Yuji Naka Refutes The Claim He Threatened To Leave Sega Over Sonic X-Treme

Sonic co-creator Yuji Naka has made a new post on Twitter attempting to refute an allegation about him that has circulated for years: the claim that he threatened to leave Sega if the development team for Sonic X-Treme used his engine for Nights: Into Dreams.

Yuji Naka says that the Nights Engine could not have been used since it was made in the programming language Assembly and Sonic X-Treme was made in C.

The NiGHTS I programmed was coded in full scratch assembly, so there is no way I could share that engine with people who are making it in C because they don’t understand it and the documentation doesn’t exist. All these people who tell these stories are liars. https://t.co/JVzYYFxp33

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— Yuji Naka / 中　裕司 (@nakayuji) July 7, 2022

The full story of this controversy was that the American development team Sega Technical Institute was working on the next mainline Sonic game for the Sega Saturn called ‘Sonic X-Treme’. The game had a troubled development and at one point they were hoping to use the engine that was used for Naka’s recent Saturn game Nights: Into Dreams. Naka apparently didn’t like this and threatened to leave the company if it was used.

The game was eventually canceled, leaving Saturn without a mainline Sonic title (that’s like having a Nintendo console with no Mario game). The alleged pulling of The Nights engine was not the main reason for the cancelation of the game but it is often used as an example of Naka being difficult to work with.

The main source of the Nights engine claim comes from is the game’s Producer Mike Wallis in an interview with Sonic Stadium:

“So, you know, they shipped us a NiGHTS editor, a level-based editor, and our designers were familiarising themselves with that… and after about two weeks, Yuji Naka (who was the designer of NiGHTS, and one of the original Sonic Team), had [heard about it and] said, ‘No’.

“There was a big rivalry between SEGA Japan and SEGA America, and Yuji Naka hated SOA. So he went [to the Head of SOJ at the time] and said ‘Look, I don’t want these guys to have the NiGHTS engine. I do not want them to have the NiGHTS technology. If you give it to them, I quit.’ So [they went] to Bernie Stolar and said, ‘I’m not giving you anything. You’re gonna have to do without it.’ So… Bernie had to come to us and say, ‘Sorry guys, you’re gonna have to do it without the NiGHTS Technology.’”

Bernie Stolar was the former president of Sega of America who passed away on June 22nd, 2022.

Netizens are debating just how reliable Naka is as a source. Considering the accusation, it seems that he wants to clear his name of prior controversy.

Even disregarding X-Treme, the Sonic co-creator still has a reputation of not being easy to work with, another example being him allegedly wishing to fire the development team of Geist Force so that he could use their engine for Sonic games. Many are also debating whether the programming would have really been as difficult as Naka says it would.

We’ll probably never know truly what happened between Naka and the Sonic X-Treme team. In situations like these, I suppose we all have to look at both sides and decide for ourselves who we believe is more reliable.

The latest game in the Sonic series, Sonic Origins is available now for all modern platforms.