Retro

Ultra rare Swing arcade cabinet with exclusive English translated SegaSonic The Hedgehog arcade board up for auction

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Anybody got £40,000 pound sterling (Currently about $53,271.60 USD) to lend me? I’ll totally pay you back.

That’s how much it’s likely to cost you (Perhaps more) to get this Multi Cabinet Swing arcade cabinet that has, what is likely to be, the only officially translated arcade board of SegaSonic the Hedgehog housed in it. The game and cabinet are fully functional and properly maintained. They have been since this cabinet was first taken from Sega World London after its closure in 1999.

Since then, this cabinet fell into the hands of a few private collectors and, eventually, back into Sega Europe’s hands, where it was most recently up for display at a promotional event for Sonic Racing: Crossworlds, shown above. Now, this cabinet is up for auction at the Ewbank’s auction site with a starting bid of £10,000. Bidding begins on December 19th, 2025

If you’re a rich UK resident who’s feeling lucky, you can check in past the break to learn more about this golden opportunity.

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Gamescare’s new GF-1 Neptune FPGA console pushed back into 2026

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Looking forward to the new GF-1 Neptune? Well, I hope you don’t mind waiting a little longer, because Gamescare have announced in an email to newsletter subscribers like Yours Truly that the new FPGA-based Genesis/Mega-Drive and 32X console combo has been delayed.

Originally slated to have begun pre-orders in December 2025, which is now as this article is uploaded, the GF-1 Neptune has been pushed back in an effort to ensure that Gamescare’s quality standards are met. Pre-orders have still not yet begun and Gamescare also reiterates their commitment to avoiding crowdfunding or opening pre-orders before independent reviewers can demo the final hardware.

Below the break, we’ll have Gamescare’s statement on this matter.

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Lost Nintendo 64 game from Sammy, Viewpoint 2064, found and preserved online

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That’s right. Another article from me regarding a Nintendo 64 game that’s now retroactively related to Sega by way of corporate merging years later. Are you doing any barrel rolls over that yet?

Viewpoint 2064 was developed exclusively for the Nintendo 64 (Oooooooh, I see what they did with the name there) as a sequel to Viewpoint (1992), an isometric scrolling shooter developed by Aicom and published by Sammy originally for the Neo-Geo family of game hardware. The original Viewpoint was ported to a few other systems, including the Genesis/Mega-Drive. (You might recall that was part of the Sega Genesis Mini 2) Viewpoint 2064 was still being published by Sammy, but was being developed by Racdym. (The same Racdym that made Snowboard Kids) It was shown to the public at Nintendo Spaceworld 1999, and was likely meant to release in stores either that year or the next, but for whatever reason it simply wasn’t meant to be.

Fast forward to 2025 and a new development cartridge containing the full game has been found and its rom dumped online for all to see. This comes after a prototype version of the game was previously found and dumped online in 2020. Not only does this new version look and feel much more complete than that prototype, but the cartridge also has a sticker with the word “Master” printed on it, implying that this might’ve been the completed version meant to be mass produced onto cartridges and shipped to stores everywhere. This master version was found and preserved by game archival YouTuber Hard4Games onto Archive.org for all to try for themselves.

Hard4Games has also prepared a video showing the game in action, including some comparisons to the prototype he found five years ago. If you would like to View that, then I will Point you beyond the break here.

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Kickstarter launched for Bang² Busters 2, a Neo-Geo game sequel for Dreamcast and Neo-Geo

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🐇🐇 Space Bunnies are back on NEO GEO and more!

Bang² Busters 2 expands upon the eccentric, vibrant universe of the original game, while significantly enhancing its core mechanics and scenario

Support the project here 👉 bit.ly/4qp83H0
💚 Free demo available

[image or embed]

— PixelHeart (@pixelheart-eu.bsky.social) October 31, 2025 at 1:02 PM

Just what the Dreamcast needed: Space Bunnies!

The niche Neo-Geo classic from Visco, Bang² Busters (That’s Bang-squared, so “Bang Bang Busters”), is finally receiving an official sequel courtesy of Pixelheart games, a longtime publisher of indie games on Dreamcast. Bang² Busters 2 is being developed for Neo-Geo AES/MVS as well as Sega Dreamcast, but first, the team has turned to Kickstarter to fund the project.

