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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.
When we meet at Gamescom 2024, we're there to firstly discuss his history at Nintendo. That means I've got one burning question: of all the characters he designed, does he have a favorite? After a moment of consideration, he concludes "Fox," before asking me the exact same question. He smiles as I tell him it's Tingle, who he would later doodle onto the back of a business card to give me before wrapping up our conversation. Imamura positively glows with passion for his craft and love of art. It's something he's been doing since childhood, in a manner he describes as "completely the opposite" from most children: a drive to "do something my own" rather than copy any existing beloved characters or artists' work.
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."
Forever a fan
Imamura believes this uncompromising attitude is why Nintendo is so highly regarded, and it's no surprise to hear that he's still a fan of its work even after departing the company in 2021. After watching The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Imamura has "high hopes that the next one will be a Star Fox movie," and he's already told Miyamoto that if it does happen, he wants to be part of it. He believes Miyamoto has "strong feelings" for the franchise, and points out that there's already an Arwing cameo in Mario's animated adventure. "I wouldn't be surprised if they've already got a plan in place," he adds.
It's not just movies he's interested in, though. He's also keen for Star Fox to make a return in video game form at some point. After all, its newest installment in 2017 was actually an old one – the once-canceled Star Fox 2, which was released over 20 years after it was originally supposed to on the Super NES Classic Edition. However, Imamura believes that the key to a full-blown Fox McCloud comeback would be for Miyamoto to come up with "a completely fresh idea," since he's "not the kind of person who keeps rehashing the same thing."
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."
What could have been
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 thank for his career at Nintendo. "The truth is, when I applied to games companies, I applied to Konami as 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."
Going beyond Nintendo
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.
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