Masayuki Uemura has died | Hacker News Reader

Masayuki Uemura has died

thegamer.com

420 pointsthe-dude118 comments

"When I developed the Famicom, I put all the basic functions that were necessary to make it as a gaming device. For the Switch, it's inherited all that over the years. All the successes and failures of the Famicom are inherited by the next generation of consoles and onward."

What did he consider to be the failures?

EDIT: Added the first sentence of the quote.

The way I read the quote is he felt there where fundamental designs decisions that have been passed down all the way to the Switch. Some of which he considers to be failures.

I imagine he is talking about the hardware/software stack. OS seems pretty custom: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch_system_softwar...

I think the quote isn't meant for such literal interpretation. Basically, saying they have all learned from good and bad things which puts them to where they are today. It's like one of those "I regret nothing because without my failures I wouldn't be the person I am today" type quotes.

Yeah, I like that interpretation.

The virtual boy was a failure by any measure, 64DD, the Wii U sucked, and the 3DS wasn’t very popular compared to the DS, and wouldn’t have had any success if it didn’t have backwards compatibility.

Wii U was a marketing disaster.

It was a very fun console. It is unfortunate that asymmetrical game play wasn't explored more.

It really was the first step towards what the Switch is now. Being able to remotely play games anywhere in my house, or have someone else watch TV while I played on the Wii U, was super cool.

I loved my Wii U. So many features that I still miss today. So many great games, I'm glad many of them were ported to the Switch.

I wonder if some are even portable. I would love to have Windwaker HD on Switch but I remember the touchpad screen being pretty integral (and part of why it was a lot better than the original)

It was overpriced, the small screen sucked, and it had no games, polar opposite of the wii, it was just the DS in console form which was forced into using this for every game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GameCube_–_Game_Boy_Advance_li... like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_Crystal_Chronicl...

> It was overpriced, the small screen sucked, and it had no games

And $ for $ I had more fun with my Wii U than my Xbox One.

Nintendo's Wii U games were full of joy and happiness. They are all an absolute delight to play.

Wait, you didn't like Crystal Chronicles? Maybe I'm just a nostalgic millennial, but I thought the game's aesthetic was pristine and the multiplayer super clever.

It's up there with Pac Man Vs. for that sort of thing.

I didn’t get to play it with others since they didn’t have the cable and it was pointless on my own.

I own a few of the cables. If we ever somehow meet in real life someday, would you want to try it with me and some friends?

There are moments where it feels like a bit of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign with the towns, or roadside scenes, or everyone receiving individual letters from home.

Yes I’d love to! I heard neverwinter nights is great for that too, it’s still being developed and it’s even Linux native since 2002 or so.

The Wii U and 3DS were some of the best consoles Nintendo ever made.

I get that they weren't large hits in the general market, I get that they were not financial successes.

But for dedicated folks, these consoles represented some of the very best design and product packages that Nintendo had ever offered. (A good chunk of which was lost in the transition to the Switch, like proper Virtual Console support, or Nintendo Mii's getting heavy usage, or StreetPass).

Yes, they also offered backwards compatibility, but that's not "why" they had success -- they were successful as products entirely in their own right.

They weren’t “good failures” like Dreamcast. I can’t think of any game that was great on either off the top of my head, but the Dreamcast I can name several exclusives that were. A lot of the good games were just remakes, like Devil Survivor Overclocked.

> They weren’t “good failures” like Dreamcast. I can’t think of any game that was great on either off the top of my head, but the Dreamcast I can name several exclusives that were.

Really? The Wii U lineup is like a perfect Dreamcast-like example of a "good failure". It was so good, that half of the best selling Switch games from it's first two years, were just past Wii U exclusive games (or 3DS games), ported up to the switch.

Zelda: BotW, Mario Kart 8, Lego City Undercover, Pokken Tournament, Bayonetta 2, Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze, Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker, Hyrule Warriors, Super Mario Brothers U, Tokyo Mirage Sessions, Wonderful 101, Pikmin 3, Super Mario 3D World, Fatal Frame: Maiden of the Black Water, Super Mario Maker, and Xenoblade Chronicles (1).

