Masayuki Uemura, the lead architect for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and the Super NES, has died, local media reported.

He was 78, a Japanese newspaper Nikkei Asia reported. Uemura, a native of Tokyo, was a visiting professor at Ritsumeikan University in Japan.

In 197Os, Uemura was in charge of developing the NES and its successor, the SNES. These consoles became huge hits with combined sales of 100 million units worldwide.

Uemura is known as one of the main architects of popular systems in video games died on Monday, according to the Japanese newspaper. This propelled Nintendo to become one of the world’s leading video game companies.

Uemura, an electronic engineering graduate of Japan’s Chiba Institute of Technology, started teaching at Kyoto University in 2004.

In 1983, Disk System hit the Japanese market as Nintendo’s first cartridge-based console. This enabled users to play an expanding range of video games.

The Super Famicom was later released in 1990.