His obsession swelled through to 1990 with the release of the Mega Drive (known as the Genesis in North America), and like many small town kids without access to sources of information, he began his own magazine called The SEGA Times. He squeezed that console “for all it was worth”, mainly through mail-order games which he would wait for at his mailbox, pacing like a junkie. He figured that it had the SEGA logo on it, and a couple of cool games, and that was enough for now. “You know when you go online and you see photos of people unwrapping their consoles on Christmas day, I never got to experience that.” Instead, he saved up his pocket money and bought an SC-3000 at a clearance sale. With the brand wrapped around his heart, 12-year-old Brian longed for the Master System when it was released in Australia in 1987, though he couldn’t afford it.
His love of video games was only sated at the arcade, where he poured over SEGA’s machines: Zaxxon, Turbo, Flicky, and Space Harrier. He grew up as a self-proclaimed poor kid in The Shire, a Southern-Sydney region so long satisfied with its laid back suburban surfer vibe that it’s felt frozen in time for 50 years. Though conventional wisdom balks at fanboyism, it rarely accounts for upbringings like Brian’s. “I just didn’t think the NES was worth the hype.” Throughout our journey to the junkyard Brian makes numerous cracks at the expense of Nintendo, and while he cackles and riffs, it’s clear the 44-year-old still feels the sting from the fights between the once-great blood rivals.
His YouTube channel, SinceSpacies, is filmed in a shrine to the publisher that he’s constructed in his home, and every video features an old Sonic game playing on his TV as he talks. “I think we could restore them.”īrian is a big SEGA fan. Behind a Heras fence, partially obscured by a tall, rusted railway signal, and bracketed by two train carriages, their position is far from ‘pride of place.’ Nor do they seem to hold much of a place in their owner’s heart: Sonic is missing an arm, Sally is missing all her limbs, and their remaining paint is at the mercy of the weather.īrian gazes longingly at the sideshow freaks, his fingers entwining in the fence wire.
You can’t blame me for not immediately spotting the statues of Sonic the Hedgehog and his erstwhile girlfriend Sally Acorn, the only documented fixtures that remain of Sydney’s SEGA World theme park. Sonic is missing an arm, Sally is missing all her limbs, and their remaining paint is at the mercy of the weather. The vague threat of menace, of guard dogs and shotguns, permeates. It appears to go on for miles, piles of golf clubs and bicycles and detritus from fairgrounds, shadowed by twisting train carriages decorated with petrol and Coke signs. As we move further into the junkyard, I can’t grasp at any discernible theme among the treasure.