did nomura get stepford wivesed or something?
i dont like normie sora thats not my son what have you done to his HAIR
oh neat whoâs OC is this?
stuff like this used to be kinda charming like when youâd find the dev rooms in Pokemon or Final Fantasy games and their NPC stand-ins joke about how they didnt get to see their families while making the game. now that im aware of normalized crunch in the game industry and especially the kind of âgrin and bear itâ vibe that normalization takes form of in the Japanese game dev industry it makes me pretty sad!!
like i think a lot about how Majoraâs Mask is a game about being under enormous time pressure made during an insane 1 year crunch dev cycle where the lowkey true villain (the Happy Mask Salesman) was apparently inspired by/based on Shigeru Miyamoto
Really love how Gumpei Yokoi walked in there and was like: âthe fuck yâall thinking youâre doing, making the Mona Lisa?? Itâs just a toy, go live your life!â
So true, Mr. Yokoi, so true.
When @HOBO finished finished Bioshock Infinite recently the credit scroll had a segment where all the staff left a one line comment, and most of it was âI miss my familyâ or âI miss my coworkers at the support studio after I/they were laid offâ or âNeed more caffeine to survive crunchâ.
And for all that suffering, they got Bioshock Infinite out of it.
Criminey.
This near-endgame boss from Lies of P (and more specifically the second phase cutscene)
This still from a streamer I sometimes watch (and just to be clear w/r/t whether this qualifies for the thread title, I assure you I thought about it on đ two different occasions)
I met Yuji Naka once. This was during development of The Matrix Online and Sega had become co-publisher along with WB Interactive. Naka doesnât have an MXO credit and I didnât hear of him again while I worked on the game so I guess probably Sega just had him swinging by on a meet and greet as a PR / morale booster thing. I didnât know anything about him at the time except that he was âthe Sonic guyâ; I knew what Sonic was but Iâd never really sat down and played any of the games.
Naka seemed affable and genuine.
I think about this a lot now.
Based on multiple other similar stories, itâs possible he was walking through because he was seeing if there was anything he wanted to steal.
What stories are these?
Iâm blanking on the exact game, but Naka was walking through a dev working on a tank or military game for the dreamcast, said it looked really good, and then said in japanese to the other member from Sonic Team (because he thought no one at the dev could speak japanese) that they should get the game cancelled and poach their graphics programmers for SA2.
Also a dev who made a tech deck game pitched SEGA on making a Sonic racing game, Naka got in contact with them asking for a demo, they put one together for him, and then he ghosted them. 18 months later Sonic Riders came out.
Geist Force.
The story seems to come from here:
The ex Sega of America internal dev team member stumbles over what sound likely to have been quite serious development problems that he canât seem to stop himself from mentioning (he fast-talked, hand-waved, and deflected pretty hard through an earlier voluntary allusion to them at 1:15:17). And he doesnât say Naka called for the game to be cancelledâhe says Naka said to fire the team AFTER the game would ship, except keep their best engineer and put him on Sonic.
Callous, dickish, foolish (to assume those US Sega employees wouldnât understand Japanese), and arrogant on Nakaâs part, if true? Sure. But a relatively new team being fired after finishing a struggling game is exactly how working at a big publisher goes, at least in the States. Naka was a Sega producer at that point and making calls in that kind of situation was his job. (It happened to my team, too, but it wasnât Nakaâs callâsee end of post.)
Although maybe the smarter call would have been to cancel the still-pre-beta game immediately when realizing it wasnât up to scratch, instead of funding its remaining production and letting it come out as a bad game on your new (Dreamcast) console; the engineers saved Naka from that possibly bad call by quitting.
Maybe the smartest call would have been not to have a new team working on a Starfox clone as a launch title in the first place.
The prototype Geist Force video above came from this older, extremely long article about the gameâs development:
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The c. 2003 âSonic Extremeâ prototype (not to be confused with the infamously cancelled 1996 âSonic X-tremeââprobably not a great choice of name though). But that team had apparently signed NDAs during their previous work with Sega that gave ownership of any pitches involving Sega characters to Sega:
So if Sega did get ideas from the pitch, they were apparently well within their rights to make use of themâat least as far as an NDA made out; the terms of an NDA arenât necessarily legal, but in any case theyâd almost certainly make legal action more expensive.
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In my case, we certainly werenât pitching Sega on any Sonic games. ; ) And Sega didnât own the developerâthey were really only handling distributionâso Naka wouldnât have been in a position to get anyone fired or transferred directly, even if he had been assigned to produce the game, which he doesnât seem to have been. I suppose a producerâs job is always to spot prospective talent though, so in that sense he probably did have an eye out to some degree. 2/3rds of my team WAS let go by WBIEâwho had acquired the studio earlier in developmentâafter the game launched and didnât do well; that would have been a WB rather than a Sega call. I havenât heard of any of the people let go having been subsequently called by Naka, but I suppose itâs possible.
This recent interview has a few Naka nightmare stories and the dude claims he was there when Naka stole credit for the creation of Sonic from Ohshima.
https://selectbutton.net/t/pictures-anonymous-12-steps-to-reconsideration/16594/638
Another great Naka moment . . . f u Yuji . . . Blinx is cooler than anything youâve done this century . . .
I know there are a bunch of âNaka stole Xâ stories out there now but searching for them is hard now cuz the internet sucks which is a shame cuz people are way more open about slagging him now that heâs a ~convicted criminal~
