The creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, Yuji Naka, was arrested for alleged insider trading. The Tokyo District Attorney’s Office has made the arrest. The illegal act would relate to information collected on the Dragon Quest game.
Naka Yuji allegedly obtained sensitive information about the development of the Dragon Quest smartphone game in January 2020 while working on Square Enix. Yuji allegedly used this information and invested the equivalent of $335,000 in stock in Aiming, a production company that collaborated with Square Enix on the Dragon Quest title before it hit the market. In addition, two other people who are part of Square Enix are said to have been arrested.
Yūji Naka was working for Sega in the 1980s, when he and Naoto Ōshima created the Sonic figure, which competed with the Nintendo Super Mario figure at the time. The video game Sonic the Hedgehog, released in 1991, became a worldwide success.
After the game’s release, Yūji Naka stated that his contribution to the Sonic video game was not sufficiently recognized, and after 1994, he decided to return to Japan, although he continued to develop Sonic titles. Naka then founded his own company, Prope, and joined Square Enix in 2016, a company he had just left this year when he was removed from developing the game Balan Wonderworld.
Source: Lega Nerd
