COLLECTED WORKS TAKAYA IMAMURA

The creator of Star Fox, Captain Falcon and Tingle on 30 years at Nintendo and restarting as an indie

- BY JON BAILES

The origins of some of Nintendo’s most iconic characters can be traced back to a sliding-doors moment in the late 1980s. There may not have been a Star Fox, at least as we know him, if another game company had been a little quicker to offer Takaya Imamura his first videogame industry job – or if not for some timely parental guidance.

Studying art at university, Imamura had no thoughts about getting into game development. “I had this image of the people who make games,” he tells us, “that they must have studied science and maths. This was another world for me.” When a fellow art student from the year above him joined Konami, however, he started to wonder. He looked up the addresses of Konami and Nintendo (he recalls getting the latter’s address from the Super Mario Bros manual), and then submitted his CV. “Until I applied, I had no idea where either of them was,” Imamura says. It turned out that Konami was based in Kobe, not far from where he lived.

If that potential employer was more convenient than the Kyoto-based Nintendo, it was his preferred choice for other reasons too. “As an arcade-goer, I really liked Konami games, especially Gradius,” Imamura says. “The look of their games was close to what I wanted to do myself.” When he made it through to the final interview with both companies, though, it was Nintendo that gave him the nod first. And, sealing the deal, Imamura’s mother had her say, arguably showing more industry savvy than Imamura himself at the time. “I ended up with Nintendo because my mother said Nintendo is a better-known company,” he recalls, “so that’s where I should go.”