All of those are either Wii U / 3DS exclusives ported forward, or planned to be exclusives and got last-minute ports near the end of development cycle (like Zelda BotW).

The 3DS isn't really a "failure". It still sold 70+ million units. Only in comparison to the 150 million of the DS is it a failure. Both Wii U and 3DS have some fantastic exclusives (although most of the good ones on Wii U ended up Switch or 3DS or both).

Super Mario 3D Land and 3D World are IMO the two best 3D Mario games made, 3DS has a trio of fantastic Fire Emblem games (granted one is a remake but for English audiences not really), excellent JRPGs in stuff like Bravely Default, SMTIV, Pokémon X&Y, Mario Kart 7 and Smash were as good as always and LoZ: A Link Between Worlds is really good. Yes, there was plenty of ports and remakes but they were ports and remakes of great games made portable like Ocarina of Time 3D, DQ7 and DQ8, etc.

Wii U had great exclusives like Mario Maker, Bayonetta 2, the aforementioned Mario 3D World, Mario Kart 8, Breath of the Wild, Hyrule Warriors, Splatoon, Pikmin 3, Xenoblade Chronicles X, etc.

My bet is you have more fondness for the Dreamcast because you spent more time with it. Wii U was a fantastic system and still is.

I have a bias to Dreamcast, I was able to pick up any random game and it was gonna be good. The Dreamcast has a total of 624 games compared to the Wii U with 783, and if we remove remakes the good ones are mostly Nintendo, Dreamcast has 3rd parties that made good ones too. BoTW was a backport, but odd that list, I can confirm splatoon was pretty good.

BoTW is not a backport. It was announced originally for Wii U and came out the same day. There's not really very many remakes or remasters on Wii U, there's some enhanced ports of PS3/360 games but if you remove enhanced ports a lot of DC games disappear too...

The 783 game list also doesn't include any of the virtual console games and there's some really good stuff there that getting a hold of on the original system is pricey like Metroid Fusion and Ogre Battle 64.

Wii U games have the benefit of still being good today. Most DC games you need to add the caveat "for the time". There's also plenty of trash on DC too. I'm sure if you actually picked any random game it would more likely be trash than good. Wii U also has that problem but all consoles do.

3ds and wii U were marketing issues in that it wasn't clear that it was the next version of the system, like nes->snes but just a slightly different version of the same thing, like DS->DS Lite. It doesn't help that Nintendo rereleases their consoles multiple times a generation, or does things like the New 3ds which is only a slight improvement over the 3ds (extra joystick, slightly improved hardware). But yeah, virtual boy was a failure by pretty much any metric.

N64 wasn’t a continuation of SNES and 3DS sounds like a new DS, as does the Wii U unless you’re stating Xbox one failed because it’s name is 359 less, and was not an obvious continuation of Xbox 360. They went N64, GameCube, Wii which don’t have any continuity nor does Wii U to switch.

Seems like continuity hurts rather than helps Nintendo.

I don't think GP was saying that Nintendo had full continuation, just that they assumed people would see Wii U and 3DS the same way they saw the SNES. But by the time those were released people had just been through multiple models of DS and Gameboy Advanced that were just modified versions of the same hardware.

Hardware on the Switch seems standard:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Switch#Hardware

I wonder if his comments mean their Switch OS is emulating antiquated calls that have lineage to the original NES hardware.

There are no "antiquated calls" on a machine which had no os or standard library :)

Anyway, the switch not being special technology wise is very inline with the nintendo philosophy actually[0]. The NES wasn't that special for the time either, having not as that great specs of consoles in the late second generation, but it was how it was used, the games that came with it that made history.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi#Lateral_Thinking_...

There wasn't any system software on the NES, even to the point of no ubiquitous libraries, so it's doubtful.