As of this writing, they have 22 days left to raise $40,378 USD and are a little over halfway there. If you’re interested in helping them reach that goal and securing your own copy of the game, check below the break for more info.

UPDATE: Rejoice! The game was successfully funded on November 30th, 2025. They managed to raise $47,527.

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Lost Genesis/Mega-Drive RTS from Sega Technical Institute, Dark Empires, recovered and preserved

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Another unreleased Genesis game long thought lost has now been found and preserved thanks to The Hidden Palace.

Dark Empires, which was being worked on alongside Kid Chameleon at Sega Technical Institute in 1990, got cancelled in order to get the studio to work on Sonic the Hedgehog 2 instead, as we had learned thanks to The Video Game History Foundation back in 2023. While Kid Chameleon made it to store shelves, Dark Empires wasn’t far enough along to get in the hands of Genesis/Mega-Drive owners everywhere. Thankfully, former STI artist Craig Stitt had found a pre-release copy of Dark Empires among his personal archives and shared it with Hidden Palace.

Interested in learning more? You can see more after the break, including the link to download the prototype.

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New visual coding program for Genesis/Mega-Drive, MD Engine, coming soon

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Look. I get you, Sega fans. You saw all these cool new homebrew games for Genesis/Mega-Drive coming out and you wanna make a game just like those, but you don’t know how to write code for Genesis. Thankfully, Two Black Cats have got you covered.

MD Engine is a new visual coding program made for easy development of games for Sega Genesis. A visual coding program, much like Game Maker or Clickteam Fusion, allows for the development of video games with an interface that allows for you to build a game with visual assets and menus without having to rely so much on writing code. With this, and a bit of patience and inspiration, you should be able to make your very own new Genesis games without having to write one line of code.

MD Engine was made as a fork of GB Studio, an open source visual coding program for making games for Nintendo’s Game Boy (Color) handheld. It uses much of the same interface and menus, so MD Engine should look familiar to anyone who has worked in GB Studio. However, MD Engine touts some extra special features that are not available even with GB Studio, such as exporting your game as a special PC or HTML5 game with extra features not possible on Genesis, such as a widescreen visual mode and CRT visual filters. Of course, if you just want to make a game ROM that can play on Genesis consoles or in Genesis emulators, you can do that as well.

Be sure to take a dive past the break to find out more about how MD Engine could help you make the Genesis game of your dreams.

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Earthion Review – Ancient Returns to the SEGA Genesis

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Where does the time go? It only feels like yesterday that I reported on the one and only Yuzo Koshiro being hard at work on his first new Genesis/Mega-Drive game since 1995’s Beyond Oasis, which we later heard would be named Earthion. Now, before I even knew it, Earthion had released on Steam and just came out for modern consoles earlier this month. Limited Run Games also started pre-orders for physical copies of the game on those modern platforms until September 28th, as well, but have yet to open pre-orders on cartridges for your old Genesis consoles. (Sorry for not letting you know sooner.)

Yuzo Koshiro’s studio Ancient has been kind enough to offer us a review code for Earthion on Steam, and I have run the game through its paces many a times. Now that the wait to experience this modern Genesis classic is finally over, it’s time for me to report on how this shooter turned out. Suffice it to say, the game pushes the Genesis to limits never thought possible, but is the game fun to play? Find out now after the break.

(Neither Ancient nor Limited Run Games have influenced this review or seen it before it has gone live.)

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Unseen photos of Micheal Jackson, made for an unreleased Sega game, surfaced from a developer interview

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Sega fans will know that the infamous King of Pop Micheal Jackson had quite the interesting history with Sega during the 90’s, but this may be something many of you weren’t privy to.

In a recent interview with designer Kazunori Sasaki with News Post-Seven, as reported on by MJ Vibe, Sasaki-san spoke about how he met with Jackson during his HIStory World Tour stop in Japan in December 1996 to do some photography and motion capture work for an unreleased game, presumably a new entry in Sega’s Digital Dance Mix game series for Saturn. The above photos of Jackson were taken during that shoot and were never publicly shown before. (The Ghost album cover has been available to the public for many years, but News Post-Seven just attached it to the pictures, for some reason.)

