July 5, 1996: Yuji Naka's about to make you fall asleep
by Diamond Feit
As a writer and small-time media personality, I do not envy the creators of Sonic the Hedgehog. Sega president Hayao Nakayama wanted a new character to become the face of the company\u2014a Mickey Mouse for the 90s\u2014and got exactly what he wanted when Naoto Ohshima and Yuji Naka proposed a lightning-fast platformer starring a protagonist rolled into a ball. That unnamed sphere eventually became Sonic the Hedgehog, a household name celebrating his 35th anniversary this year.
Yet the success of Sonic as a game and as an icon did little to raise the profile of the people who made him a success. Video games as a medium have a notoriously poor reputation when it comes to proper accreditation, especially in the early days when few titles offered any credits beyond a list of pseudonyms. Meanwhile, every single human on Earth over the age of 12 knows at least one of the men responsible for creating Mickey Mouse.
In our teenage years, my friends and I had already come to love those who wrote, directed, and starred in all our favorite films or television shows, but we simply had no idea who made the games we devoted hours to each and every day. If anything, we attributed games to their publishers: Konami made Castlevania, Capcom made Mega Man, and so on. That's akin to assuming a new Paramount movie must be good because they released The Godfather and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Meanwhile, Sega saw the sales potential of Sonic and renamed one of its internal studios after the character. While its full history and membership exceed the scope of this column, Sonic Team became a front-facing brand as each Sonic sequel featured the words \"Sonic Team Presents\" on the packaging\u2014but only in Japan.
That all changed when, 30 years ago this week, the Sonic Team name took front and center on a brand-new game for Sega's still relatively-new game console. Neither Sonic nor any of his friends made an appearance in this unique experience from his original creators, but the invocation of Sonic's name helped sell NiGHTs into dreams\u2026 as a must-have title for the Sega Saturn.
NiGHTs into dreams\u2026 does not reveal much to players when they first boot it up. After the Sonic Team logo, a computer-animated cutscene introduces an enigmatic figure standing atop a tower in the moonlight. We see her\u2014or possibly him\u2014flying peacefully across idyllic landscapes. They make a funny face, they take a bow, the title screen drops, and that's that.
This curious purple-clad humanoid is the star of and is also known as NiGHTS. With their wide sleeves and floppy tassels on their head, NiGHTS resembles a king's jester from the distant past, a harlequin trickster with a mischievous grin. According to the instruction manual, NiGHTS lives in the Night Dimension, an alternate reality which humans only visit in their dreams. Just like our dreams can soothe or shock us, the Night Dimension contains a variety of residents and locations both friendly and hostile.
Further digging in the manual or lingering on the title screen will introduce the co-stars of the game, two teens named Elliot and Claris from the town of Twin Seeds. Both youths had a bad day where they felt publicly humiliated; their great shame lingered until the evening when they crawled into bed and went to sleep. Tormented by their own inadequacies, Elliot and Claris fled from the dark visions but not before Nightmareans attacked them and siphoned away their Ideya dream energy.
The kids make a getaway and stumble upon a strange building where they encounter NiGHTS, once a servant of the forces seeking to conquer the dream world. Having rebelled, NiGHTS was sealed inside an Ideya Palace to prevent future interference. Elliot and Claris discover they can use their remaining dream energy to temporarily liberate the purple prisoner and borrow NiGHTS' powers to recover their stolen Ideyas and free the Night Dimension.
Starting a new game brings up the Dreams menu where players can choose to control Elliot or Claris and set off on their individual journey made up of four stages. Each Dream contains a wide swath of real estate to explore, but proceeding on foot will prove difficult. Not only does the terrain slow your progress, but special Alarm Egg enemies will wake up Elliot or Claris and instantly end the Dream (and the game). Thus, your primary goal is to link up with NiGHTS and take advantage of their \"aerial acrobatics,\" as the manual puts it. In other words, NiGHTS can fly.
As NiGHTS, you may ignore gravity and freely move in eight directions, although the game locks you into one of four predetermined flight paths called Mares. Each Mare begins and ends at the Ideya Palace, giving NiGHTS a limited time window to collect as much dream energy as possible. Once NiGHTS meets their quota, returning to the Palace resets the clock and seamlessly transitions to the next Mare.
