I wouldn't call him a hack, but he definitely overreached. He's a great programmer, not a great designer/director/producer.
L Thammy said:
I honestly don't know why he got the credit he did to begin with.
There are 3 main people responsible for Sonic. Naoto Ohshima created the concept of the character. Yuji Naka programmed the games. And Yasuhara designed the game (level design and gameplay concepts).
In Sonic 1 they are credited:
- Yasuhara
- Naka
- Ohshima
Yasuhara was instrumental to Sonic being what it was and him being there was kind of a fluke. He was set to move to California and help Mark Cerny set up Sega Technical Institute but he got delayed. He headed to STI after his work was done.
Ohshima stayed in Japan and made Sonic CD without Naka or Yasuhara (and it shows).
Naka quit Sega after Sonic 1 because he wanted to work at Nintendo. But rather than submitting a resume to Nintendo he expected them to contact him because he was so good. Mark Cerny was friends with Naka and called him up to offer him better pay if he moved to California and joined STI. Sega also gave Naka a Ferrari.
—And I heard that you actually approached Nintendo after you quit…? Naka: While I was reading those books, I got a call from a third-party developer asking if I would come work for them. But the truth is, I was holding out for a call from Nintendo.
Naka: When I was driving back to my home in Osaka from Tokyo, I decided to stop by Nintendo's headquarters in Kyoto. I actually wanted to see how long it would take for me to commute from Osaka to Nintendo's offices. (laughs) However, when I stopped my car in their parking lot, a security guard came out and started eyeing me suspiciously. I got scared and decided to just go home. (laughs) If that security guard hadn't been there, who knows how different my future might have been…! (laughs)
—Oh, really?! (laughs)
Naka: The reason I thought that is, a few months before I quit Sega, I heard a story about another programmer from a big gaming company who had quit his job, and was then called by Nintendo. I was like, "Wow, that could happen to me too!" (laughs) So when I quit Sega I had this faint hope that I'd be getting a call… but it never came. (laughs) It was sad.
With Yasuhara and Naka at STI, Cerny pitched Sonic 2 to Sega but Sega declined because it was "too soon." A few months later Sega asked STI to make Sonic 2 after losing months of work. Yasuhara was once again head game designer and Naka head programmer. This time, though, Naka is credited before Yasuhara.
Cerny left Sega in 1992 to join Crystal Dynamics.
Yasuhara got along well with everyone at STI, but Naka disliked working with Americans because of the cultural differences. STI was split into 2 teams to segregate the American and Japanese developers and Naka was put in charge of the Japanese team.
For Sonic 3 Naka is credited before Yasuhara; this time as Producer and Director respectively.
Yasuhara quit STI citing differences with Naka and went to Sega of America.
Then Naka split from STI and went back to Japan to head a team there. His team was given control of Sonic but they didn't make any Sonic games. They made NiGHTs and Burning Rangers.
Back in the US Yasuhara helped STI make Sonic games and Sonic R and Sonic X-treme. Sonic X-treme was notoriously cancelled after Naka refused to let the team use the NiGHTS engine to reduce dev time.
In 1998 Naka moved back to California to found Sonic Team, while Yasuhara eventually left Sega to join Naughty Dog.
Naka stayed with Sonic Team until he bailed on Sega part-way through development on Sonic 2006.
I think this interview with Naka from 2003 best illustrates his issues:
What do you think of the way the Sonic games have evolved; was it a problem when one of your team members left to work with Sony?
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.
Basically he thinks very highly of himself and very lowly of others. He thinks things like level and game design are straightforward unimportant jobs. He calls Yasuhara useless when Naka himself was partly responsible for killing projects Yasuhara was working on.
There's also this anecdote from Peter Moore from when he was President of Sega of America:
Peter Moore recalls the last straw that convinced him to leave Sega
"So I said to the translator, ‘Tell him to fuck off’"
www.polygon.com
In 2001/2002 he had Sega of America conduct a focus group of 18/19 year olds for their opinions on game companies and they said Sega was old news. He went to Japan to present footage of the focus group.
Peter Moore:
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.
Naka doesn't take criticism well.
Basically he was just really good at leveraging his talent to get what he wanted while pushing competition out of the way. I wonder what things would be like if Yasuhara was given the credit over Naka.
