The development of FC can be described as a success if it is not successful, and the birth of the project is largely due to the fact that Nintendo's handheld Game & atch became a hit at that time!

But the good thing is that this product does have some shortcomings, that is, a machine can only carry one game, which is of course difficult for players to continue to buy.

As a result, the sales of Game & atch quickly fell back!

Yamauchi, the iron-clad leader, did not relax at all, and directly assigned Masayuki Uemura to develop a game console that could replace the cassette, and hoped that the new game console would have a longer life cycle than those that could only play one game.

Such a concept was proposed in the late 70s!

You can imagine how extraordinary Pu Yamauchi's vision is!

I was not carried away by the huge sales of Game & atch handhelds, but found a countermeasure very quickly.

At that time, Yamauchi's ruthlessness was not much worse than now.

In fact, Masayuki Uemura, a novice, was set by Yamauchi with a sales target of 1 million new game consoles!

You can imagine how difficult it is!

In the end, Masayuki Uemura certainly lived up to Yamauchi's trust, and he proved that he was not only the right leader in the FC project, but an indispensable leader!

His experience as an engineer, his design choices, and his personal relationships all helped bring this seemingly impossible project to the end.

In the end, FC sales have exceeded 14 million units in Japan alone!

At the beginning of the project, Masayuki Uemura already had a lot of experience working in Nintendo's console department.

He co-created two consoles that parody Pong, namely: TV-Game 6 and TV-Game 15.

As you can tell from the name, they have 6 and 15 table tennis games that can be played on TV, respectively.

That's right, Nintendo's earliest and earliest console was not the well-known FC, but FC was the most successful generation, and long before FC, Nintendo actually had been making consoles for a long time.

Of course, everyone must admit that these products are not actually popular, in 1977, the whole market was actually full of imitations of "Pong", and Nintendo, as a newcomer to the video game industry, that is, a rookie, made products at that time, in fact, did not seem to be unique. On the contrary, it was Nintendo's next console, Super Arkanoid, which, to some extent, laid the foundation for FC's success.

Of all the consoles before Nintendo FC, all consoles were a game, and Super Arkanoid was the most famous of them!

Equipped with a console with rounded corners and beautiful icons by genius designer Shigeru Miyamoto, this console is the perfect reference for the FC controller.

Of course, in addition to these genius designs, the hardware design inside Super Arkanoid is just as important for the company's future.

Masayuki Uemura is responsible for the development of devices for TV Game 6 and TV Game 15. At that time, Nintendo bought chips directly from Mitsubishi, and Nintendo just packaged the machines and brought them to the market.

This was one of Nintendo's first learning stages, a learning phase before entering the video game industry.

Of course, it was also the stage when Masayuki Uemura began to learn the technology of connecting game consoles to televisions and TV image display technology.

Since then, Nintendo's perception of TV has changed: TV is not just for watching!

And this idea can be said to be an unprecedented concept in Japan at that time, both technically and commercially.

Masayuki Uemura stole a copy of Mitsubishi's designers who designed it on early consoles like Pong, and he saw an opportunity for Super Arkanoid to take Nintendo's game development to the next level.

After referencing the Atari "Pong" type of game system and the "Arkanoid" type of game, Nintendo's engineers naturally began to think about the next breakthrough point for Atari: the video game console system, as was the case with the Atari 2600. Although the 2600 is not the first game console that can replace the cassette, the 2600 has successfully opened up the market for cassette games.

At that time, Atari had great success in the American market and entered the glorious console era. Masayuki Uemura had an idea, that is, in Japan, can he also do something like Atari?

At the beginning, the goal was to consider TV Game 6,15 and Arkanoid games, and many people in Japan are keen to watch TV at home, which is the origin of Japanese otaku culture, and in the 70s, they were used to using TV entertainment at home, so playing games on TV is completely feasible in Uemura's view, and the technical problems are also achievable!

It can be said that the game "Super Arkanoid", although it was produced by Nintendo, also responded to the needs of players, and also stole Mitsubishi engineers, counting, Mitsubishi can even be said to be Nintendo's teacher!

And the friendly relationship between Masayuki Uemura and Gunpei Yokoi was also established at this stage.

The Game & Inch handheld produced by Gunpei Yokoi has played a decisive role in the hardware design of FC!

The Game & atch handheld was equipped with a very popular game at the time, and that was Donkey Kong!

And a very mature design on that handheld that caught the attention of Masayuki Uemura, that is, the design of the D-pad!!

But it wasn't very friendly at first.

In the beginning, there was even a lot of discord between the FC production team and the Game & atch handheld team!

Because at that time, Nintendo's engineers were divided between two teams, one team making arcade machines like Space Invaders, and the other team being Yokoi's Game & Atch handheld team.

As you can imagine, the impact of the horror sales of Game & atch handhelds on the interior is that many engineers and designers have run to Junhei's team in Yokoi!

When Masayuki Uemura was overwhelmed by the three people left in the entire team, Pu Yamauchi said to him, "Come on, let's make a home game console!"

And Yokoi Junhei took the initiative to give Uemura Masayuki a lot of help during this time, including the benefits of the use of the cross key, and finally, Uemura Masayuki also adopted Yokoi's idea, and established the core component of FC's hardware, FC handle!

Since then, the two teams have shown that they are rivals of each other, but what few people know is that Masayuki Uemura's talent was recognized by Yokoi Junpei, and the two cherished each other and became rivals and friends.

The father of FC, Masayuki Uemura, the father of Game & atch, Gunpei Yokoi.

The two of them discussed and learned from each other, as if it had become a habitual thing!

It's finally finished, I'm so sleepy~!!

(End of chapter)