NiGHTS' simple control scheme means players barely need to touch any of the eight different buttons on the Sega Saturn game pad. Pressing in a direction moves NiGHTS accordingly. Pressing a face button accelerates via a Drill Attack though this depletes an energy meter so its usage is limited. Pressing a shoulder button adds a bit of flair to NiGHTS' moves and pressing both shoulder buttons together brings NiGHTS to a full stop.
Funnily enough, the gameplay loop of NiGHTs into dreams\u2026 is literally a loop as players fly through Mares as many times as needed to accrue energy in the form of colored chips. Floating rings also dot the landscape which NiGHTS can pass through for a score bonus and to recharge the Drill Attack meter. Players may put off starting the next Mare by avoiding the Palace and running the loop again to rack up additional points. This matters because NiGHTs into dreams\u2026 grades your performance and only by getting a C or better in every Dream can you access the final challenge.
After completing four Mares, NiGHTS flies off to a special Nightmare arena where they must defeat a boss. Strategies vary but once again a ticking clock governs the battle. NiGHTS doesn't have a health bar, so getting hurt depletes the timer instead. If the countdown reaches zero, that's a Night Over which means restarting the entire Dream from the beginning.
As an American Sega Saturn owner, I had good reason to look forward to NiGHTs into dreams\u2026 in 1996. I primarily used my console as a fighting game machine thanks to excellent ports of Street Fighter Alpha 2 and Night Warriors: Darkstalkers' Revenge, but I also saw a much greater variety of software available on competing systems. A fresh, original title with the pedigree of Sonic Team sounded exactly like what I wanted\u2014given that Sonic himself remained missing in action on Saturn.
Sega treated the debut of NiGHTs into dreams\u2026 as a major event, dropping a reported $10 million on magazine ads and television commercials featuring the tagline \"Prepare to fly.\" The company invited reporters to Japan to ask Yuji Naka and Naoto Ohshima directly about their latest creation. To further push NiGHTs into dreams\u2026 as a groundbreaking three-dimensional title, Sega even made a new controller featuring an analog stick for smoother movement; this 3D Control Pad came bundled with copies of NiGHTs into dreams\u2026 at launch.
Within minutes of diving headfirst into the dream world Sega had pitched me, two problems became apparent. Right off the bat, NiGHTS can not hold a candle to Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic is expressive and dynamic, running and jumping and tapping his foot as if to say \"hey buddy, you're the one holding the controller but I'm doing all the work!\" NiGHTS looks like a porcelain figure my great aunt would keep on a shelf or a whimsical clown seen in the background of a Star Trek holodeck program.
The other, larger issue I had with NiGHTs into dreams\u2026 concerned its structure. Despite all the advertisements hyping NiGHTS' aerial artistry, actually playing NiGHTS means following the same route through the sky over and over. The game offers room for exploration in that creatures and items lay out of sight, but that doesn't alter the fact that NiGHTS essentially operates in two dimensions rather than three.
Speaking to the Japanese press in 1996 and translated by Shmuplations.com, Yuji Naka said \"We just didn\u2019t think we\u2019d be able to create interesting gameplay in a completely 3D environment\u2026We did try some early experiments with full 3D, but as we thought, it didn\u2019t feel right. But pure 2D would have looked 'old' to today\u2019s audiences. What we settled on is the game you see today: the gameplay appeal of 2D with a 3D presentation.\"
Despite strong sales and critical praise in multiple regions, NiGHTs into dreams\u2026 occupies a curious position in Sega's catalog. The game remained a standalone title for over a decade with nary a sequel or spinoff in sight. A planned follow-up for the Dreamcast never made it to market. NiGHTS co-creator Yuji Naka may have played a role in this, as he told the UK's Official Dreamcast Magazine \"I know a lot of people love it and want us to make a sequel, but for us it's a really important game. Like the way Spielberg likes E.T. so much he won't remake it, I don't want to make another NiGHTS.\"
Naka's departure from Sega in 2006 seemingly opened the door for more NiGHTS. A full-on sequel subtitled Journey of Dreams debuted on the Wii in 2007, followed by a 2008 PlayStation 2 port of the Saturn original. This PS2 version formed the basis of an HD remaster released digitally for consoles and Steam in 2012, although Sega delisted the latter in 2024.
