Sonic creators worked on Wii Play sequel

Sonic The Hedgehog creators Yuji Naka and Naoto Ohshima were among the developers who made mini-games for the recent Wii Play: Motion collection, Nintendo has revealed.

According to the latest Iwata Asks roundtable, published on Nintendo's official site, Yuji Naka's Prope studio designed the Twigger Twist game, whereas Naoto Ohshima's new start-up Arzest created Jump Park, Cone Zone and Spooky Search.

Naka programmed the original Sonic The Hedgehog for Sega back in 1991, whereas Ohshima designed the characters. Naka went on to head up Sonic Team when Sega's rivalry with Nintendo was at its peak, before leaving to set up Prope in 2006.

As detailed in the interview, rather than use a single studio for Wii Play: Motion, Nintendo instead decided to ask a number of external partners to contribute a few mini-games each.

Other developers included Kirby's Epic Yarn developer Good Feel; Pokémon Mystery Dungeon developer Chunsoft; Skip, who were responsible for GameCube favourite Chibi-Robo and the Art Style series on Wii and DSiWare; and Vanpool, who made Zelda spin-off Freshly-Picked Tingle's Rosy Rupeeland for the DS.

Nintendo asked the studios to compete against each other, with only the best games included in the final product.

"We actually had proposed something different, but we lost in competition only to crawl our way back up in the consolation round and make this minigame, so I couldn't be happier," explained Naka.

"This was our first time to work with Nintendo, so I'm glad to have formed this relationship."

The end result arrived in stores last month, winning a middling 6/10 from Eurogamer's Christian Donlan.

"There are some decent games here," he wrote in his Wii Play: Motion review, "but not enough to make this something you simply have to try."