Blowing on the cardridge? It didn’t work for the Famicon, and it has even less effect with the Switch.

Perhaps the repeated insertions/removals did clear off any light oxidation or slightly reposition the contacts?

I'll never believe it. Blowing was required and technique mattered.

Insertions and removals did work well on the Famicom, but not so much on the NES; the famicom had a typical edge-connector while the NES had a zero-insertion-force (ZIF) connector.

The pins would be repositioned with each insertion and you had to hope that all 72 pins made a good-enough contact. If the 10NES made poor contact you got a 1Hz reboot loop. If other pins made poor contact the game would kind-of sort-of work until it crashed.

Thank you so much Uemura-san for these great consoles!

I often think about how great it was to play these games, the amount of effort and care that went into them, and the sense of fairness and pure joy that you bought a game and could truly experience it! There was a magic and sincerity in these consoles that is buried under layers of ads, in-game purchases, tracking, updates etc. in more recent devices and games.

The NES and SNES still feel like the greatest consoles that ever existed. Thank you again!

What an absolute giant. The design of the NES made possible the games that revived the entire industry we know and love. There's no telling what gaming would look like for the past 35 years without his work. Godspeed sir.

With the passing of Uemura, and Near (aka Byuu) earlier this year, the SNES has truly become an artifact of history.

Byuu died too? I didn't hear about this!

Byuu/Near committed suicide following a coordinated harrasment campaign targeted against them, their family and friends, for being openly queer.

Byuu was bullied into committing suicide by a bunch of horrible trolls that wouldn't leave them alone.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27652814

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27657610

It's a big claim, but there hasn't been any proof that he actually died. Thankfully, he's probably just taking a break from the Internet

It's sad Byuu is gone but they don't represent the SNES becoming an artifact of history nor does a big thread about them belong in a memorial thread about Masayuki Uemura. There are many more SNES emu programmers who will take their place. That being said. RIP David Kirk Ginder.

A fascinating talk he gave just two years ago in NYC: https://youtu.be/A53gdHXwxHg

And a great written profile of his work: https://www.usgamer.net/articles/nes-creator-masayuki-uemura...

It is incredible that Uemura has been giving lectures at foreign universities even in his late age, and a member from our local video game archivist organization was extraordinarily lucky to get a NES signed from him when he was visiting Bratislava.

https://sanqui.net/etc/masayuki_uemura_signed_nes.jpg

On another branch of the digital world, Louis pouzin was also doing talks not long ago

Ah this is sooooooo good...

Is 78 considered old age? Danny Kahneman is 87, grew up in Nazi occupied France and still does.

78 is definitely not young, and various age-related health conditions develop rather abruptly with age. While your mind might be crystal clear, the rest of the daily life is far harder at 78 than say at 48.

It’s not young but it’s not extreme. The average lifespan for a man in Japan, where he lived, is 81.5 years

Many more people are living into their 90’s, and even over 100.

https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/18826/number-of-hundred-y...

Hopefully what we consider to be old changes over time. Dr Fauci is a few days from 81, for example.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Fauci

“Old age” is likely one of those things we simply accepted and never made much of an effort to address the issues that make us old.

> The average lifespan for a man in Japan, where he lived, is 81.5 years

That includes people who died as children, teens, etc. If you reach 70, your average lifespan is much higher AFAIK.

Yes, 78 is considered old age. In fact, the US life expectancy at birth is 78.

Most of the US is obese and unhealthy as well. If we remove child deaths from ancient Roman times it wasn’t that different not accounting for infant mortality, and in Britain for males it’s 79.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181002-how-long-did-anc...

>If one’s thirties were a decrepit old age, ancient writers and politicians don’t seem to have got the message. In the early 7th Century BC, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote that a man should marry “when you are not much less than 30, and not much more”. Meanwhile, ancient Rome’s ‘cursus honorum’ – the sequence of political offices that an ambitious young man would undertake – didn’t even allow a young man to stand for his first office, that of quaestor, until the age of 30 (under Emperor Augustus, this was later lowered to 25; Augustus himself died at 75). To be consul, you had to be 43 – eight years older than the US’s minimum age limit of 35 to hold a presidency.