NiGHTS' return to the spotlight brought with it a flurry of fans not just endorsing the game but explaining its inner workings. In contrast to its simple control scheme, NiGHTS has repeatedly confounded me due to its counter-intuitive mechanics. The timer encourages me to treat it like a racing game so I gather up the colored orbs, make a beeline for the Palace, and I receive a D-grade for my efforts.
According to countless YouTube tutorials, the winning strategy involves hoarding dream energy, depositing it all in one go to open the path forward, but then milking the clock for all its worth. Every collectible beyond the required quota offers far greater rewards, and doing so uninterrupted reaps even higher scores. NiGHTS looks like a childish game at first glance but demands repetition and skillful execution to fully experience all that it offers.\u00a0
Trying NiGHTs into dreams\u2026 again, 30 years after I first played it, I still don't jive with the game. I'm old enough now to appreciate that it has a particular vision and it operates according to its own rules, rules that set it apart from Sonic or Mario or any other platforming hero. NiGHTs into dreams\u2026 might be the platonic ideal of the maxim \"it's about the journey, not the destination\" considering how players start and end each Mare in exactly the same place.
However, the prospect of running through obstacle courses over and over chasing bigger and bigger numbers feels nightmarish to me; if I'm going to drill myself until I achieve proficiency, I'd rather head to the batting cages and learn how to hit home runs. Apologies to Elliot, Claris, and Sega fans everywhere, but I reserve the right to spend my nights reading in bed, not chasing Ideyas.
Writer/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit has written professionally since 2009 and contributed to Retronauts since 2018. Look up feitclub on social media or visit Diamond's lofi website.
", "contentSnippet": "July 5, 1996: Yuji Naka's about to make you fall asleep\nby Diamond Feit\nAs a writer and small-time media personality, I do not envy the creators of Sonic the Hedgehog. Sega president Hayao Nakayama wanted a new character to become the face of the company\u2014a Mickey Mouse for the 90s\u2014and got exactly what he wanted when Naoto Ohshima and Yuji Naka proposed a lightning-fast platformer starring a protagonist rolled into a ball. That unnamed sphere eventually became Sonic the Hedgehog, a household name celebrating his 35th anniversary this year.\nYet the success of Sonic as a game and as an icon did little to raise the profile of the people who made him a success. Video games as a medium have a notoriously poor reputation when it comes to proper accreditation, especially in the early days when few titles offered any credits beyond a list of pseudonyms. Meanwhile, every single human on Earth over the age of 12 knows at least one of the men responsible for creating Mickey Mouse.\nIn our teenage years, my friends and I had already come to love those who wrote, directed, and starred in all our favorite films or television shows, but we simply had no idea who made the games we devoted hours to each and every day. If anything, we attributed games to their publishers: Konami made Castlevania, Capcom made Mega Man, and so on. That's akin to assuming a new Paramount movie must be good because they released The Godfather and Raiders of the Lost Ark.\nMeanwhile, Sega saw the sales potential of Sonic and renamed one of its internal studios after the character. While its full history and membership exceed the scope of this column, Sonic Team became a front-facing brand as each Sonic sequel featured the words \"Sonic Team Presents\" on the packaging\u2014but only in Japan.\nThat all changed when, 30 years ago this week, the Sonic Team name took front and center on a brand-new game for Sega's still relatively-new game console. Neither Sonic nor any of his friends made an appearance in this unique experience from his original creators, but the invocation of Sonic's name helped sell NiGHTs into dreams\u2026 as a must-have title for the Sega Saturn.\nNiGHTs into dreams\u2026 does not reveal much to players when they first boot it up. After the Sonic Team logo, a computer-animated cutscene introduces an enigmatic figure standing atop a tower in the moonlight. We see her\u2014or possibly him\u2014flying peacefully across idyllic landscapes. They make a funny face, they take a bow, the title screen drops, and that's that.