Rumor Patrol: Sonic Team Split?

The Claim: Sonic Team to split into three groups
The Defendant: Videogames.com
The Case: On Friday April 30, the following article appeared on Videogames.com:

"Our sources in Japan spoke with a former Sega employee who told us that the Sonic Team has been divided into three parts (Naka team, Iizuka team, and Oshima team), as some employees were not happy working with Yuji Naka. The Iizuka team is in the states working on the US version of Sonic Adventure; the Oshima team is working on a new project (possibly featuring a brand new character); and the Naka team is working on NiGHTS 2."

The Verdict: Videogames.com had better fire some of their "sources" in Japan. The above claim cannot be true for three reasons:

  1. Sonic Team is hardly big enough to split into three groups.
  2. Whether Naoto Ohshima and Takashi Iizuka are qualified to lead their own teams is debatable. They're directors, not producers, and Ohshima usually wasn't credited.
  3. Yuji Naka has stated more times than I care to point out that he is not ready to do a sequel to NiGHTS yet. (Let it go, people, it just isn't going to happen.)
The Sentence: Let us flood the homes of the Videogames.com staff with Liquid Plumber and send them anonymous packages containing old Digital Pictures Sega CD games.

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