Interesting. So what age would you consider old age and on what grounds?

I am confident a random sample of any nation on Earth would consider 78 old.

Ask them what age and they’ll tell you what age they think a 78 year old should look like (examples like on oxygen, can’t use legs, obese, completely wrinkly, no teeth, had 20 pills they need daily, basically on the verge of death).

Ask people how does this person look and they’ll often be surprised, epigenetic age matters more (obesity raises it for example) and when we think of age we don’t think years as much as “how old they look”. There are 50 year olds that show accelerated aging and 80 year olds that still look younger than their age. https://www.odditycentral.com/news/ripped-81-year-old-bodybu...

https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-topics/g01016/

I will look at a person and decide how old they look.

Fascinating. Thank you for sharing.

Even in Japan life expectancy is 81.9 years for men. 78 is well within what we consider to be old age for men.

I’ve always found mean life expectancy an odd metric. Median life expectancy seems more useful to answer “how long am I expected to live?” and appears to be 3-4 years higher in the US.

Japan's life expectancy is a bit higher.

Yes, it’s 81.5 years for a man and almost 87 for a woman.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_ex...

yes, 81. i'd say 2-3 years before the average age of someone's death constitutes "old age", surprised to see this has spawned such a debate.

Lol I had the same thought. There’s times when HN feels a little like Monty Python https://youtu.be/xpAvcGcEc0k

Sad to hear about this :( He brought so much joy into the hearts of small kids and big kids.

Maybe I'm biased, but I feel that Japanese video game developers don't enjoy the long life I think Japanese should enjoy. There are other examples. 78 is not bad but still far from good.

I hope to live that long. The average life expectancy for a Japanese male is 84, but there is this pandemic going on and it has definitely hit the older generation hard.

My friend at Tokyo university says they keep public windows open, cases are low, and it didn’t hit Japan hard at all, they were used to wearing masks long before, and most people isolate naturally anyway.

True, but it is fairly unlikely he passed away from COVID unless he got extremely unlucky. There’s very few cases in Japan right now.

I played my first Nintendo games in black and white on an NES that my dad brought back to Brazil after a trip to the US, and I loved them!

The reason the games were black and white had something to do with the differences between broadcast color encoding systems of PAL, used in Brazil, and NTSC, used in the US.

Eventually the hardware in my NES was modified and I could play the games in color, but it was, I suspect, an experience that shaped my own visual preferences.

Thank you, Mr. Uemura and team!

It's a sad moment for gamers. He started working at Sharp, where he sold solar cell and light sensor technology, but he's best remembered for a long and highly influential run at Nintendo that effectively revived the video game industry following the 1983 crash.

Nintendo Famicon was the first console I ever played, and to this day, controller-based sidescrollers are my favorite type of games. Chances are, it's because all those hours I put into Famicon (Dendy, actually) as a kid. Thank you for all the memories!

Absolute legend, it's sad that he is gone. SNES is still my favorite platform (I love iso-morphic view points).

Just a few months ago I setup a retopie and did a play through of one of my favorite games, Trials of Mana, with a rom patch (http://ngplus.net/index.php?/files/file/28-seiken-densetsu-3...).

I feel the rom hacking community is still going strong and some of you guys might find it interesting. An intro to rom hacking: https://datacrystal.romhacking.net/wiki/Introduction_to_Hack...

