Cruel practices are nothing new to the business world, but when they happen in a company, you usually don’t hear about them.Turned out to be like this Sega Producer Mark Subotnick (Mark Subotnick) claimed that in the latest episode of the “Retro Time” podcast, it happened in his previous company. (Thanks for your report, NintendoLife!)
As an episode titled “Dreamcast: What went wrong”, Subonik detailed the time he and Sega of the United States developed a Star Fox-like game called Geist Force. Once considered cancelled due to lack of confidence in the product and missed deadlines, Subonik tells his story:
“Naka took his team to visit our studio [and] Look at our tools and engines; we have a lot of proprietary [and] Very amazing technology-I still say to this day, [we had] Some things I haven’t seen are fully replicated on our level. [Naka] I didn’t realize that many people in my team speak fluent Japanese, including my chief engineer. [Naka] Start to speak Japanese, assuming no one understands it; [he] Start talking about which parts of our technology they want to use for Sonic, and then basically say that as soon as they ship, except for an engineer who understands their system, they fire everyone and add him to our Sonic team-my team Hearing all this, so you can imagine how they feel. At that time, Naka was very strong at Sega. “
Subonik said this caused a chain reaction across the company. People jumped off the sinking ship and five of his engineers found other jobs. This means hiring again, training new employees, and basically restarting the team, which will take months and ultimately fail the project.
If Subnik’s allegations are true, it depicts a bleak picture of how Sega treated its Sega US studio during the Dreamcast era. Naka’s careless indifference to the workers there and the work they do, not to mention the additional insult to harm by saying these words in front of the developers there, it would be a bit surprising if this happened. Of course, this is one aspect of the story. We may never know the full truth, but if past experience can be used as a reference, those in power are often reluctant to show up in public.
At the same time, Yuji Naka has not had the best time since the fall of Sega’s console ambitions. His latest work, Balan Wonderworld, is bad enough that the first day patch of the game won our “Gunshot Wound Band-Aid Award” in our Alternative Game Awards and made sure that he leaves Square Enix. These things can happen when you publish a game that may cause seizures.
