However, a former SEGA producer prevented this from happening. It wasn’t a tiny name either: Yuji Naka, who was previously instrumental in launching the Sonic series.

Mark Subotnick, another ex-SEGA producer, spoke on The Retro Hour Podcast about how there were projects within Nintendo’s former big rival that could have saved the Japanese company’s console division. As a guest on the episode Dreamcast: Where It Went Wrong, Subotnick spoke about how SEGA’s US arm worked on a Star Fox-like game, Geist Force. So far, the official explanation was that the company was not confident in the product, and deadlines were not being met.

Let’s hear what Subotnick had to say: “Naka came to visit with his team to tour our studio [and] look at our tools and engine; we had a lot of proprietary [and] phenomenal tech – I would say still to this day, [we had] some stuff that I haven’t seen replicated quite at the level we had. [Naka] didn’t realize that the people on my team, many of them, spoke fluent Japanese, including my lead engineer.

[Naka] started speaking in Japanese assuming that no one would understand; [he] started talking about what parts of our tech they were going take for Sonic and then basically said as soon as they ship, fire everyone but one of the engineers who knows their system and roll him onto our team for Sonic – and my team heard all that, so you can imagine how they felt. Naka was pretty powerful at SEGA at that time,” Subotnick said. Oh, how time flies: since then, Naka has moved to Square Enix, and he also flopped there with Balan Underworld…

This story outlines how much SEGA looked down on its US subsidiary during the Dreamcast. According to Subotnick, Naka’s comments started a chain reaction that led to people departing SEGA’s US branch. Five of his engineers also transferred elsewhere, which led to a damaging cycle (hiring new people, training new people, rebuilding the team, and all of that took time), hence eliminating Geist Force. Naka’s negligence is just icing on the cake, but let’s be fair: it’s only one side of the coin…

Source: VG247