Career
Around 1983, Naka saw that Sega was looking for programming assistants and decided to apply. After a brief interview, he was hired and his first project was a game called Girl's Garden, which he and a colleague created together as part of their training process. Their boss was impressed and decided to publish the game, and it earned them notice among their peers and Japanese gamers. Naka's abilities as a programmer were further demonstrated in 1987 for his work on Phantasy Star for the Sega Master System, where he was responsible for the impressive pseudo-3D animation effects present in the game's first-person dungeons.
His true breakthrough, however, came in 1991 when he programmed the original Sonic the Hedgehog game for the Sega Genesis, with Naoto Ōshima designing the character and Hirokazu Yasuhara creating the stages. Following Sonic The Hedgehog's release, Naka moved to Sega's U.S. branch, Sega Technical Institute, where he worked with famed American designer Mark Cerny on the follow-up in conjunction with the original team back in Japan, now known as "Sonic Team". This partnership between the Eastern and Western teams continued through the development of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic & Knuckles, though the bulk of the development duties shifted back to Sonic Team in Japan for those titles, which Naka had also returned to by that time.
After the release of Sonic & Knuckles, Naka was moved up to the role of producer at Sega of Japan. During his tenure in that position, he oversaw titles including Nights into Dreams... and Burning Rangers for Sega Saturn; Sonic Adventure and Phantasy Star Online for Dreamcast; Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg for Nintendo GameCube; and the "EyeToy" game Sega Superstars for PlayStation 2.
In news released on March 16, 2006, Naka announced that he intended to create his own game studio, Prope, and that he would be leaving Sega to do so. Following Naoto Oshima's departure in 1999 and Hirokazu Yasuhara's departure in 2002, Yuji Naka was the final member of the original creative core that created Sonic the Hedgehog to leave Sega.
Read more about this topic: Yuji Naka
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