«I created Sonic for Megadrive to win Super Nintendo»

Yuji Naka celebrates the 25th anniversary of his pet at the Fun & Serious Game Festival

  For ten years, Sonic's designs have not depended on its creator, Yuji Naka (Osaka, 1965), but it is clear that this videogame designer with contagious laughter will always live under the shadow of the charismatic blue hedgehog of Sega. This was recognized this afternoon, in an interview that several journalists specializing in video games have done on the stage of the Fun & Serious Game Festival. "Overcoming a character like this is difficult but I keep trying," he explained.

The truth is that 25 years of the first title of a pet that, as reported by Naka, emerged with the intention of the "Megadrive console winning Super Nintendo." And the rivalry between the two Japanese companies in the early nineties was brutal. "Obviously I was also looking for something fun and satisfying, but I wanted a very fast game that could demonstrate the capacity of the console and I focused all my efforts on it", he reflected that on Monday he will receive an honorary award from the festival.

In fact, the competition was so fierce that it occurred to Naka, precisely while he was creating the Sonic character, to develop a Nes emulator - the first Nintendo console - for Megadrive. "Regardless of what my superiors had asked me, I started working on it because I thought that if we could load the Nintendo games on Sega's console, it would become the most sold." As the developer has revealed, it managed to work but the emulator was stored in a drawer.

The launch of 'Sonic: The Hedgehog' (1991) was a success and the mascot quickly became the icon of the company. Soon the sequels would arrive and in the third installment it is known that even the ill-fated king of pop participated in the compositions. "Michael Jackson loved Sonic and came many times to Sega," said Naka, who has not gone into detail on exactly what the artist did. What he did say is that on one occasion Jackson went to the company's headquarters with his two children and at the reception there were four cabins of the 'Powerdrift' car game.

"Michael and his two sons sat in three of them and my boss asked me to take fourth place," Naka continued. "Evidently, I had to let me win and I was the last but Jackson on the last lap crashed into a wall and was the last. At least I can say: 'I'm the man who has won Michael Jackson', "he laughs.

Naka, who now designs games at Prope, the studio he founded in 2006 and has already released four titles for Nintendo 3DS, laments the current situation of the video game in Japan, whose production is now at its best. In his opinion, the mistake has been to try to adapt the games they did to Western tastes. "Most of these games have failed and I'm sure Americans and Europeans would like to play the games we used to play before targeting the Japanese public," he says.