For those unaware, Digital Dance Mix was a planned series of rhythm games with each entry themed after a single popular singer. However, only one game in that planned series ended up releasing exclusively in Japan, based around the Japanese pop singer Namie Amuro. Apparently, she was popular enough to be known as the “Queen of J-Pop“, so she and Jackson may have been equals, depending on who you ask.

For more info from the interview, be sure to moonwalk right past the break.

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Atari CEO Wade Rosen expresses desire to remaster Panzer Dragoon Saga and Snatcher

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Have you played your Atari today? A better question would be “Have you played Panzer Dragoon Saga or Snatcher today?”

Under the leadership of Wade Rosen, Atari SA has been busy reviving tons of retro game franchises. From famous Atari classics like Yars Revenge, Centipede, and Missile Command, to obscure Atari classics like Caverns of Mars and Fatal Run, to even Bubsy, which Atari SA acquired only two years ago, Atari’s making one impressive comeback. Atari SA owned developers Digital Eclipse and Nightdive Studios are even bringing back classic games not owned by Atari, such as Mortal Kombat and Outlaws, which makes Mr. Rosen’s wishlist of classic games to remaster a bit more plausible than you’d expect.

In a recent interview with VGC, Wade Rosen expressed his personal desire to arrange remasters of Panzer Dragoon Saga, Snatcher, and Ogre Battle. Of course, this is not to be taken as confirmation that Atari SA or any companies under its ownership are currently working on such remasters.

You can see his exact quote right below the break.

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Irena Genesis Metal Fury is 90% finished; new Summer demo released just for Kickstarter backers

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*Ahem* Now that we got your attention, it’s time for an update on a promising indie Genesis/Mega-Drive shooter that was kickstarted all the way back in 2021. Perhaps at least a few of you remember this one?

Irena Genesis Metal Fury, henceforth Irena for short, is an all new indie scrolling shooter that’s been in active development for Genesis from White Ninja Studio since before launching their Kickstarter, which succeeded in reaching its goal. They ended up raising €62,240, almost double its goal of €35,000. (About $40,708.96 USD, adjusted for inflation) This was thanks, in part, to an impressive demo they worked on and launched simultaneously with the Kickstarter. Thousands of Genesis shooter fans downloaded and played that demo and were so impressed they couldn’t wait to fund its completion.

Four years later and White Ninja Studio’s fortunes took a drastic turn. They had gained new publishers, Mega Cat Studios for North America and Broke Studio for Europe, only for those publishers to drop the game this year. Last year, they also suffered the passing of the game’s lead artist OHKO. The project lead also took an extended break to preserve their own mental health amidst all these challenges, something we could all use now and then. Even so, the team soldiered on, including OHKO in his last remaining days, and even as the team missed several projected release dates, they’ve announced now that the game is 9/10 of the way to completion and a new, updated demo just for Kickstarter backers is now available. This comes in a recent update to Kickstarter backers on August 23rd, 2025, where news of the loss of their publishers was also shared.

You can check your Kickstarter account or your email if you were a Kickstarter backer, where you’ll hear the news directly from White Ninja Studio. For everyone else, go right past the break to hear more.

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Indie Genesis/Mega-Drive developer Kai Magazine Software caught tracing artwork in their games

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When someone who loves developers making new games for old consoles as much as I do has something negative to say about one of them, you know it’s bad news.

Some of you may not know about developer Kai Magazine Software. I have only written one article about them, that being about their then upcoming Genesis/Mega-Drive action RPG The Secret of Four Winds. Now it turns out they were exposed for stealing art from several artists online and some retro games and tracing it to use in their own games, including The Secret of Four Winds. They’ve also allegedly been stealing art in a less direct way by using AI-generated art in their games too.

SNES fan translator Krokodyl noticed this and showed his findings on Bluesky Social. He had managed to find several examples of traced over art in Kai Magazine Software’s games Life On Mars, Metal Dragon, The Secret of Four Winds, and their newest game currently up for pre-order: Death & Lead, shown above. Sorry if this is how you first learned about Death & Lead. (It’s how I first heard of it.)

