A UK-based video game reseller claims Sega was behind a police raid that seized a trove of Nintendo development kits from his home, according to a report from Time Extension. The seller, who reportedly purchased the collection from a scrapyard, accuses Sega of getting the police involved to recover the dev kits after mistakenly throwing them out.
The seller tells the outlet that he purchased the rare finds for around £10,000 (~$13,526) from a worker who showed up at the scrapyard with “a van-load of items that had reportedly come from Sega’s office clearance.” Sega moved its Europe office from Brentford, West London, to the city’s Chiswick Business Park earlier this year.
On July 14th — around three months after the purchase — police arrested the seller and raided his home, according to Time Extension. “I was woken at around 7:30 am by a loud knock at my door,” the seller tells Time Extension. “When I opened it, I was met by approximately ten officers from the City of London Police. They informed me that I was under arrest for money laundering and that they were there to seize development kits and game cartridges.”
In addition to Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DSi, 2DS, 3DS, Wii, and Wii U dev kits, the collection also included a bunch of prototype games, including Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, Sonic Generations, Mario & Sonic at the Winter Olympic Games, Phantasy Star 0, and many others. It’s unclear whether the games were seized by police.
Just days after releasing the seller, police reportedly asked him to sign a “formal disclaimer request” that asks him to relinquish ownership of the dev kits, indicating that he fairly obtained the consoles. The seller hasn’t heard back from the police after refusing to sign the disclaimer, nor has Sega reached out to him despite being “named in six separate pre-action protocol claims,” he tells Time Extension.
The rare consoles are still in the hands of the police, and it’s unclear whether they’ll ever see the light of day, sparking frustration from the video game preservation community. The Verge reached out to Sega with a request for comment but didn’t immediately hear back.