If you want to bootstrap a s/nes collection to play/hack on in memoriam (this may or may not work):

  1. Update the no-intro rom set. This guy usually post an yearly update: https://archive.org/details/no-intro_romsets

  2. Update the no-intro love pack dats (PC-XML): https://datomatic.no-intro.org/index.php?page=download&s=64&op=daily

  3. [Update and Apply patches](https://www.marcrobledo.com/RomPatcher.js/)

  4. Pull https://github.com/andrebrait/1g1r-romset-generator

  5. Run build.sh to build 1g1r sets

  #!/bin/bash

  cd 1g1r-romset-generator 
  git pull
  cd ../

  # Select what systems you want for you base 1g1r romsets 
  zips=(
      "Nintendo - Nintendo Entertainment System (20210122-114559) [headered]"
      "Nintendo - Nintendo Entertainment System (20210122-114559) [headered_iNES2.0_NRS(2020-09-27)]"
      "Nintendo - Nintendo Entertainment System (20210122-114559) [unheadered]"
      "Nintendo - Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Combined) (20201230-192658)"

)

  dats=(
      "Nintendo - Nintendo Entertainment System (Parent-Clone) (20210822-055431).dat"
      "Nintendo - Nintendo Entertainment System (Parent-Clone) (20210822-055431).dat"
      "Nintendo - Nintendo Entertainment System (Parent-Clone) (20210822-055431).dat"
      "Nintendo - Super Nintendo Entertainment System (Combined) (Parent-Clone) (Parent-Clone) (20210119-061911).dat"

)

  NOINTRODIR="no-intro_romsets/no-intro romsets/"
  OUTPUTDIR="roms-output/"

  mkdir -p $OUTPUTDIR
  for i in "${!zips[@]}"; do
      mkdir -p "$NOINTRODIR${zips[i]}"
      unzip -qq -n -d "$NOINTRODIR${zips[i]}" "$NOINTRODIR${zips[i]}.zip" 
      python3 1g1r-romset-generator/generate.py \
      --no-all \
      --regions=USA,JP,EUR --languages=EN --all-regions \
      --input-dir="$NOINTRODIR${zips[i]}" --output-dir="$OUTPUTDIR${zips[i]}" \
      --threads=16 \
      --dat="./No-Intro Love Pack (PC XML) (2021-08-22)/${dats[i]}"
  done

I loved the chrono trigger rom hack, and Pokémon crystal rom hack (Pokémon prism).

Which Chrono Trigger hack?

Flames of Eternity https://www.fandomspot.com/chrono-trigger-rom-hacks/

What a great legacy. We wouldn't have video gaming in any real capacity without the NES.

I've largely built my career from gaming , thank you for the gifts.

A loss for an entire generation of people. Visionaries are rare, but it's clear that every one of them is way ahead of his/her time.

Rest in peace.

My childhood and many of my fondest memories. Thanks Uemura-san.

legendary craftsman. rip

This man's a hero, he will forever be remembered.

RIP. You bought me much joy.

I think it's just a Japanese person thing, Yuri Kochiyama was still organizing and writing well into her 80s.

Absolutely fascinating individual, she should be an essential part of American history.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Kochiyama

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29498499 and marked it offtopic.

With quotes like this, I don't think she will be considered essential in America: >Interviewed in 2003, she said, "I consider Osama bin Laden as one of the people that I admire.

Several things to keep in mind:

- you can admire some people you consider enemies;

- you can admire some people and still wish that they fail, or consider some of their actions bad;

- you can admire some people that are despised by other people in your country;

- America put her in a camp for years during the war;

- people are more complicated than black and white heroes and vilains.

Also, you cannot judge someone based on a sentence taken out of context.

The full quote/wikipedia article is a bit more subtle indictment of the USA's foreign military interventions though the name dropping of bin Laden is a provocation - it feels close to paraphrasing Chomsky's the way to stop terrorism is to stop participating in terrorism.

Osama bin Laden was an ally of the US. As was Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi and many others.

Never forget that.

Am I missing something here? "Her" genuine question, did he transition!?!

She looks more like a crazy anarchist.

Quite unusual for that era in corporate Japan he switched from Sharp to Nintendo. Sarariman of that era were lifers.

Maybe his connections across companies is what led to the Sharp Nintendo TV: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp_Nintendo_Television

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