Yuji Naka, former boss of Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog team, has expressed surprise at the $430k sale price for a copy of the original Sonic on Sega Genesis.
The auction is the latest in a string of eye-opening prices for vintage games rated by controversial quality-assessment service Wata.
Earlier this month, Wata co-founder Mark Haspel was accused of breaking his own company rules on selling graded stock for a profit, in a detailed report which alleged a “serious conflict of interest”.
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Has Yuji Naka been keeping up to date on all this? Last night, seeing word of the sale on Twitter, he replied: “[Hedgehog emoji] What’s this” and “Is it a scam?”
“That’s a scam, right?” he continued. “I wondered if it was time for Sonic to reach a high.”
🦔What’s this https://t.co/U6BkQaWgHz
— Yuji Naka / 中 裕司 (@nakayuji) September 21, 2021
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This particular copy of Sonic the Hedgehog had been rated with a quality of 9.4 by Wata. Anything above a 9.0 rating is suggested by Wata to be “investment grade”, and will likely only increase in value.
But while the vintage video game market has long been viewed as an investment, there have frequently been suggestions that prices are now being artificially driven up by collectors and other interested parties to in turn drive up the value of their own collections.