Mike Fischer, former Sega of America vice president of entertainment marketing, recalls working with Sonic co-creator Yuji Naka, and not very fondly.
Fischer worked for Sega in the early 90s before returning to the company in the early 2000s, and speaking to Sega 16, he explains, “It was wonderful to go back and reconnect with those people. It was less pleasant to deal with Naka-san.” He recalls speaking about trends in the western market going towards mature games, with the soon-to-be-developed Yakuza playing into this nicely. But Fischer recalls, “Naka just went fucking ballistic on me, yelling at me, saying I wanted to make porno games.”
He also recalled the development of Sonic Team’s Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, saying, “He wanted to call it Giant Eggs, and we’re like, ‘Well, to lay a big egg in the U.S. just means a failure.'” Someone on the team suggested calling it “‘Billy Hatcher’ because it’s a hatching game with a cute character. The main character is the boy, not the egg.” But, “Naka-san hated it. We called it Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, which he still hated.”
Fischer then recalls another tale about the naming of the now-mostly-forgotten GameCube title. He notes, “I promise you, I am not making up this story,” and says, “He goes, ‘Well, I know another name for the boy wearing a rooster suit. Another name for [a] rooster is cock. Can we call the game Giant Cock in English?'”
And despite the hilarity of suggesting that, Fischer doesn’t have the best memories of Sonic’s co-creator, saying, “He is literally the most miserable person I have ever worked with in games or anything else in my life, just a horrible human being, and you can quote me on that,” while also making reference to his prison sentence for insider trading charges in 2022.
However, Fischer has far better things to say about Sonic’s other co-creator, Naoto Ōshima, saying “Ōshima-san is one of the most wonderful, kindhearted people you’ll ever meet in your life,” while citing distaste at Naka speaking in an interview about why he decided to make Sonic blue – something Ōshima, as the character artist, was responsible for.
He also says that Naka “was so malignant in trying to rewrite history” and that he “refused to sit in the same row as Ōshima-san because he accused Ōshima-san of trying to steal his credit” at the Xbox One debut event. However, the duo would eventually collaborate again on 2021’s Balan Wonderworld for the first time since Sonic Adventure, so presumably they had patched things up by then.
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