Sega Game Gear’s Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was released on November 17th, 1992. At this point in gaming history, Nintendo’s Game Boy was dominating the handheld market, but Sega’s fast, blue mascot was carving out a niche of his own in the platform-heavy days of the early ’90s. And while no one has truly marked the Sonic Game Gear games as classics (Sonic CD is still great), someone out there was willing to track down a brand-new copy to buy at a retail establishment decades after it was probably supposed to get moved to the used section.
This comes from Polygon, who also had their minds blown at the fact that someone still had the game in-stock and brand-new, let alone someone finding it and buying it. The data came from NPD Group’s Mat Piscatella, an industry analyst who has his eye on the strange minutia of video game sales.
https://twitter.com/MatPiscatella/status/990278962147246081
Like, was it just buried in some back room the last twenty years? Did it get lost underneath some retail fixture? Was it a twenty something year old pre-order? What was the reaction when that person who bought it saw it? So many questions I have.
— Mat Piscatella (@MatPiscatella) April 28, 2018
This is the game in question. pic.twitter.com/Q6bss1WBPc
— Mat Piscatella (@MatPiscatella) April 28, 2018
https://twitter.com/MatPiscatella/status/990280976554061824
Breaking: In the middle of writing this article, someone claiming to know the person who purchased the brand-new copy of Sonic 2 for the Game Gear tweeted Piscatella:
https://twitter.com/MihaelMELLO_K/status/990405267190886406
Would this sale register for March when it’s clear the analyst said his data was from March? Also, why did Half-Price books hold onto this lost treasure for over 20 years? Piscatella is asking the right questions. Was it lost in the back room? At some point during an inventory, you’d think they’d eat the loss and just dump the copy. Or was it out in the open all along, possibly considered by many, with the back of its box looked over by nostalgic gamers, only to be put back in the discount bin?
Is this mystery solved?
(Via Polygon)