Sonic Co-creator Yuji Naka Was Recently Imprisoned For Insider Trading

Sonic Co-creator Yuji Naka Was Recently Imprisoned: After releasing a new game, Sonic co-creator and former Sonic Team chief Yuji Naka was arrested in Tokyo on charges of insider trading. According to reports in Japanese media, the lawsuit also involves former employees of Square Enix and a game in the Dragon Quest series.

It was reported by The Verge that in early 2020, Naka and two other ex-Square Enix workers invested in developer Aiming after learning that the companies were working on a smartphone game dubbed Dragon Quest Tact. But back then, Naka was working on a doomed Balan Wonderland game, and the publisher and developer partnership weren’t out in the open.

No one knows if the other two employees working on the same game as Yuji Naka, Sonic‘s co-creator, are facing the same charges. The Tokyo District Public Prosecutor’s Office Investigations Unit, which carried out the arrest, claimed that Yuji Naka had purchased 10,000 shares in Aiming for around $20,000 (around 2.8 million yen) after hearing rumors of Dragon Quest Tact’s development in January 2020.

Sonic Co-creator Yuji Naka Was Recently Imprisoned

The Sonic co-creator is currently being prosecuted by the investigative unit on the idea that he planned to get financial gain from the game’s announcement and subsequent release. Naka may or may not have made a profit when he sold his shares, considering Dragon Quest Tact didn’t come out until months after he bought them.

The creator of Sonic would make back almost seven million yen (or 258% of his initial investment) if he achieved this. Two other former Square Enix employees were arrested the day before him on similar allegations, thus his arrest is not unexpected.

After learning from Suzuki in late November 2019 that the aforementioned game existed, former workers Taisuke Sazaki and Fumiaki Suzuki invested roughly $336,000 in Aiming shares between late 2019 and early 2020.

In contrast, Suzuki and Sazaki made tens of millions of yen in profit when they sold their Aiming stake after the announcement of Dragon Quest Tact in February 2020. There is evidence from Japan that suggests Sazaki worked on Dragon Quest Tact and was thanked for his efforts in Yuji Naka’s Balan Wonderland. It seems like Bobby Kotick wasn’t the only one thinking about making money.

As the chief programmer for Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) and its sequels, Yuji Naka is largely responsible for the game’s smooth and fast-paced visuals. From 1983 through 2006, he was employed by Sega; afterward, he worked as an independent programmer until joining Square Enix in 2018, where he collaborated with fellow Sonic co-creator and illustrator Naoto Ohshima on the project Balan Wonderland.

The new collaborative attempt to create another game, unfortunately, was unsuccessful; the game was published in March 2021 to bad review ratings and controversies concerning seizure-inducing flashing sequences.

A public apology from Sonic creator Yuji Naka to Balan Wonderland’s fans for the game’s incomplete status was made in April 2022, after he revealed that he had been removed from the project and sued Square Enix over it.

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