Summary
- Yuji Naka, who was charged with insider trading in 2023, has returned to game development.
- He announced an update to his eight-year-old mobile game Pirates of Coin on Twitter earlier today.
- This is his first major return to game development since 2021.
Two years ago, Sonic co-creator Yuji Naka was given a four-year suspended prison sentence and fined over $1 million for insider trading. Naka mostly stayed out of the spotlight following the verdict (aside from last year when he accused Dragon Quest lead Yu Miyake for lying in court), but he is finally returning to game development after a four-year hiatus.
As reported by Time Extension, Naka announced on Twitter that he’s working on, wait for it, Pirates of Coin! In terms of recognisability, it doesn’t quite measure up to Sonic or even Balan Wonderworld, because it’s a run-of-the-mill mobile game about pushing coins.
“After eight years, I have updated our PROPE [app] Pirates of Coin,” Naka tweeted earlier today. “It was built in Unity 5 at the time, but I had to update a lot of things while there are a lot of Unitys between now and Unity 6. I changed JavaScript to C# and supported a lot of Obsoletes.”
Pirates of Coin, developed by PROPE, the studio Naka opened after leaving Sega in 2006, works like most coin pushers. The key difference is that the coins turn into pirates that you hurl at enemies. Naka boldly claims that it’s “the definitive version of the pusher-type coin game,” though its meager 10,000 downloads and middling reviews suggest otherwise.
What Has Prope Been Up To In The Eight Years?
In 2018, Naka joined Square Enix and formed a new studio, Balan Company, to develop Balan Wonderworld. However, he was removed from the project six months prior to release, and left Square Enix shortly after in 2021. During this period, he remained Prope’s sole employee.
Related
Balan Wonderworld Debuted At Under 2,100 Copies In Japan
To put this in perspective, Monster Hunter Rise was released the same day and has already sold well over four million copies.
The studio didn’t release any games during Naka’s tenure at Square Enix, with its last project being Kizumon in 2017 and Pirates of the Coin the year prior. But in 2021, Naka released Shot2048, a game in which you roll hexagonal dice along a board to create the number 2048. It has favourable reviews, with an average of 4.6, but it’s a fairly simple concept without much replayability.
This, and Balan Wonderworld, are Naka’s two most recent projects, and his return to Pirates of Coin is merely an update. It remains to be seen if Naka will dip his toes back into game development proper with a new release.
