Yuji Naka
| Yuji Naka | |
|---|---|
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Naka in 2015
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| Born |
September 17, 1965 Osaka, Japan |
| Occupation | Game designer, producer, programmer |
| Years active | 1983-present |
| Notable work | Sonic the Hedgehog series |
Yuji Naka (中 裕司 Naka Yūji?, born September 17, 1965) is a Japanese video game programmer, designer, and producer best known as the former head of Sonic Team, where he was the lead programmer of the original Sonic the Hedgehog series of games on the Sega Genesis. Since 2006, he has been the head of Prope, a game company he founded after leaving Sonic Team that same year.
Naka learned how 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. After graduating high school, Naka decided to skip university and stay in his home town.
Around 1983, Naka saw that Sega was looking for programming assistants and decided to apply. After a brief interview, he was hired and his first project was a game called Girl's Garden, which he and Hiroshi Kawaguchi created together as part of their training process. Their boss was impressed and decided to publish the game, and it earned them notice among their peers and Japanese gamers. Naka's abilities as a programmer were further demonstrated in 1987 for his work on Phantasy Star for the Master System, where he was responsible for the impressive pseudo-3D animation effects present in the game's first-person dungeons.
His true breakthrough, however, came in 1991 when he programmed the original Sonic the Hedgehog game for the Genesis, with Naoto Ohshima designing the characters and Hirokazu Yasuhara creating the stages. The origins of Sonic can be traced farther back to a tech demo created by Naka, who had developed an algorithm that allowed a sprite to move smoothly on a curve by determining its position with a dot matrix. Naka's original prototype was a platform game that involved a fast-moving character rolling in a ball through a long winding tube, and this concept was subsequently fleshed out with Oshima's character design and levels conceived by Yasuhara. Following Sonic The Hedgehog's release, Naka moved to Sega's U.S. branch, Sega Technical Institute, where he worked with famed American designer Mark Cerny on the follow-up in conjunction with the original team back in Japan, now known as "Sonic Team". This partnership between the Eastern and Western teams continued through the development of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic & Knuckles, though the bulk of the development duties shifted back to Sonic Team in Japan for those titles, which Naka had also returned to by that time.
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