Forum - View topicNEWS: Yuji Naka Admits to Insider Trading Charges in Tokyo Court
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LinkTSwordmaster
 Posts: 381 Location: PA / USA |
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If you are aware of his history of clashing with Peter Moore over the failings of the Dreamcast, ever since his time had been winding down at Sega, Yuji Naka has always given me this vibe that he'd been succeeding due to riding the coattails of the folks around him rather than for any sort of functional merit of his own. He's like the anti-Miyamoto. I hesitate to call Miyamoto entirely humble himself, but the guy's body of work is full of mainline Mario games that usually release to folks finding surprise & wonder in each individual title. Most of what he touches is at least artistic if not an outright hit.
If you look at Naka's body of work it was literally just Sonic and Phantasy Star over & over, and I would argue that the best moments in those franchises happened without or in spite of him..... and as such, I wonder if he'd always realised that and had a chip on his shoulder. I remember when he left Sega and was talking about his Kiwi game and I just figured "Uhoh, this guy's not reading the room" - like not to dump on Kiwi fans, but.... it was like Naka was good at making SMALL character-based action games in the era of the NES and Genesis, and the more that the move to 3D demanded longer adventures, he just wasn't up to snuff to keep up. It does not shock me to find him in legal trouble, seeing his body of work since leaving Sega, that he would wind up being taken to court like this, as his entire life seemed to be funneling towards such an entitled & ill-tempered future for the last two decades. If you can, go give the Wii (not the WiiU) version of Rodea the Sky Soldier a look. It's funny/sad that it's not mentioned in the article with the other PROPE titles. It's the last notable game by Naka that I don't recall being critically panned - it got relatively middling/average reviews and is a fairly solid game, but.... It looks like a knockoff of a combo of Nights into Dreams and Mario Galaxy. But it should also be noted that even Balan looked like a Nights knockoff. Rodea is the first & last time since leaving Sega that I feel like Naka didn't embarrass himself. In short, TLDR if you were to go and tell me that Sakurai or Miyamoto were in this sort of legal trouble, my jaw would drop and I'd probably call you a liar, but Yuji Naka looked like he'd been gaslighting himself into these situations ever since Sonic 2 went to print. I'm just not too shocked this is where he ended up. It's ironic that of all things he decided to do the insider trading-tango with, it was the mobile game that literally EVERY Final Fantasy fan knew was going to die since SE tossed it into the appstore garbage pile. You wonder what other times he's done this in the past now. |
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Aresef
Posts: 909 Location: MD |
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For those who don't remember: https://www.polygon.com/2017/4/7/15222852/peter-moore-sega-yuji-naka
I'm not a lawyer, nor am I well-versed in Japanese law, but Google Esq. tells me he faces up to five years in prison, a 5 million yen (US$36,681) fine or both. I know this is serious, but I can't help but think of the PSAs at the end of AOTSH episodes and what a skit advising against insider trading would have looked like. That's no good. |
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MFrontier
Posts: 11178 |
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I guess he's pretty much done.
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 5920 |
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More like didn’t know. Then idea they couldn’t accept the fact they were being left behind is so amazing.
Well if you recall correctly the game for a period of time was in well release hell. All finished but stuck waiting to be dropped on markets. People that were interested in the game probably moved on and forgot. I also forgot the game also had a 3DS version |
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Aresef
Posts: 909 Location: MD |
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More like didn’t know. Then idea they couldn’t accept the fact they were being left behind is so amazing.[/quote]
You had three successive Sega of America presidents tell their bosses in Tokyo what was what--Kalinske, Stolar and Moore--and they were met with internecine handwringing. And then, as a final thank you for all his hard work, they made Moore the face of Sega's pivot to third-party development. Compare with Nintendo, where NOA was run for 22 years by Hiroshi Yamauchi's son-in-law, then later by Reggie Fils-Aime, who formed a deep friendship with Iwata. He had to fight for the "Wii would like to play" ads but his bosses basically trusted his judgment from there. |
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LinkTSwordmaster
Posts: 381 Location: PA / USA |
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Yeah, it's important to point out that Sega experiencing turbulence over the years was by and large issues with management at Sega JP. You look at various careers that have been fostered and launched at Nintendo over the decades, and then compare that to the toxicity that you hear after-the-fact come out of working for Sega, and it -again- doesn't shock me that this is ultimately where Yuji Naka has wound up after all this time. Naka sort of got a similar kind of "golden ticket" like Miyamoto and Sakurai did over at Nintendo, but his path veered quite far from where those other devs have wound up today. |
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