#Game Business Archive Yuji Naka

[videogamesdensetsu]

Yuji Naka’s Game Business Archive conference report (June 27, 2018)

Before Girl's Garden (his first commercial game), Naka developed an SC-3000 version of Lode Runner on floppy disk (you need an add-on -the SF-7000- to use floppy disks on SC-3000). Only 10 copies were produced.

The SC-3000 and its add-on, the SF-7000. Naka started developing the Mark III port of Space Harrier without permission from Sega. He got the greenlight when his boss saw what he had already made. He later got advice from Yu Suzuki during the development. The FM Sound Unit was developed by the team behind the Mark III version of Outrun. They developed it without permission from Sega since they weren't satisfied with the PSG sound. This is the only game for which Naka arranged the music. When he came back from the 1988 AM Show where he saw Ghouls'n Ghosts / Dai Makaimura for the first time, Yuji Naka immediately asked Sega to port of the game on Mega Drive. The conversion was developed in 5 months. Due to the size of the cartridge (4 mega), memory was a major issue.

The Phantasy Star II development team had to make the game fit on a 4mega cartridge. They asked the president to use a 6M cartridge instead. He agreed under the condition that they deliver the game in time. They missed the deadline (by at least 2 months) but the game was released on a 6M cart. This was one of the biggest cartridge at the time which had an impact on the production cost. Since Sega refused to increase the retail price to compensate that additional cost, the company presumably didn't make any profit with this game.

Metal Lancer, a 3D shooting game Yuji Naka worked on in 90, before starting to work on Sonic. I assume Naka still has the ROM of a prototype (a video which seemed taken from an emulator was shown during the conference)

Sonic 1 was programmed on a PC-98. It seems that the software/editor used by Naka was MIFES. It took one year to make Green Hill, 6 months to make the rest. The scrolling in Namco's Marvel Land (8 pixels per frame) had an impact on Naka.

Sample demo of the engine developed for Sonic 1, showing how the Mega Drive could handle scalling and rotation.

When Naka left Sega before the release of Sonic 1 and joined Marc Cerny at the Sega Technical institute, he said he didn't want to develop a sequel. Naka started working on Sonic 2 under the condition that his boss let him develop a 2 player mode, something he hadn't been able to achieve with the first episode (he tried to implement that 2P mode pretty late in the development of Sonic 1 but the engine he had developed wasn't fast enough). Source: https://togetter.com/li/1241412