A former Sega executive has shared stories about the company’s history, while casually outing a potential ‘remake’ of Sonic CD.
If you owned a Nintendo GameCube in the early 2000s, you might’ve encountered a zany Sega platformer which has earned a cult following.
Billy Hatcher And The Giant Egg, released in 2003, was a 3D platformer where you grow, roll, and hatch eggs to defeat enemies and navigate the environment. It was a bizarre title at the time, but it got some attention as it was developed by Sonic Team and produced by Sonic The Hedgehog co-creator Yuji Naka, who is now a convicted felon for insider trading.
The game has remained in people’s memory perhaps because of its name (or the excellent theme song), but according to a former executive at Sega, Naka wasn’t a fan of the name and wanted to give it a name that would make your nan blush.
Speaking to fansite Sega-16, former vice president at Sega Of America, Mike Fischer, explained how Naka originally wanted to call the game ‘Giant Eggs’, but after the idea was ruled out, he suggested an even worse one for Western territories.
‘One of the guys on my team said, ‘Well, let’s call it Billy Hatcher’ because it’s a hatching game with a cute character,’ Fischer said. ‘The main character is the boy, not the egg. Of course, Naka-san hated it. We called it Billy Hatcher And The Giant Egg, which he still hated.
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‘We at one point – I promise you, I am not making up this story; I have two witnesses! At one point, he visited the US. Sometimes, I translated and sometimes other people translated. He goes, ‘Well, I know another name for the boy wearing a rooster suit. Another name for rooster is cock. Can we call the game Giant Cock in English?’
If you need a visual aid for the cock that got away, illustrator Kobalt Network mocked up the game’s front cover with the title on BlueSky in light of the revelation. We imagine it might’ve sold a few more copies, at least.
Fischer goes onto to say that he ‘should have’ agreed to have Giant Cock as the title to see what would happen, before making his feelings very clear on Naka as a person.
‘He is literally the most miserable person I have ever worked with in games or anything else in my life, just a horrible human being, and you can quote me on that,’ Fischer added.
Elsewhere in the same interview, Fischer claims he’s ‘heard’ that Sega is ‘remaking Sonic CD’, but doesn’t elaborate on exactly what that means. Sonic CD was released in 1993 for the Mega-CD, and has been ported via various Sonic collections over the years since.
Some kind of new version makes sense as the next Sonic movie, Sonic The Hedgehog 4, is partially inspired by Sonic CD but remaking a 2D game doesn’t really make any sense unless they’re going to turn it into a 3D title or completely change the graphics.
There are other interesting nuggets in the interview too, including a time when Fischer recalls meeting Michael Jackson, before 1988’s Moonwalker for the Mega Drive.
‘I worked a couple of days with him,’ Fischer said about Jackson. ‘I think the first day, we just hung out at an arcade, and I played video games with him for about four hours. They kicked everyone out of the arcade, and it’s just me and him playing every video game in the Roppongi Sega GiGO Game Center (I met him the first two or three times he came to Tokyo, so GIGO may not have been on the first trip).
‘Then, I think it was on a separate trip that he came, and I just translated for him with the head of the team that eventually made Moonwalker. We even went back to his hotel, and we hooked up a Genesis to his TV (the hotel TVs were harder to connect stuff to). He was asleep in his suite.’
Along with Moonwalker, Jackson is said to have written tracks for Sonic The Hedgehog 3, but his work went uncredited. There are conflicting accounts as to the reason why, with some claiming the singer was unhappy with the sound quality, but allegations of child sexual abuse against Jackson emerged during the game’s development and many suspect that was the reason his involvement was never made public.
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