Takaya Imamura Celebrates Star Fox Adventures’ 20th Anniversary

Update: It’s not just Star Fox’s creator who’s getting in on sharing art for the GameCube game’s anniversary.

Former Rare artist and magazine cover designer Wil Overton reveals that he managed to get the Star Fox crew — with Fox McCloud, Krystal, Peppy Hare, Slippy Toad, and General Pepper — on the company’s 2001 Christmas card!

One to get reprinted for the 2022 festive season, then?

Original article: Too many GameCube games are turning 20 at the moment, and it’s making us feel old. But, on the plus side, it’s also making us feel nostalgic. Star Fox Adventures is the latest GameCube game to hit the big two-zero today, 23rd September, in North America. And Star Fox’s character designer Takaya Imamura is celebrating with some brand new art.

The Nintendo legend — who retired from the company last year — shared some new art of Krystal, one of Star Fox Adventures’ new characters who would go on to join Fox McCloud and the team in later space-faring journeys.

We would’ve loved to have seen Krystal get her own game, but alas. We haven’t seen a new Star Fox game since (technically) 2016’s Star Fox Zero, though for all intents and purposes, Starlink: Battle for Atlas in 2018 was really a Star Fox game, wasn’t it? Here’s Imamura’s rather wonderful art from his Twitter:

Imamura joined Nintendo in 1989 as a graphic designer and is responsible for creating many of the bosses in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, acting as Art Director on Majora’s Mask (we can blame him for the Moon and Tingle, then) and working on F-Zero and Star Fox on the SNES. Imamura eventually became producer and supervisor for both of these Nintendo.

Since leaving Nintendo, Imamura has expressed pride in the Star Fox series, saying that Star Fox 64 was “the game of my life“, as well as hoping that Nintendo would bring Zero to Switch. Our friends over at Time Extension charted the history of Rare’s Star Fox Adventures, which was once known as an unrelated IP — Dinosaur Planet.

Are you a Star Fox Adventures fan? Will you be busting out the game today and playing through it in celebration? Tell us in the comments!

Further reading