\nThis curious purple-clad humanoid is the star of and is also known as NiGHTS. With their wide sleeves and floppy tassels on their head, NiGHTS resembles a king's jester from the distant past, a harlequin trickster with a mischievous grin. According to the instruction manual, NiGHTS lives in the Night Dimension, an alternate reality which humans only visit in their dreams. Just like our dreams can soothe or shock us, the Night Dimension contains a variety of residents and locations both friendly and hostile.\nFurther digging in the manual or lingering on the title screen will introduce the co-stars of the game, two teens named Elliot and Claris from the town of Twin Seeds. Both youths had a bad day where they felt publicly humiliated; their great shame lingered until the evening when they crawled into bed and went to sleep. Tormented by their own inadequacies, Elliot and Claris fled from the dark visions but not before Nightmareans attacked them and siphoned away their Ideya dream energy.\nThe kids make a getaway and stumble upon a strange building where they encounter NiGHTS, once a servant of the forces seeking to conquer the dream world. Having rebelled, NiGHTS was sealed inside an Ideya Palace to prevent future interference. Elliot and Claris discover they can use their remaining dream energy to temporarily liberate the purple prisoner and borrow NiGHTS' powers to recover their stolen Ideyas and free the Night Dimension.\nStarting a new game brings up the Dreams menu where players can choose to control Elliot or Claris and set off on their individual journey made up of four stages. Each Dream contains a wide swath of real estate to explore, but proceeding on foot will prove difficult. Not only does the terrain slow your progress, but special Alarm Egg enemies will wake up Elliot or Claris and instantly end the Dream (and the game). Thus, your primary goal is to link up with NiGHTS and take advantage of their \"aerial acrobatics,\" as the manual puts it. In other words, NiGHTS can fly.\nAs NiGHTS, you may ignore gravity and freely move in eight directions, although the game locks you into one of four predetermined flight paths called Mares. Each Mare begins and ends at the Ideya Palace, giving NiGHTS a limited time window to collect as much dream energy as possible. Once NiGHTS meets their quota, returning to the Palace resets the clock and seamlessly transitions to the next Mare.\nNiGHTS' simple control scheme means players barely need to touch any of the eight different buttons on the Sega Saturn game pad. Pressing in a direction moves NiGHTS accordingly. Pressing a face button accelerates via a Drill Attack though this depletes an energy meter so its usage is limited. Pressing a shoulder button adds a bit of flair to NiGHTS' moves and pressing both shoulder buttons together brings NiGHTS to a full stop.\nFunnily enough, the gameplay loop of NiGHTs into dreams\u2026 is literally a loop as players fly through Mares as many times as needed to accrue energy in the form of colored chips. Floating rings also dot the landscape which NiGHTS can pass through for a score bonus and to recharge the Drill Attack meter. Players may put off starting the next Mare by avoiding the Palace and running the loop again to rack up additional points. This matters because NiGHTs into dreams\u2026 grades your performance and only by getting a C or better in every Dream can you access the final challenge.\nAfter completing four Mares, NiGHTS flies off to a special Nightmare arena where they must defeat a boss. Strategies vary but once again a ticking clock governs the battle. NiGHTS doesn't have a health bar, so getting hurt depletes the timer instead. If the countdown reaches zero, that's a Night Over which means restarting the entire Dream from the beginning.\nAs an American Sega Saturn owner, I had good reason to look forward to NiGHTs into dreams\u2026 in 1996. I primarily used my console as a fighting game machine thanks to excellent ports of Street Fighter Alpha 2 and Night Warriors: Darkstalkers' Revenge, but I also saw a much greater variety of software available on competing systems. A fresh, original title with the pedigree of Sonic Team sounded exactly like what I wanted\u2014given that Sonic himself remained missing in action on Saturn.\nSega treated the debut of NiGHTs into dreams\u2026 as a major event, dropping a reported $10 million on magazine ads and television commercials featuring the tagline \"Prepare to fly.\" The company invited reporters to Japan to ask Yuji Naka and Naoto Ohshima directly about their latest creation. To further push NiGHTs into dreams\u2026 as a groundbreaking three-dimensional title, Sega even made a new controller featuring an analog stick for smoother movement; this 3D Control Pad came bundled with copies of NiGHTs into dreams\u2026 at launch.