(born February 26, 1964) is a Japanese

video game designer Video game design is the process of designing the rules and content of video games in the Video game development#Pre-production, pre-production stage and designing the gameplay, environment, storyline and characters in the Video game development ...

and artist, best known for designing

Sonic the Hedgehog is a video game series and media franchise created by the Japanese developers Yuji Naka, Naoto Ohshima, and Hirokazu Yasuhara for Sega. The franchise follows Sonic the Hedgehog (character), Sonic, an anthropomorphic blue hedgehog who battle ...

and Dr. Eggman from

Sega is a Japanese video game company and subsidiary of Sega Sammy Holdings headquartered in Tokyo. It produces several List of best-selling video game franchises, multi-million-selling game franchises for arcade game, arcades and video game cons ...

's ''

'' franchise. Although

Yuji Naka , credited in some games as YU2, is a Japanese video game designer and programmer. He is the co-creator of the ''Sonic the Hedgehog'' series and was the president of Sonic Team at Sega until his departure in 2006. Naka joined Sega in 1984 and w ...

made a tech demo around which ''Sonic'' gameplay was based, the character in his prototype was a ball that lacked any specific features and was based on Ohshima's game proposal.

Sonic Team , doing business as , is a Japanese video game developer owned by Sega. Sonic Team is best known for its ''Sonic the Hedgehog'' series and games such as '' Nights into Dreams'' and '' Phantasy Star Online''. The initial team, formed in 1990, c ...

considered numerous potential animal mascots before deciding on Ohshima's design, with an armadillo or hedgehog being the top choices because their spikes worked well with the concept of rolling into enemies. After leaving Sonic Team, Ohshima formed an independent game company called Artoon in 1999. There he went on to work on such games ''as Pinobee'' (2001), '' Blinx: The Time Sweeper'' (2002), and '' Blinx 2: Masters of Time & Space'' (2004). In 2010, Artoon was absorbed into AQ Interactive, and Ohshima and other key members of Artoon left to form Arzest. Early in his career, he was credited under the nickname "Big Island" in a number of games, which is a literal translation of his

family name In many societies, a surname, family name, or last name is the mostly hereditary portion of one's personal name that indicates one's family. It is typically combined with a given name to form the full name of a person, although several give ...

Works

References

External links

*
Sega Stars: Naoto Ohshima
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ohshima, Naoto 1964 births Japanese video game designers Japanese video game directors Living people Sega people Japanese video game artists Artists from Osaka

Works

References

Further reading

External links