Takaya Imamura

is a Japanese video game designer, manga artist and educator. From 1989 to 2021, Imamura worked at Nintendo, where he designed the characters and story of F-Zero, including Captain Falcon, and most of the supporting characters from the Star Fox series of video games. He also played a role in designing games in the Legend of Zelda series, such as The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, invented the character Tingle, and served as supervising producer for F-Zero GX.

Early life When Imamura was in college, he was an enthusiastic gamer who had played several Famicom titles including Metroid, Zanac and Super Mario Bros. 3, but he still wanted to be a manga artist, his childhood dream. He considered video games developed by computer programmers and did not envision the role of an artist in making them.

Career

Work at Nintendo Imamura applied for a job at Nintendo because he thought he could help illustrate box art and instruction booklets, wanting to join the video game industry in any way possible. He had also applied to Konami. In Nintendo's case, he had looked up their address on the back of the Super Mario Bros. instruction booklet and mailed in a job application. He went to the Kyoto-based company in person for a job interview from Shigeru Miyamoto. When asked about his favorite Nintendo game, he answered Metroid due to being a fan of science fiction, despite the fact that Miyamoto did not develop it. Nevertheless, Miyamoto was impressed by his work and gave him the job. He joined Nintendo in 1989. Additionally, he drew animation patterns and characters, as well as designing the game's courses, due to the small team size of less than 10 people.

Other projects worked on by Imamura while he was at Nintendo include Star Fox Adventures (2002), in collaboration with Rare, and numerous other Star Fox projects, including the Star Fox crossover content of Starlink: Battle for Atlas (2018). He also directed the Steel Diver series of submarine simulation games and Tank Troopers (2016), a stylized third-person tank combat game. Imamura remained active as a developer until his final day at the company, though not all of his projects reached store shelves. The last time he and Miyamoto worked together was during the development of Star Fox Zero (2016), where he supervised the project and wrote the scenario and storyboard for the game's tie-in anime, with which Miyamoto was heavily involved. Following the 2015 death of former Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, Miyamoto became too busy in his role as Creative Fellow to oversee individual game projects. A video game adaptation titled Omega 6: The Triangle Stars was released in 2025 as a retro-styled adventure game. In addition to his other post-Nintendo projects, Imamura also contributed as a character designer on the independent game GRAPPIN.

Works