So, if you’d like to see all the art these varmints pilfered from innocent artists and some of the best games in video game history, mosey on down to the link below at sundown.

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Special interview with Retro Sumus, creators of Sovietborgs and Xenocider

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Some of you may remember Sovietborgs, the hot new Genesis/Mega-Drive top-down shooter being developed by Retro Sumus, previously known for their work on modern Dreamcast classic Xenocider. As of this writing, Sovietborgs’s Indiegogo campaign is still live and they are halfway toward their monetary goal to finish the game.

As their crowdfunding campaign soldiers on, we’ve had the lucky opportunity to speak to the people hard at work on Sovietborgs. This way, all of you, whether you’re excited for the game or still on the fence about supporting it, can get a look within the minds of this USSR themed 3D shooter and see what inspired them in their work.

Join us after the break as we learn about this history of Retro Sumus’s developers and what inspired them both technologically and creatively. As a special bonus, you can also see some photos of the game at this year’s Retrocon, which took place in São Paulo, Brazil from July 25-27th, 2025.

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Retro-Bit announces new Undeadline Collector’s Cartridge for Genesis/Mega-Drive; pre-orders open until August 10th, 2025

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When there’s an ultra-rare, ultra-expensive, and especially Japan exclusive shooter for Genesis/Mega-Drive, you can bet your bottom dollar that Retro-Bit will try to bring it to the western world as one of their Collector’s Cartridges, as they have done a few times before. This time, they’ve set their sights on the monster filled shmup known as Undeadline (1991).

Pre-orders have already begun in North America and Europe for this ghoulish shooter, which is at a big time bargain compared to trying to track down even a loose cartridge of the original Japanese copy of this cult Mega-Drive classic. This comes licensed from the current rights holder D4 Enterprise and with a brand new English translation made in cooperation with D4.

Come on down past the break for a closer look at this game and for pre-order links.

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Fundraiser started to rescue and preserve hundreds of Sega 3DS and DS game prototypes before August 2025

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Video game preservation organizations Obscure Gamers and Video Game Preservation Museum are in the midst of a public fundraiser to help them bring in £61K to rescue some 300 prototypes and showroom demos of classic Sega games on Nintendo DS and 3DS from becoming e-waste. This includes never-before-seen early builds of memorable DS/3DS Sega classics such as Sonic Colors DS, Sonic Generations 3DS, some Mario & Sonic Olympics games, and even a DS build of Project R, better known as Rhythm Thief & The Emperor’s Treasure, which would release on Nintendo 3DS instead of DS in 2012.

Sadly, even with multiple fundraisers set up to pool money, they have not made it far reaching their goal by now, and they must raise the necessary funds before the start of August 2025. Otherwise, they may not have another chance to rescue all this precious Sega history before it returns to the e-waste bins they were pulled from. There’s still plenty of time as of this writing, so it’s too soon to give up now. We encourage you to give whatever money you can spare to help with this noble preservation effort. Obscure Gamers have promised that your money can be refunded in August at your request if the fundraiser fails, so you at least have nothing to lose if they lose, other than tons of important information on the development of these games that could be documented online for all to see, as well as the digital rom files themselves for you to try out.

Links to the various fundraisers, as well as a list of every game prototype hanging in the balance, will be below the break here.

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Gamescare announces a December 2025 release date for their new FPGA Genesis/32X console: the GF-1 Neptune

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The Brazillian company GamesCare have announced a December 2025 release window for their hotly anticipated Genesis/32X hybrid FPGA console: the GF-1 Neptune. At the moment, pre-orders are not yet available and no price has been announced, though they have stated it will be average for consoles of this nature. Given the usual cost of most FPGA consoles, I would estimate somewhere in the ballpark of $200-300 USD, but we’ll see soon. (Expect tariffs to be an issue as well) They have also promised that crowdfunding will not be part of their plans.

This announcement was made public through GamesCare’s Twitter, along with a link to a signup page for their new email newsletter. You can sign up there to hear when more info comes out. The link will be right below the break.

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