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In 2006, Naka left Sega and founded the independent game company Prope. He joined Square Enix to direct the platform game Balan Wonderworld (2021), which reunited him with the Sonic co-creator Naoto Ohshima. Naka was removed from the project six months before the game was released, and Balan underperformed critically and commercially. He left Square Enix in April 2021. In 2023, Naka was found guilty of insider trading at Square Enix.
Naka was born on September 17, 1965, in Hirakata, Osaka.[2] He learned to program by replicating and debugging video game code printed in magazines. The experience prompted him to study assemblers and practice writing code during his school classes.[3] After graduating, Naka decided not to enroll in university and stayed in Osaka.[4]
Around 1983, Naka saw that the video game company Sega was looking for programming assistants and applied.[5] Following a brief interview,[5] he began working for Sega in April 1984.[6] His first task was designing maps and checking floppy disks for Road Runner for the SG-1000, he could not recall if the game was released.[6] His first major project was Girl's Garden (1985), which he and the composer Hiroshi Kawaguchi created as part of their training process.[5] Their boss was impressed and decided to publish the game, and it earned them notice among their peers and Japanese gamers.[3] However Naka felt embarrassed about his code, and did not want to release the game. He developed games going with the flow, and did not do task management at all. The pace of game development was 1 game every 1 or 2 months, and he was essentially living at the company; he recalled bragging with Yu Suzuki on who worked more overtime.[7]
During the Master System era, Naka wanted to develop games that were not possible on Nintendo's Famicom. Examples of this include the 3D dungeons of Phantasy Star and ports of Space Harrier and OutRun, which ran on powerful arcade hardware. The Mega Drive was introduced suddenly, much like the Master System. It was only around the 32X's release in 1994 that Sega gave Naka information about hardware beforehand.[7] Super Thunder Blade was the first game he programmed for the Mega Drive. He requested that sprite-scaling be implemented in future models of the console.[7] However, he was told that it was not possible at the time. He also requested a 6Mbit cartridge for Phantasy Star II, which got through.[7] The Mega Drive was Naka's favourite hardware, and he said that he could have kept working on it forever just by making the clock speed faster.[7]
During a visit to the 1988 Amusement Machines Show, Naka was impressed by the ability to move diagonally on slopes in a demonstration of Capcom's game Ghouls 'n Ghosts. Hoping to recreate it, he asked his supervisors at Sega to allow him to port the game to the Mega Drive. Capcom provided him with the source code and ROM data. As he was developing the port, he experimented with aspects such as the speed of the main character to understand how they interacted with the environment. He also altered the slopes and was able to create a functioning 360-degree loop.[8] Sprite-scaling was still a technique that Naka wanted to improve his skill on with a game called Metal Lancer, but it was cancelled halfway through development.[7]
Sega's president Hayao Nakayama decided that Sega needed a flagship series and mascot to compete with Nintendo's Mario franchise.[9] Of Naka's numerous development plans, "a game to beat Super Mario", caught a superior's attention. Naka created a prototype platform game that involved a fast-moving character rolling in a ball through a long winding tube.[10] The idea for a hedgehog that could roll into a ball by jumping and attacking enemies came from his high school notebook, and he was unsure whether to use it. This concept was expanded out with character design by Naoto Ohshima and levels conceived by Hirokazu Yasuhara.[11] Naka hoped to showcase the Mega Drive's processing speed through fast and exhilarating gameplay. Part of his approach was based on his experience playing through the original Super Mario Bros (1985); he wondered why he could not complete each level faster the better he became at playing the game.[12] The development took longer than any game Naka worked on before, and he worked only on this game for approximately a year and a half.[7]
Sonic the Hedgehog was released in 1991 and received acclaim;[13][14] it greatly increased the popularity of the Sega Genesis in North America,[15] and is credited with helping Sega gain 65% of the market share against Nintendo.[16] Naka was dissatisfied at Sega, feeling he received little credit for the success, and quit.[15][17]
