Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (Mega Drive)/Production credits

Why are a couple people not credited with their real names?

Occasionally I've wondered, why are most of the people credited by their real name, but Rieko Kodama, Akinori Nishiyama and the sound team aren't? They don't take the approach as Naka, Yasuhara or Yamaguchi and include both real names and aliases. Particularly weird as this was treated like a breakthrough for Sonic the Hedgehog CD (forgot the source, it might have been a developer talking about Naoto Ohshima on Twitter) (although Panic! did it earlier anyway.

Now that I've looking more into Sega Technical Institute, I may figured out a reason: The STI people, stationed in America, where credited by their real name, but the people still working in Japan were credited with aliases. There's a fair bit of documentation for Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (mainly from Jun Senoue) about that game's sound team still being stationed in Japan, so that's likely the case here too. I could see that being the case for Kodama and Nishiyama as well, since they were probably in Japan doing some sort of pre-production on Phantasy Star IV.

Tatsuo Yamada was also in Japan, but he's an executive, so is likely in the same boat as Hayao Nakayama or the executive suppoerters and they don't bother with fake names. Shuichi Katagi is the one that makes me unsure, though, since in Harmony, it says he moved from AM1 to CS3 in October 1992, both in Japan. --Nicolaas Hamman (talk) 20:13, 21 October 2023 (GMT+2)

I wonder if this is a way for the Japanese team to further distance/distinguish themselves from their American counterparts, due to the whole dislike of SoA thing? Like, "look, real developers use aliases, this is how its really done." CartridgeCulture (talk) 22:03, 21 October 2023 (EDT)