As part of the episode titled “Dreamcast: Where It Went Wrong”, Subotnick detailed the time he was working on a Star Fox-like game called Geist Force with Sega of America. Once thought to be cancelled because of a lack of confidence in the product and missed deadlines, Subotnick tells his side of the story: That, Subotnick says, caused a chain reaction throughout the company of people jumping from a sinking ship, with his five engineers finding other jobs. That meant hiring again, training the new hires, and basically restarting the team, which would take months and ultimately doom the project. If Subotnick’s allegations are true, it paints a pretty bleak picture of how Dreamcast-era Sega treated its Sega of America studio. Naka’s casual disregard for the workers there and the work they did, not to mention the added insult to injury with saying these things in front of the developers there, is a bit astonishing if that’s what actually happened. Of course, that’s one side of the story. We may never know the whole truth, but if past experience is anything to go by, those in power tend to be in a position to not want to be forthcoming. Yuji Naka, meanwhile, hasn’t had the best time since the downfall of Sega’s console ambitions. His latest creation, Balan Wonderworld, was bad enough that the Day One patch for the game earned our “Band-aid over a gunshot wound award” in our Alternate Game Awards, as well as ensuring his departure from Square Enix. Those things can happen when you release a game that can cause seizures.
