Legendary designer behind F-Zero and Star Fox nearly worked at Konami, but his mom told him to take the job at Nintendo

Legendary former Nintendo designer Takaya Imamura helped create Star Fox and F-Zero across 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 to Konami as 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 the best Nintendo Switch games out there.

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