Although he’s no longer affiliated with the blue blur, Sonic the Hedgehog co-creator Yuji Naka, 57, has been arrested for insider trading in recent times.
He was given a 2.5-year prison sentence with fines totaling $1.2 million for insider trading schemes that date back to 2020.
According to Jiji Press, a Japanese news agency, Naka’s prison sentence has since been suspended for the next four years. This means he will successfully avoid doing time as long as he follows the conditions of his release and does not break the law again during said time. The judge also noted that Naka expressed remorse when convicted.
Yuji Naka is a video game developer, producer, and designer who served as the president of Sonic Team at SEGA until leaving in 2006. He co-created Sonic the Hedgehog alongside Naoto Ohshima and Hirokazu Yasuhara back in the early 1990s.
The insider trading charges against Naka were made twice; first in November then again in December in matters unrelated to each other.
His first arrest surrounded a scheme to purchase stock in Aiming, a developer, in early 2020, based on insider knowledge that it would be releasing a mobile title known as Dragon Quest Tact. This project, funded by Square Enix, was not made public at the time. However, Naka was working with Square Enix on Balan Wonderworld at the time.
The second arrest involved Naka working with Taisuke Sazaki, a fellow Square Enix employee, to purchase shares of Ateam, known for developing Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier. This is yet another case in which Naka acted prior to the collaboration being made publicly available knowledge. Both men were said to have received “hundreds of millions of yen” in this deal.
In a lengthy Twitter thread back in April 2022, Naka revealed to fans he was removed from the development team for Balan Underworld six months prior to the 2021 launch and sued Square Enix in retaliation.