Sonic co-creator Yuji Naka has just updated an eight-year-old mobile game
Yuji Naka, who’s serving a suspended prison sentence, has updated Pirates of Coin
Sonic the Hedgehog co-creator Yuji Naka has announced the release of an update to an eight-year-old mobile game.
Posting on X on Monday, he said he’d updated Pirates of Coin, which was released in 2016 by Prope, the independent studio he co-founded after leaving Sega.
“After 8 years, I have updated our PROPE application ‘Pirates of Coin’. It was built in Unity5 at the time, but I had to update a lot of things while there are a lot of Unitys between now and Unity6,” he wrote. “I changed Javascript to C# and supported a lot of Obsoletes.”
It’s unclear what Naka, who is currently serving a suspended prison sentence for insider trading, has planned in terms of future game development.
In July 2023, Naka was sentenced to 30 months in prison, suspended for four years, and given two fines totalling ¥173 million ($1.2 million), after he pled guilty to buying shares based on inside information during his time working at publisher Square Enix.
After his arrest in November 2022, it was claimed that Naka – who was working on Balan Wonderworld at the time – was made aware that Japanese developer Aiming was working on a new Dragon Quest mobile game called Dragon Quest Tact before it was officially announced.
He then reportedly bought approximately 10,000 shares of Aiming stock for around ¥2.8 million ($20,000), with the intention of selling them once the game was announced and Aiming’s stock value had increased.
Naka was arrested for a second time in December 2022, relating to allegations that he had carried out similar insider trading after learning confidential information that Square was planning to make Final Fantasy VII: The First Soldier with mobile developer ATeam Entertainment.
