Sonic X-Treme Demo Disc Sold!

OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG…

I’m close to wetting my pants for the second time in 24 hours. As a huge Sonic fan you have no idea how stunned I was when I saw this land in my feed reader:

A man pays $2500 for the only playable version of the Sonic X-treme known to exist. This is hard core.

The story is on the front page of Digg, so it seems that this could be the real deal…

The only demo disc of Sonic X-Treme in existence.

The sale was conducted on the highly respected ASSEMbler forums, with moderator TheRedEye acting as middle man between the anonymous seller (previously employed at Sega, and the member of staff charged with the task of destroying all copies of the Sonic X-Treme demo) and the lucky devil that eventually ponied up a four figure sum for the privilege of owning a piece of gaming history.

This is, he assured me, the only playable Saturn build ever seen outside of the development office itself, and I really have no reason to believe otherwise. Furthermore, with the possible exception of one disc under heavy lock and key in Sega’s library (according to another anonymous employee, who I spoke to about two years ago), this is very likely to be the only surviving disc PERIOD. Why does he know this? Because he destroyed the others himself, it was part of his job.

The auction itself seems to have generated a lot of excitement over there, with forum members desperately trying to get together enough cash to buy it after an anonymous buyer offered $2,600. Later, forum member “ratman221″ offered $3,000. It’s as yet unknown who won the auction, but if it’s “ratman221″ then we could be looking at being able to purchase a copy for around $40 in the future. Obviously this will greatly depreciate the value of the original, but he said that he wanted to buy it “to benefit the Sonic Community”. Generous if nothing else. I just hope he won and that he makes good on his word.

Money has changed hands, the disc has been shipped and subsequently received, so what’s next? Who knows… Maybe it will find it’s way onto the net in Torrent form, perhaps not. I’ll have to ask Racketboy what he makes of this, he’s far more knowledgable than me when it comes to the Saturn, so I’d be interested to hear what he has to say.

The only thing we do know we can expect from the disc is www.sonicxtreme.com (you could have gotten the hyphen in there) which will, according to ASSEMbler forum mod “ASSEMbler” will soon be populated with high definition footage of the demo in action.

I can’t wait, but we’ll have to wait and see.

• Digg it. Go on!
• Read the forum post
• Sonic X-Treme Revisited
• Via Opposable Thumbs“