\nWithin minutes of diving headfirst into the dream world Sega had pitched me, two problems became apparent. Right off the bat, NiGHTS can not hold a candle to Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic is expressive and dynamic, running and jumping and tapping his foot as if to say \"hey buddy, you're the one holding the controller but I'm doing all the work!\" NiGHTS looks like a porcelain figure my great aunt would keep on a shelf or a whimsical clown seen in the background of a Star Trek holodeck program.\nThe other, larger issue I had with NiGHTs into dreams\u2026 concerned its structure. Despite all the advertisements hyping NiGHTS' aerial artistry, actually playing NiGHTS means following the same route through the sky over and over. The game offers room for exploration in that creatures and items lay out of sight, but that doesn't alter the fact that NiGHTS essentially operates in two dimensions rather than three.\nSpeaking to the Japanese press in 1996 and translated by Shmuplations.com, Yuji Naka said \"We just didn\u2019t think we\u2019d be able to create interesting gameplay in a completely 3D environment\u2026We did try some early experiments with full 3D, but as we thought, it didn\u2019t feel right. But pure 2D would have looked 'old' to today\u2019s audiences. What we settled on is the game you see today: the gameplay appeal of 2D with a 3D presentation.\"\nDespite strong sales and critical praise in multiple regions, NiGHTs into dreams\u2026 occupies a curious position in Sega's catalog. The game remained a standalone title for over a decade with nary a sequel or spinoff in sight. A planned follow-up for the Dreamcast never made it to market. NiGHTS co-creator Yuji Naka may have played a role in this, as he told the UK's Official Dreamcast Magazine \"I know a lot of people love it and want us to make a sequel, but for us it's a really important game. Like the way Spielberg likes E.T. so much he won't remake it, I don't want to make another NiGHTS.\"\nNaka's departure from Sega in 2006 seemingly opened the door for more NiGHTS. A full-on sequel subtitled Journey of Dreams debuted on the Wii in 2007, followed by a 2008 PlayStation 2 port of the Saturn original. This PS2 version formed the basis of an HD remaster released digitally for consoles and Steam in 2012, although Sega delisted the latter in 2024.\nNiGHTS' return to the spotlight brought with it a flurry of fans not just endorsing the game but explaining its inner workings. In contrast to its simple control scheme, NiGHTS has repeatedly confounded me due to its counter-intuitive mechanics. The timer encourages me to treat it like a racing game so I gather up the colored orbs, make a beeline for the Palace, and I receive a D-grade for my efforts.\nAccording to countless YouTube tutorials, the winning strategy involves hoarding dream energy, depositing it all in one go to open the path forward, but then milking the clock for all its worth. Every collectible beyond the required quota offers far greater rewards, and doing so uninterrupted reaps even higher scores. NiGHTS looks like a childish game at first glance but demands repetition and skillful execution to fully experience all that it offers.\u00a0\nTrying NiGHTs into dreams\u2026 again, 30 years after I first played it, I still don't jive with the game. I'm old enough now to appreciate that it has a particular vision and it operates according to its own rules, rules that set it apart from Sonic or Mario or any other platforming hero. NiGHTs into dreams\u2026 might be the platonic ideal of the maxim \"it's about the journey, not the destination\" considering how players start and end each Mare in exactly the same place.\nHowever, the prospect of running through obstacle courses over and over chasing bigger and bigger numbers feels nightmarish to me; if I'm going to drill myself until I achieve proficiency, I'd rather head to the batting cages and learn how to hit home runs. Apologies to Elliot, Claris, and Sega fans everywhere, but I reserve the right to spend my nights reading in bed, not chasing Ideyas.\nWriter/podcaster/performer Diamond Feit has written professionally since 2009 and contributed to Retronauts since 2018. Look up feitclub on social media or visit Diamond's lofi website.", "guid": "162857344", "isoDate": "2026-07-05T11:00:09.000Z", "itunes": { "duration": "1037", "image": "https://c10.patreonusercontent.com/4/patreon-media/p/post/162857344/797322ce9f03492d94db9a9caac368d9/eyJkIjo3MiwiaCI6MzAwMCwic3RyaXBfYWxwaGEiOjEsInciOjMwMDAsIndlYnAiOjB9/1.jpg?token-hash=rKQi31H17cjthRf9BvksRviTm_etIJlvoCiGo8v0vkA%3D" }, "itunes_duration": "0:17:16" }