Naka ist in der Industrie schon seit Jahrzehnten für seine Zickigkeit und Diva-Mentalität berüchtigt.
So äußerte es sich etwa über den Sonic-Miterfinder Hirokazu Yasuhara:
Yuji Naka: Yeah, one of the guys from our team went to work on Jak and Daxter! As for the original titles, I was involved from the beginning, the creation of the game. The character was born in a kind of stream of creating, so I'm involved from the very beginning of the character. I gave the game direction, and I was the main programmer also.
So I was involved with every aspect of the original Sonics. Some of the details, like making a map, quite straight-forward stuff, was done by the guy who's working on Jak and Daxter right now. He was involved until Sonic 3, and after that for eight years he didn't do anything in Sega, so he was quite useless in Sega. We really didn't need him. He was really doing nothing with Sonic.
http://info.sonicretro.org/Yuji_Naka_in ... _27,_2003)
Peter Moore mag ihn auch nicht.
When Moore brought a video of the focus group to present to his Japanese colleagues, they refused to believe the validity of what the American consumers had been saying. That's when things got especially rough with Sonic creator Yuji Naka.
"I said, 'We need to be incredibly aware of the challenges we face as a brand at Sega,' you know, and so I play the video. Yuji Naka, Naka-san, maker of Sonic, is in the room. Now, he and I have a love/hate relationship on a good day. And we show him this, and it's subtitled in Japanese, and when it comes to that piece he just [slams his hand on the table], 'This is ridiculous. You have made them say this. Sega is the great brand, nobody would ever say this, you have falsified!' He just gets in my face. So I said to the translator, 'Tell him to fuck off.' And the poor guy looks at me and says, 'There's no expression in Japanese.' I said, 'I know there is.' And that was it. That was the last time I ever set foot in there," Moore explains.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/ ... to-f-k-off
Er sah die Entwicler bei Sega of America als Rivalen an, und wollte nicht zulassen, dass diese seine Engine aus Nights für ein 3D-Sonic-Spiel benutzen. Das Projekt musste deshalb eingestellt werden:
“So, you know, they shipped us a NiGHTS editor, a level-based editor and our designers were familiarising themselves with that… and after about two weeks, Yuji Naka (who was the designer of NiGHTS, and one of the original Sonic Team), had [heard about it and] said, ‘No’.
“There was a big rivalry between SEGA Japan and SEGA America, and Yuji Naka hated SOA. So he went [to the Head of SOJ at the time] and said ‘Look, I don’t want these guys to have the NiGHTS engine. I do not want them to have the NiGHTS technology. If you give it to them, I quit.’ So [they went] to Bernie Stolar and said, ‘I’m not giving you anything. You’re gonna have to do without it.’ So… Bernie had to come to us and say, ‘Sorry guys, you’re gonna have to do it without the NiGHTS Technology.'”
https://www.sonicstadium.org/2002/06/so ... me-engine/
Es war ein Launchtitel für die Dreamcast in Entwicklung, mit einer damals vielversprechenden 3D-Engine, aber ...
Naka came to visit with his team to tour our studio [and] look at our tools and engine; we had a lot of proprietary [and] really phenomenal tech – I would say still to this day, [we had] some stuff that I haven't seen replicated quite at the level we had. [Naka] didn't realize that the people on my team, a lot of them spoke fluent Japanese, including my lead engineer. [Naka] started speaking in Japanese assuming that no one would understand; [he] started talking about what parts of our tech they were going take for Sonic and then basically said as soon as they ship, fire everyone but one of the engineers who knows their system and roll him onto our team for Sonic – and my team heard all that, so you can imagine how they felt. Naka was pretty powerful at Sega at that time.
So I had a group of five engineers that now knew what was potentially happening to their baby. They were, outside of [NFL2K and NBA2K studio] Visual Concepts, the only people in North America working on a 128-bit gaming console, [so it was] pretty easy to go get another job – so they did. I had to go to Bernie [and tell him] I just lost my five lead engineers and I've got a proprietary engine; even if I hire, I've got healthy burn rate... we were expensive title for that time... it was a lot of money [and] it was impossible to justify. It would have taken me two months to hire, another two months to ramp up... so [I've got] four months of burn rate where pretty much nothing's happening.
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/ ... a-producer
Mit dem möchte wahrscheinlich so gut wie niemand mehr jemals wieder zusammenarbeiten.
