Legendary designer behind F-Zero and Star Fox nearly worked at Konami, but his mom told him to take the job at Nintendo
Takaya 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.
Speaking to GamesRadar+ at Gamescom 2024, Imamura admitted that back in the 1980s, “the truth is, when I applied to games companies, I applied toKonamias well as Nintendo, and I got through to the final interview.”
Imamura says he “really wanted” the job at Konami - partly because he lived closer to the office, and partly because he was a “big fan of the Gradius series,” the shooter games that Konami released between 1985 and 2004. But it wasn’t to be, thanks to the intervention of a very important person in Imamura’s life.
“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?”
The rest is history, and Imamura’s mother’s influence eventually led to the creation of two major Nintendo franchises. He also worked with the SNES before its release in 1990. His three-decade tenure at the company came to an end in 2021, however, and he now says that “the last thing I would want to do or be seen as doing, is being that person who quit Nintendo but keeps turning up at events as the guy who made Star Fox. 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.”
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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