‘Inside I was doing the Mario jump’ – how one artist became a key player in Nintendo’s story
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Takaya Imamura worked at Nintendo for 32 years before leaving to create his own game, Omega Six. He shares anecdotes from those pivotal years at the creative giant. In 1889 in Kyoto, craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi founded a hanafuda playing card company. He called it Nintendo – a phrase whose meaning is lost to time according to Nintendo’s own historians, but which can be translated as “leave luck up to heaven”. In the 1970s, Nintendo eventually transitioned from paper games to electronic ones, making its own luck in the process. It has been a permanent fixture in living rooms across the world ever since.
![[Takaya Imamura, video game designer, in the 1990s]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/483b49a4d1bc8931986bdefd959716cdb74829c6/0_0_1144_1200/master/1144.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
For budding artist Takaya Imamura, an art student who had been captivated by Metroid and Super Mario Bros 3 in the 1980s, working at Nintendo was a dream. “Back in 1985 when Super Mario came out in Japan, everybody was playing it,” he recalls. “I was at an art university, studying design at the time. Back then, game design wasn’t a thing … people didn’t even know what game creators were.”.
![[Takaya Imamura’s artwork for the SNES racing game F-Zero.]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/250847d7bee083894fca54538e62cbea71f35347/0_0_2006_1142/master/2006.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Imamura assumed that he’d need to study science to land a job designing these exciting pieces of software. But then he found out that the team at Nintendo that had created Super Mario Bros was run by someone called Miyamoto – not a programmer, but a designer who had himself once aspired to be a comic book artist. Someone in the year above him at art school had just landed a job at Konami. So he decided to apply for a job in video games, too. To his surprise, he was invited for an interview at Konami – and at Nintendo.
![[Takaya Imamura, video game designer]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/6a8ff7c4cec35f03f6c810c3a976113b7adeb207/0_0_900_1200/master/900.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
