The NES and SNES designer has retired from Nintendo after nearly 40 years

Lance Barr, the man who designed the NES and SNES consoles, has retired from Nintendo.

Barr has made the announcement through his staff. LinkedIn he says, stating that “after almost 39 years at Nintendo, I am retiring and moving on to ‘other’ projects.” He has served as Brand and Design Director since 1982. According to Tim santensOne of Barr’s earliest assignments was creating gaming cabinets for the North American market, which would make sense since Nintendo didn’t have a home console in 1982 and wouldn’t release one in the US until 1985.

Barr was instrumental in reshaping the 1983 Japanese Famicom for the North American market, developing the unique front-loading VHS-style mechanism that made the console so unique compared to earlier examples of the hardware, such as the Atari VCS.

The North American console market was in tatters after the 1983 crash, so Barr’s work was vitally important: The NES had to be seen as something new and different, and it’s fair to say that his efforts were successful, when the console got to North. America in 1985 quickly became the dominant system; More than 60 million units of the Famicom / NES would be sold worldwide, and a large number of them would be sold in the United States.

Talking to Nintendojo’s Chad Margetts and M. Noah Ward in 2005, Barr had the following to say about the redesign:

The original design for the NES was put together over several months, including a couple of months’ stay while working in Japan at NCL. The design was conceived as a wireless modular system, designed to look more like a fancy stereo system than an electronic toy. After the first public display in the US at the Consumer Electronics Show, I was asked to redesign the case based on new engineering requirements. To reduce costs, the wireless function was eliminated, as well as some of the modular components such as the keyboard and data logger. But the biggest change was the orientation and size requirements to fit a new edge connector to insert the games. The new edge connector had a “zero force” design that allowed the kit to be inserted with little force and then rotated down to the “https://www.nintendolife.com/contact” position. The case had to be designed around the movement of the game and required the shape and size of the NES to grow from the previous concepts. Many of the features, such as the two-tone color, left and right side cutouts, and the overall “boxy” look, were retained, but the proportions change significantly to accommodate the new edge connector.

Even today, the NES remains one of the most iconic console designs of all time. Barr also created some of the console’s most unique peripherals, such as the NES Zapper, NES Advantage, and NES Max, and was responsible for the redesign of the top-loading NES, complete with its ‘dog bone’ controller. You can watch a rare video interview with Barr here.

His next adventure would be the North American redesign of the SNES, which recently celebrated 30 years in that particular region. While Europe retained the more rounded shape of the Japanese Super Famicom (which Barr deemed “too soft and blunt”), the United States got a more boxy system. The debate over which design is better, even in 2021, but Barr’s design clearly has a lot of fans (he also designed the ‘SNES Jr’).

Most recently, Barr was responsible for designing the Wii Nunchuck.

Thanks to Tim santens for the tip!