Bringing Sonic to the World

TOKYO - During the portion of Tuesday's New Challenge conference where attendees had free playing time on production Dreamcasts, we had a chance to speak with Yuji Naka, the producer of Sonic Adventure.

The game is now 55 percent complete, Naka told us. Naka and his team are working on the game full time in order to make the December 17 deadline. According to Naka, after the official announcement and public roll-out back in August, Sonic Team got a lot of e-mails from all over the world. Among them were some kind of threatening letters asking why Sega would release Sonic first in Japan, and overseas later.

Well, Naka told us that he knows that Sonic is really popular in the States, probably even bigger than Japan. He said he actually wanted to show the game North America first. But the game happened to be released in Japan first. He assured that the game will be a US launch title, "so please wait until next September."