Legendary designer behind F-Zero and Star Fox nearly worked at Konami, but his mom told him to take the job at Nintendo
Aug. 29, 2024Takaya Imamura eventually spent more than 30 years with the company
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Legendary former Nintendo designer Takaya Imamura helped createStar FoxandF-Zeroacross his 32-year career at the company, but he almost worked at an entirely different Japanese studio.
“My mother heard that I was doing well with Nintendo,” he explains, “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?”
Imamura’s probably left his mark on some of thebest Nintendo Switch gamesout there.
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I’m GamesRadar’s news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I’ve run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam’s latest indie hit.
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