About Yuji Naka
Yuji Naka (中 裕司, Naka Yūji; born September 17, 1965), sometimes credited as YU2, is a Japanese former video game designer and programmer. He is the co-creator of the Sonic the Hedgehog series and was the president of Sonic Team at Sega until his departure in 2006. Naka joined Sega in 1984 and worked on games including Girl's Garden (1985) and Phantasy Star II (1989). He was the lead programmer of the original Sonic games on the Mega Drive in the early 1990s, which greatly increased Sega's market share. After developing Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) in Japan, Naka moved to California to develop Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (1992), Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (1994) and Sonic & Knuckles (1994) with Sega Technical Institute. Naka returned to Japan to lead development on Sonic Team games including Nights into Dreams (1996), Burning Rangers (1998), Sonic Adventure (1998) and Phantasy Star Online (2000). After Sega left the console market in 2001, Naka remained as an executive officer and oversaw its output for the next five years. In 2006, Naka left Sega and founded the independent game company Prope. He joined Square Enix to direct the platform game Balan Wonderworld (2021), which reunited him with the Sonic co-creator Naoto Ohshima. Naka said he was removed from the project six months before Balan Wonderworld was released, and it underperformed critically and commercially. He left Square Enix in April 2021. In 2023, Naka was found guilty of insider trading at Square Enix. His first task was designing maps and checking floppy disks for Lode Runner for the SG-1000; he could not recall if the game was released. His first major project was Girl's Garden (1985), which he and the composer Hiroshi Kawaguchi created as part of their training process.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.