, and pass the results around global
Check out our list of the best Nintendo Switch games to see what software has been driving players back in 2020.