Masayuki Uemura, creator of NES and SNES game consoles, dies at 78

Kyoto – Masayuki Uemura, the lead architect for the breakthrough Nintendo Entertainment System and the Super NES, and a visiting professor at Ritsumeikan University, has died, the university said Thursday. After joining Nintendo Co. in 1971, Uemura was in charge of developing the NES and its successor the SNES. The consoles, known in Japan as Famicom -- an abbreviation of family computer -- and Super Famicom, became huge hits with combined sales of 100 million units worldwide. The mega hits propelled Nintendo to become one of the world's leading video game companies. The cause of Uemura's death on Monday was not released.