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Takaya Imamura

The Nintendo artist who drew Captain Falcon, Fox McCloud and Tingle

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Takaya Imamura joined Nintendo in 1989 as a graphic designer on F-Zero, where he designed Captain Falcon, and went on to design the characters of Star Fox. He was art director of Star Fox 64 and The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, where he created Tingle, later directed Steel Diver, and retired in January 2021 after 32 years. Since leaving he has taught in Osaka and drawn the manga Omega 6, which became a game in 2024.

Takaya Imamura spent 32 years drawing Nintendo’s science fiction. He designed Captain Falcon for F-Zero in 1990 and Fox McCloud’s team for Star Fox in 1993, was art director on Star Fox 64, and gave The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask its strangest resident, the map-seller Tingle. He came to Nintendo with a manga under his arm, and when he left in 2021 he went back to drawing one.

Joining Nintendo

Imamura joined Nintendo in 1989. He brought manga he had drawn to his interview, and told the French site Full Frontal in 2022 that it impressed Shigeru Miyamoto; Nintendo, he said, was looking for artists who were “not too much influenced by manga and anime art”, so that its games could reach a wide audience.

F-Zero and Star Fox

His first game was F-Zero (1990) for the Super Famicom, where he worked as a graphic designer and created its pilot hero, Captain Falcon. He stayed with the series for years: he was chief designer on F-Zero X for the Nintendo 64, and in 2002 Edge reported that, on the GameCube F-Zero that became F-Zero GX, Nagoshi’s team at Sega would do the programming while Nintendo, Miyamoto and Imamura among them, looked after the artistic direction.

For Star Fox (1993), built with the British programmers of Argonaut, Miyamoto “enlisted the help of artwork designer Takaya Imamura, who had previously designed the characters for Nintendo’s space-themed racer F-Zero”, as Retro Gamer put it. He designed the parts of the game that were not drawn in polygons, Fox McCloud and his team among them, and the game’s overall atmosphere.

Star Fox 64 and Majora’s Mask

On Star Fox 64 (1997), known in Europe as Lylat Wars, Imamura was art director. Germany’s Club Nintendo introduced the game’s creative team as three people: Miyamoto as producer, Imamura for design and a third member for story and concept. At the E3 show that year Imamura and Miyamoto talked to Nintendo Power about the game. Asked what made Nintendo’s EAD group special, Imamura answered: “Mr. Miyamoto’s supervision. He doesn’t involve himself with everything, but he knows when something should be done a certain way and he points that out.” He later called Star Fox 64 “the game of my life”, because he had been so involved in making it.

He was art director again on The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask (2000). There he designed Tingle, the game’s map-seller, after the director, Yoshiaki Koizumi, asked for a character who sold maps.

Producer, director, supervisor

In his later years at Nintendo Imamura produced Star Fox: Assault and Star Fox Command, and directed Steel Diver and Tank Troopers. He also supervised later F-Zero and Star Fox games, and the Super Smash Bros. games for 3DS and Wii U and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

After Nintendo

Imamura retired in January 2021. “Today is my last day coming to work,” he posted, with a photograph of the empty office, and he wrote that he was tired after 32 years. He became a professor at the International Professional University of Technology in Osaka. His first manga, Omega 6, about two bounty hunters searching space for a planet to replace Earth, came out in French from Omaké Books in 2022. The studio Happymeal turned it into a game, Omega 6: The Triangle Stars, with Imamura as art director; it was released in Japan in July 2024 for the Switch and PC, and in the West in 2025. He told Time Extension that “it would have been impossible to make this game at Nintendo”.

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