‘Inside I was doing the Mario jump’ – how one artist became a key player in Nintendo’s story

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.

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.”