When Sega of America’s fiscal year 1997 brand review documents hit the Internet on Monday morning, the secrets they revealed sent shockwaves throughout the retro gaming community. But after eluding public release for nearly 30 years, how did they get out in the first place?
The person who uploaded them to the Internet Archive, GoldenDreamcast, joined the Shiro Discord server this week and told us the story.
It all started when GoldenDreamcast was doing some “late night scrolling” on eBay in late 2021 looking for old Sega development hardware. That’s when a listing titled “Vintage Sega Game Development Brand Review binder From Former Employee” caught his eye.
“Had to snatch them up before someone else did and have it disappear into the ether,” GoldenDreamcast said.
Rather than an auction, the documents were listed at a single “buy it now” price. GoldenDreamcast described that price as “more than Saturn, but less then what they projected Pluto to be” — so somewhere between US$400 and $550.
To spend that much money then turn around and release the documents to the world for free is certainly a generous contribution to video game history. “Just had to make sure it didn’t escape,” he said.
“Just had to make sure it didn’t escape.”
The documents were shipped from San Francisco, but GoldenDreamcast could only speculate as to the rest of their origin story.
“I imagine it might have been someone who made a copy, left and then did some spring cleaning some 25 years later (since these are black and white copies, hence the poor quality),” he said.
Upon receiving the documents, GoldenDreamcast wasted no time looking through them, even if some of the inventory numbers within were a bit over his head:
“A lot of the numbers in the first section didn’t make too much sense since I’m not an accountant. They posted a few pictures of the pages in the listing, so I had an idea of what it was going to contain. It is fun to just keep going back and looking through it all.
My favorites were them naively thinking they were going to get out Sonic Xtreme, mentions of the Pluto (too bad nothing about its fate), and the sketch of their E3 floorplan and it showing the Pluto was there.
And now that more people have gone through it, talking about unreleased games with their projected launches and how development was going (and prices).”
— GoldenDreamcast
He held onto the documents for a year and a half before releasing them this week, although not for lack of trying.
“Took a while to find a decent scanner, and then I gave it to Forest of Illusion to release, but that never happened and then they eventually dissolved,” he said.
Forest of Illusion was a website that worked for six years to digitally preserve previously unseen video game history until it shuttered in April this year after its owners decided they no longer had the time and energy to devote to it. Their releases are still available on the Internet Archive.
After Forest of Illusion stopped its work, GoldenDreamcast took matters into his own hands to release the documents.
“So I just said ‘screw it’ and threw it onto the Internet Archive, where it was then picked up by Sega Retro and eventually spread from there,” he said. “Hope Christmas in July isn’t too cliche lol”
The Sega brand review documents aren’t GoldenDreamcast’s only contributions to video game history and preservation.
In December 2022, he also released two prototypes of Sonic Heroes for the GameCube that came on NPDP development cartridges as well as an unreleased Japanese demo of Shadow the Hedgehog for GameCube and a prototype of the unreleased HD remake of GoldenEye 007 for the Xbox 360. All of them can be found on the Internet Archive.
Stay tuned to Shiro for more analysis and coverage of Sega of America’s fiscal year 1997 brand review documents later this week. And be sure to check out the stories Shiro published on them earlier this week:
Sega of America’s fiscal year 1997 brand review documents
Leaked Fiscal Year ’97 Documents Reveal Saturn Sales Numbers
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