Yugi Naka was responsible for the cancellation of Dreamcast game 'Geist Force', which was to be Sega's answer to Nintendo shooting game 'Star Fox'.
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Former Sega producer Mark Subotnick worked at the games corporation at the time and claimed that the "sad story" occurred when Yugi - who was head of the 'Sonic the Hedgehog' department - cancelled the game and fired a team who "ahead of their time."
Mark said: "We got the green light to make a game called 'Geist Force'... it was actually the E3 shooter, the thing that Bernie [Stolar, SoA president] showed for Dreamcast at E3... we were to be the launch title. It was a 'Star Fox' clone... I'm not going to say we had any amazing ideas [but] we had a cool narrative that was very different and we actually had a very diverse cast. So this is a sad story, and I'm going to tell the truth, and if it comes back to bite me, so be it, because there's no lost in how this actually went down...People were relatively excited about the progress of the game. It was looking amazing."
The former gaming producer then went on to explain of how Yugi did not realise that the workers were fluent in Japanese, so when he arrived to speak to Mark in his native language, he was unaware that the staff were listening to their fate.
Speaking on the 'The Retro Hour Podcast', he added: "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] really 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, a lot 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."