Star Fox, F-Zero, and Zelda veteran Takaya Imamura was at Nintendo for over three decades before leaving in 2021, with a tenure so lengthy and impactful that he admits he was seeing Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto in his dreams for months after his departure.
Imamura has a lot of respect for Miyamoto – he previously told 12DOVE that being able to work under him for so long was the thing he was most proud of from his time at Nintendo. With that in mind, perhaps it's no wonder that Miyamoto's face was seemingly etched into his brain even when the two were no longer working together, as he tells Nintendo Life in an interview.
"For the first six months or so after leaving Nintendo, I kept dreaming I was still going to work," Imamura admits. "I'd start developing a game and then I'd wake up and go, 'Oh, oh. OK that's weird.'
"I actually met with Shigeru Miyamoto once after I left and I said, 'Hey, long time no see!' But I actually didn't feel like that was true since I was seeing him in my dreams all the time," he continues. "He got a good laugh out of that."
Given the impact his old job clearly had on him, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Imamura might have had some regrets about leaving, but in our own interview last year he told us that he believes "he made the right choice," noting that "life is about choices, and there's only a limited amount of time any of us have." This is something he's reiterated in his chat with Nintendo Life, adding: "We've only got a number of years on this Earth and there's a limit to the amount of things you can do with that time. I was kind of mulling over that and at the same time I got an invitation from the university to come and teach and I thought, 'Whoa, this is an opportunity to change things.'"
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