The Bonkers Downfall Of The Creator Of 'Sonic The Hedgehog'

One thing we've learned recently is that coming up with incredibly amazing games won't necessarily save popular game directors from one day turning into unbelievably sad husks of men. Yuji Naka, the co-creator of the Sonic The Hedgehog series has been on the news a lot lately, and always for increasingly petty reasons. 

In all fairness, we do get it that he's sad. To bring readers up to speed, Naka co-created Sonic and went on to enjoy success with a string of other popular games at Sega until he left the company back in ‘06, a very, uh, interesting year for Sonic. He’d then work on smaller projects and only attempt a big comeback in 2021 by teaming up with Square Enix to bring us Balan Wonderworld, a game whose development he got kicked out from and that ended up feeling like a worthy successor to Sonic The Hedgehog from ‘06 by virtue of how nearly unplayable it was by release. Let’s try to spot the differences between Sonic '06:

And Balan Wonderworld:

Naka's resentment has recently gotten him to betray Sega's will to keep Michael Jackson's involvement in the Sonic series a secret – yes, Jackson totally made the music for Sonic 3 (among other things, probably), and is now trying to erase (or more like brushing over) the other co-creator of Sonic. During another recent Twitter tirade, he used the celebration of Nights' birthday to post a photo where he replaced Naoto Ohshima, the other co-creator of Sonic with a huge black smudge. 

He seemingly made that because he claims Ohshima ruined his work on Balan, but this is just too much. Despite their divergences, the series' big claim to fame is not its actual gameplay, but the blue menace's immediately iconic design –and Naka should damn well know better.

Top Image: Sega