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Old-school Sega dev Hirokazu Yasuhara starts work at Nintendo
Hirokazu Yasuhara, co-creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, has begun working at Nintendo Software Technology in Redmond, Washington, Gamasutra reports. Yasuhara worked at Sega from 1988 until switching to 2K Sports in 2000, Naughty Dog in 2002 (senior game designer for the Jak & Daxter and Uncharted franchises) and finally Namco Bandai, which he left last month.Nintendo Software Technology generally develops DS and DSiWare titles, having worked on Mario vs. Donkey Kong: Mini-Land Mayhem and Metroid Prime Hunters.
New Pac-Man game on the way to celebrate 30th Pac-Manniversary
Hirokazu Yasuhara, who designed much of the original Sonic the Hedgehog at Sega and worked on Jak games and Uncharted for Naughty Dog, is now at Namco Bandai, and working on a new Pac-Man game, to celebrate the beloved circle's 30th anniversary in 2010.Namco Bandai America's Makoto Iwai told Gamasutra, "As a group, we feel like we should do something to make him come back. So, there's one project that we started working on, and [Yasuhara is] part of it." Iwai said that the new game design was "sort of meeting his wish 100 percent, in a sense," referring to an earlier statement by Yasuhara that he wanted to make a new character action game.Does Pac-Man's original maze-style gameplay count as "character action," or do we have a new Pac-Land sort of affair to look forward to? After the last Pac-Man game, we will eagerly devour whatever delicious fruit (by which we mean games) Namco Bandai sends out into the maze (by which we mean, um, the retail or downloadable market).
