NES And SNES Designer Lance Barr Is Retiring From Nintendo

Best known for his work on the NES and SNES, industrial designer Lance Barr has retired from his position as Design and Brand Director at Nintendo of America.

As spotted by Nintendo Life (via Game Industry), Barr updated his LinkedIn profile to, “Retired,” writing, “After almost 39 years at Nintendo, I am retiring and moving onto ‘other’ projects.”

Barr entered Nintendo of America in December 1982 as a part-time gig, while he was still getting his MFA in Industrial Design from the University of Washington. Within three years, he’d be tasked with what would become one of the 1980s iconic industrial designs, the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Nintendo decided the design for the original Famicom, spearheaded by engineer Masayuki Uemura, wouldn’t translate to the US market (heck, its colors were based on a scarf then-president Hiroshi Yamauchi liked!). Barr would work on the external casing redesign, aiming to appeal to American consumers.

In a 2005 interview with Nintendojo (via Tales From the Collection), Barr recalled how the design was supposed to look like hi-tech stereo equipment, instead of a toy. “The original design of the NES was worked out over several months, including a stay of a couple of months while I worked in Japan at NCL [Nintendo Co., Ltd].”

The prototype design was flat, slim, and sleek, colored in gray and black. But the reaction at its CES debut was not good.

Read the full article on Kotaku