Sonic Team’s lead producer, Yuji Naka, has won an award for Best Programmer at the annual high profile Association of Media in Digital (AMD) Awards in Japan. Congratulations Naka-san!
The award was given for Naka’s work on Dreamcast online RPG Phantasy Star Online – indeed, the reasoning AMD gave for the honour included the fact that the game represented the first time that a network of such epic proportions had been developed for a video games console.
Naka and PSO also got a special nod for the game’s innovative ‘Word Select’ system, which broke down language barriers and allowed players from all over the world to communicate with one another.
Thanks, Sonic Foundation.