If you’re surprised, you probably haven’t been paying attention.
You might, perchance, remember that there was a lot of kerfuffle over the way Balan Wonderworld turned out. At least, in regards to Yuji Naka. But, hey, it’s time to celebrate the 26th anniversary of NiGHTS, so he posted a photo from the announcement and…
…wow, I can’t believe a giant gaping black void worked on NiGHTS. All joking aside you might correctly guess that that was someone Naka decided should no longer be in the photo, and also, coincidentally, had something to do with Balan Wonderworld. And you’d be right; the person that was scribbled over in MS Paint was, in fact, Naoto Ohshima. Not like, just going from responses, you’d be able to tell, given the fact that Naka hid all the replies mentioning Ohshima.
This also drew the obvious replies.
For context, in addition to being one of the people responsible for Sonic’s inception, Ohshima worked on a number of Naka’s projects over the years, before leaving Sega to found Artoon (Blinx the Timesweeper), at which point he was stripped from the credits on Sonic Adventure DX. Later on, along with a number of Artoon and Sega vets, he founded Arzest, which worked on Balan Wonderworld with Naka for Square Enix.
A bit after his first post, Naka went on to (passive aggresively) explain:
It’s easy to feel a bit of sympathy for the man. Or at lease, it is… until you remember that we’re talking about Yuji Naka. A man who has a pattern of behavior that really lends credence to the court documents, which feature Ohshima alleging that Naka had “ruined” the working relationship with Arzest. So… yeah, kinda hard to buy the idea that it was anything else that caused things to break down.
Admittedly, though, while it’s not surprising to see, it is kind of sad. Who knows, maybe they’ll work it out eventually. I wouldn’t put money on it, though.
Source: PC Gamer
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