Masayuki Uemurao helped revolutionize the home video game industry with the Nintendo NES, and will forever be remembered for games like Duck Hunt. The Japanese engineer died Monday at the age of 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.