Summary
Yuji Naka, formally of Sonic Team andSquare Enix, has accused aDragon Questlead of lying about him in court. Breaking his social media silence for the first time since his arrest, Naka says that Dragon Quest producer Yu Miyake lied about him during the criminal proceedings, and implies that he is not a “good” person.
This comes after Yuji Naka, best known for co-creatingSonic the Hedgehogduring his time atSega, wasgiven a two-and-a-half-year prison sentence, suspended for four years. This means that, barring any further convictions, he has avoided prison, but could face the full two-and-a-half years behind bars if he commits any further offences. He was also hit with a $1 million fine.
Yuji Naka’s response
According to machine translations, Naka accuses Miyake of submitting “a memo” containing “lies” during his insider trading case. He also appears to be pleased by the reports that Miyake is stepping away from the Dragon Quest series, a story which was broken byBloombergon Friday.
A full translation has been shared by user @Genki_JPN, which can be read below.
Yuji Naka wasarrested on suspicion of insider trading back in November 2022. This was due to the fact that he bought stocks in the companies Aiming and ATeam right before it was publicly revealed that they were working with Square Enix, thus boosting their value. As Naka worked at Square Enix himself, he was accused of using this knowledge for his own financial gain on the stock market.He later pleaded guiltyto the charges of insider trading.
Yuji Naka was arrested alongside Taisuke Sasaki and Fumiaki Suzuki, who both worked on the Dragon Quest series.
Since he pleaded guilty, it’s unclear how Naka feels that this “memo” hurt his case. It’s possible that these apparent comments from Mikyake were shared with the court during a sentencing hearing, although that is just speculation.
In any case, this is an incredibly unexpected move from Naka, especially after well over a year of social media silence. It’s worth remembering that he did plead guilty to the charges of insider trading, and while Naka isn’t walking back on this in the tweet, few would have expected him to openly talk about the case like this. It remains to be seen if he makes any further comments on the case.
