Takaya Imamura, an artist who collaborated with Shigeru Miyamoto on the creation of iconic Nintendo games Star Fox, F-zero, and The legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, retires today.
Imamura has worked for Nintendo for 32 years and is also known for the creation of the Zelda franchise’s card retailer, Tingle, which has made numerous appearances in the series and other games over the past two decades.
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Posted by Takaya Imamura on Tuesday, January 19, 2021
According to a Kotaku translation, his message reads: “This is my last day of work. I took a selfie with the empty office. I think I will not come in here anymore. As you would expect, I have I will miss it . ”)
Imamura joined Nintendo in 1989 as it was already underway F-zero, a Super NES racing game launched in 1990. “After I joined, Miyamoto gathered some of the new employees and said we would be working on the new system,” Imamura recalled in a 2017 interview. “I still clearly remember how happy it made me.”
F-zero was originally considered a cyclist, but with moving tires on the vehicle, Imamura’s animations added significantly more frames. According to Imamura, the team of nine developers simply decided to lose the tires and let the racers soar, which completed the futuristic appeal of the game.
Imamura was also an artist for the team that developed Star Fox, the 1993 Super Nintendo game, which was the first company to use polygonal graphics. Imamura designed the characters, thus making anthropomorphic animals according to Miyamoto. From there, however, Imamura molded the faces of the characters onto his colleagues, with protagonist Fox McCloud chasing Miyamoto and wing Falco as Tsuyoshi Watanabe. (In an interview in 2017, Imamura revealed that Peppy is the director Katsuya Eguchi, and Slippy Toad the longtime Zelda developer Yoichi Yamada.)
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However, the most enduring character that Imamura designed and rendered is Tingle. First appeared in Majora’s masks On Nintendo 64 in 2000, Tingle’s strange image and behavior made him a favorite of comedy-lighting fans. He came back The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker and has appeared in several other games, including four of the five Super Smash Bros. (all but the first) and 2014s Hyrule Warriors. Tingle also plays in a series of Nintendo DS games: Freshly picked tintel’s Rosy Rupeeland, Tingle se ballongeveg DS, en Ripened Tingle Balloon Trip of Love.