Sega’s UK dev kit drama isn’t going away, it’s getting messier, louder, and a lot more public.
Quick refresher: last year, a UK reseller who legally bought a haul of Sega hardware and Nintendo handheld dev kits from a clearance job had his home raided at dawn by City of London Police.
Officers seized consoles and development systems tied to a stash of undumped GBA, DS, DSi, and 3DS prototypes, including curiosity fuel like a DS port of Rhythm Thief &The Emperor’s Treasure. The Video Game Preservation Museum had been trying to acquire and dump the lot before it disappeared into private collections, calling the situation a “preservation disaster” and a dangerous precedent.
Now the fallout is escalating. The seller is pushing back hard, accusing Sega and its investigators of effectively using the police as a retrieval service for hardware the company “negligently disposed of,” then regretted. Correspondence shows the City of London Police admitting Sega and private contractor Fusion 85 were explicitly written into the search warrant, raising ugly questions about privatized policing and whether the raid even met basic legal standards. There are also claims that the court itself can’t clearly account for which version of the warrant was issued, which is not the detail you want fuzzy when you’re busting down doors at 7:30 a.m.
Judicial review proceedings are underway, multiple pre-action claims reportedly name Sega, and the seller is openly talking about a “Tier‑1 governance scandal.” Sega, meanwhile, is allegedly ignoring legal letters and direct appeals to executives. For people who actually care about preservation, the worry isn’t just whether those dev kits still exist, but whether this becomes the blueprint for how corporations claw back “mistakes” from collectors in the future.
Source: X via Time Extension
