Lance Barr, who played a major role in the designs of both the NES and SNES consoles, has retired from Nintendo after almost 40 years with the company.
Console creators come and go, but one company has remained constant: Nintendo. It has gone from battling with Sega to PlayStation to Xbox for console sales, leading innovation every step of the way to offer gamers something different from what else is on the market. So many people have helped that happen over the decades, including a man called Lance Barr.
Barr has been working for Nintendo since 1982 but revealed recently via LinkedIn that his almost 40 year stay with the gaming giant has come to an end. Barr revealed that he has retired from Nintendo, but will be working on unnamed other projects. As for the legacy he leaves behind, odds are it will not be quickly forgotten.
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Barr started his stay at Nintendo creating arcade cabinets. However, his time to shine arrived when Nintendo wanted to launch the Famicom, known in the west as the NES, in North America. Barr was tasked with redesigning the console to appeal to American retailers and consumers. It was made to look like a VCR by design and flaunted as an entertainment system as opposed to a games console.
Clearly, Barr's design worked. The NES sold 33 million units in North America and Barr was subsequently trusted to tweak the Super Famicom's – aka the SNES – design for the same market. “The Super Famicom was maybe okay for the market in Japan… for the US, I felt that it was too soft and had no edge," Barr told Nintendojo in 2006. That's why the US's design differs greatly from the console released in the rest of the world, and why fans of both continue to argue over which is better to this day.
Barr continued to create and innovate for Nintendo, designing all sorts of pieces of hardware many of you will be familiar with, including the Wii's nunchuck. A legend in the industry whose legacy will live on for decades despite his departure from Nintendo after almost 40 years.
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