"I couldn't resist": Nintendo legend Takaya Imamura on trying but failing to keep a huge console secret, his hopes for the future of Star Fox, and a lot more
Oct. 23, 2024Interview | The designer of Captain Falcon, Tingle, and Fox McCloud has a lot of stories to tell
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Tingle, Captain Falcon, and Fox McCloud are all very different Nintendo characters, but they all have something in common – their iconic designer. Takaya Imamura is without a doubt one of the most influential people to have worked at Nintendo, with a lengthy tenure that spanned over 30 years. Sitting down to talk to him about it, I can’t help but feel he finds his whole career just as cool as I do.
This talent flourished at Nintendo, where as well as designing iconic characters, he became a supervisor on multiple F-Zero games. That’s on top of being the art director behind The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask and Star Fox 64, just to name a few of his roles. However, he’s not shy to say that working under Shigeru Miyamoto – the legendary creator of numerous Nintendo series including Mario, Zelda, and Star Fox – is the career highlight he’s proudest of. Discussing Miyamoto and what it was like to work for him, Imamura tells me: “Generally speaking, he’s a really kind, hard working person. But when it comes to game design,he doesn’t accept compromise. So my impression was, this is what it takes to be number one at anything in the world.”
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Besides his friendship with Miyamoto, Imamura’s favorite memory of Nintendo is one of his earliest. The designer had just been told he’d be working on the Super Nintendo Entertainment system, which hadn’t actually been announced at the time. “Three or four of us new recruits all got pulled in, and we were told, ‘You guys, you’re going to be working on this new hardware, this Super Nintendo,'” he recalls, the tale bursting out so quickly it feels as though he’s been waiting for someone to ask him about it. “There’d been rumors about it in magazines and stuff,” says Imamura, but the console was yet to be announced. How did he keep such an enormous secret? He didn’t.
“We couldn’t [talk about it], but I couldn’t resist, so I had to go and tell my family and my girlfriend,” he admits, laughing. “I mean, I didn’t go out and tell them the specs – even if I did they wouldn’t have understood what I was talking about – but I couldn’t resist telling them that, ‘You know the rumored Super Famicom? I’m going to be making a game on that’. I was that excited.”
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Considering his excitement and passion for Nintendo, it feels strange to consider that Imamura could ever have gone down a different path. But he almost did. As it happens,we’ve got his mom to thankfor his career at Nintendo. “The truth is, when I applied to games companies, I applied toKonamias well as Nintendo, and I got through to the final interview,” he reveals, adding that he “really wanted” the job at Konami since he was a “big fan of the Gradius series.”
Konami’s office was much closer to where Imamura was living at the time, so going there would have made sense on a practical level. However, his stance soon changed. “My mother heard that I was doing well with Nintendo, and she knew about Nintendo, just in general, and she told me, you know, ‘you go to Nintendo.’ And what can you say to your mother?”
Does he ever wonder how his life would have turned out at Konami? “I think I still probably would have made a game like Star Fox,” he says, although it “might have been a side-scrolling game like Gradius.” In that alternate reality, the actual Nintendo-developed Star Fox series could have looked quite different, although Imamura believes its protagonist would have remained a fox.
“Star Fox itself, I started working on straight after F-Zero. And F-Zero is, you know, human with aliens, and I wanted to take the same direction with Star Fox,” he explains. “It was Shigeru Miyamoto who came along and said, ‘No no no, let’s make the hero a fox.'” Elaborating on this, Imamura admits: “It’s not so much a preference or taste, so much as it’s just not easy drawing animals. It’s easier for me to draw aliens and humans.”
Despite happily discussing all things related to his time at Nintendo, Imamura is clear that “the last thing” he wants is to be seen as “that person who quit Nintendo but keeps turning up at events as the guy who made Star Fox.” He continues: “I wanted to get out. And if I was going to get out and leave, I wanted to make my own IP as soon as possible, so I can come to events like this, and yeah, we can talk about what I did at Nintendo, but it’s not me talking as an ex-Nintendo employee, I’m an independent creator who is working on something new.”
That ‘something new’ is Omega 6 The Triangle Stars – a retro-style adventure game based on Imamura’s own manga, which is set in a sci-fi world he plans to “continue expanding” until “I get bored of it.” The game doesn’t have a release date right now, but Imamura says he would “love” for fans to play it and see that he’s “not lost any of that creative vision”. If anything, the designer believes his “creative freedom is even stronger” after leaving Nintendo. It’s already his favorite game that he’s worked on, he says, noting that it’s an “extension” of all the things he “wanted to do but didn’t get to do” previously.
Does he have any regrets about leaving such an iconic company, then? “If there were any regrets at all, it would be I would have really loved to have worked on F-Zero or Star Fox one more time, but at the end of the day, life is about choices, and there’s only a limited amount of time any of us have,” Imamura concludes. “So I think I made the right choice in leaving.”
This interview was conducted via an interpreter, and has been edited for length and clarity.
Be sure to check out our list of thebest Nintendo Switch gamesfor more fantastic titles to round out your library.
I’m one of GamesRadar+’s news writers, who works alongside the rest of the news team to deliver cool gaming stories that we love. After spending more hours than I can count filling The University of Sheffield’s student newspaper with Pokemon and indie game content, and picking up a degree in Journalism Studies, I started my career at GAMINGbible where I worked as a journalist for over a year and a half. I then became TechRadar Gaming’s news writer, where I sourced stories and wrote about all sorts of intriguing topics. In my spare time, you’re sure to find me on my Nintendo Switch or PS5 playing through story-driven RPGs like Xenoblade Chronicles and Persona 5 Royal, nuzlocking old Pokemon games, or going for a Victory Royale in Fortnite.
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