Naka rejoined Sega when he was hired by Mark Cerny to work at Sega Technical Institute (STI) in California, with a higher salary and more creative freedom.[17][15] At STI, Naka led development on Sonic the Hedgehog 2. It was another major success, but its development suffered from the language barrier and cultural differences between the Japanese and American developers.[18] The artist Craig Stitt described Naka as "an arrogant pain in the ass" who was not interested in working with Americans.[19] Another artist, Tim Skelly, said that Naka would have been happier working with an all-Japanese team because of the language barrier and cultural differences.[20]
After Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was released in 1992, Naka refused to develop another Sonic game with the American development staff.[21] A Japanese-only development team was formed and led by Naka and developed Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic & Knuckles, both released in 1994.[20] Originally, Naka wanted to make Sonic 3 a 3D game, with the SVP chip that was also used to port Virtua Racing to the Genesis. However, it took too long, and a McDonalds Happy Meal promotion was put in place, and to complete the game in time, it was decided that it to make a 2D game again. Once again, Naka had a specific hardware request with the lock-on cartridge technology of Sonic & Knuckles, which when combined would form the complete experience, as Sonic 3 was rushed to meet a deadline.[7]
Following the release of Sonic & Knuckles, Naka returned to Japan, having been offered a role as a producer.[22] As managing director Hisashi Suzuki brought in videotapes of Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter, Naka was so impressed that it partly contributed to him going back to Japan.[7] With Naka's return, Sonic Team was officially formed as a brand,[23][24] and began work on a new intellectual property,[22] Nights into Dreams (1996), for Sega's 32-bit Saturn console.[25] Naka did not have any desire to develop for the 32X, and was disappointed that the Saturn was not true 3D. Observing the development environment he did not want to make a Sonic game right away, and instead created Nights. He persuaded his superiors that Nights would only take one year and that he would work on a 3D Sonic in 1997. However, the development on Nights took longer than expected.[7] Naka regretted that he was not able to deliver a Sonic game for the Saturn, as this was often cited as a reason for the console's failure.[26]
Meanwhile, in America, STI worked on Sonic X-treme, a 3D Sonic game. Development was hindered by numerous setbacks, culminating in its cancellation in 1996. Reportedly, Naka contributed to the cancellation by refusing to let STI use the Nights game engine and threatening to quit.[27][28] The X-treme developer Chris Senn dismissed the story as speculation but said that, if true, he understood Naka's interest in maintaining control over the Sonic Team technology and the Sonic franchise.[29][30] Sonic Team was developing its own 3D Sonic game using the Nights engine, which could have motivated Naka's threat.[31] In July 2022, Naka denied that he had anything to do with X-treme's use of the Nights engine and said it would have been useless because Nights was coded in assembly and X-treme was in C. He suggested that the developers invented the story to rationalize their failure to finish X-treme.[29]
While Sonic Adventure was in development for the Saturn, Naka was part of the "Dream Team Meetings" which involved talking about plans of what eventually became the Dreamcast as early as 1996. Sonic Team proposed the name "G-Cube". Naka also proposed a multimedia concept that involved talking to a built in microphone to switch TV channels. This method of communication was then used in Seaman.[7]
In 1998, prior to the launch of Dreamcast, Naka and his team visited Sega of America to tour their development offices and observe their work on the game Geist Force, a rail shooter for Dreamcast. According to the producer Mark Subotnick, Naka told his team in Japanese which parts they would take to incorporate in Sonic games and suggested firing all but one of the engineers. Unbeknownst to Naka, several of the Geist Force developers understood Japanese and quit, contributing to the project's cancellation.[32]
Shortly after the Japanese launch of the Dreamcast and Sonic Adventure, Naka was contacted by Sega Chairman Isao Okawa to develop a flagship online game for the Dreamcast.[33] Originally, Naka was unenthusiastic about the idea given his team's inexperience with creating online games. However, the other Sega development studios were preoccupied with their own demanding projects such as Sakura Wars series and Jet Set Radio (2000). This left Sonic Team as the only other alternative that Okawa could rely on. In addition to their inexperience, Naka and his team saw the creation of an online game for Japan, a nation of console gamers, as a serious challenge, akin to creating a new genre. This was further complicated by the perception of online games in the late 1990s having boring visuals and the per-minute fee for dial-up internet in Japan.[33]
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