Takashi Iizuka gets a little piece of Nidcom’s history.
Those of you who remember the humble beginnings of this website might remember an old piece of artwork I done called 'Paradox' featuring Claris, Elliot, NiGHTS and a whole lot of little details from the game. The image featured on our splash page for many years long before we were a wordpress site. Back then we didn't have much in the way of direct contact with SEGA themselves, we made our own fun and our community was small but very hardcore and closeknit.
Fast forward to November 2007. Journey of Dreams was about to make the rounds and a Mr Kevin Eva (AAUK) popped into our lives to unleash the frankly-awesome-power of SEGA's community team. And what a top job he did too, even securing us an interview with Iizuka and coming all the way up to our house in Scotland at the time to promote the new game. Back then he took some prints of my artwork to show Iizuka san in London and talk about the NiGHTS fanbase. As a gift Kev brought back some signed things, one of which being my print of Paradox signed by Takashi Iizuka:
Well then fast foward some 3 years to 2010 where I now work for SEGA Europe myself and AAUK is currently visiting SEGA Japan on work related business. Kevin asked if I wanted to pass anything to SonicTeam, soooo….
I gave Iizuka san the original framed painting to keep! And he remembered it! He liked the print the first time he seen it in 2007 so i figured it'd be fun to suprise him with the actual real one instead. Just to keep him on his toes. Just incase he ever y'know… forgets NiGHTS or something ;D I wrote him a letter in Japanese on the back telling him us NiGHTS fans are still going strong and care about the character AND that we really want to see this port happen. After the comment he made about NiGHTS 3 a while ago I wanted to give him an extra 'across the ocean' nudge. So it's safe to say he's up to date on our situation and even congratulated me for getting into the company *lol* Yeah I've been grinning all day
Thanks AAUK, as always you're the man … Also, I've heard that Kev is bringing back some mad flavoured Japanese KitKats to give away in Freestuff Friday, so look out for that.
Win!
This is the height of awesome. Congrats on all your amazing successes =] Is there anywhere that a higher-res version of that image is kept on the site? I'd like to take a better look, I can barely make out a lot of the details…
Here you go
This painting is beautiful. Congratulations and let's hope Sega look for us and for NiGHTS!
Congrats! You really deserve what you got! This site is a huge reference for anyone who calls himself fan of something. Keep it up!
Wow that's great! Your drawings are trully amazing Picasso would be proud, I'm not surprised this happened.
You work at Sega now Trippy?
I didn't know this! What position?
-Ryan
http://www.segabits.com