Abstract

This chapter looks at how the imaginaries surrounding a commercially obsolesced ‘cult’ platform—the Sega Saturn—are reactivated and imbued with ‘residual’ value in the present. It takes as its starting point the media archaeological idea that obsolesced technologies, once liberated from their commercial contexts, are freed up for aesthetic experimentation. I argue that this media archaeological ‘impulse’ is often shot through with a ‘dialectic of obsolescence’ that hesitates between wanting to fetishize and salvage media history. In order to unpick this dialectic, I analyse the residual afterlife of the Sega Saturn's cancelled ‘flagship’ title, Sonic X-treme, by looking at fan attempts to revive the videogame in the present.

Keywords: archives, obsolescence, vapourware, fan revival, Sega, nostalgia

media archaeology, despite the brave calls for going against the grain, for making a last stand against the tyranny of the new, for digging into the past in order to discover there an as yet unrealized future, nonetheless does not escape our culture's most prominent pathology: the need to preserve the past, to fetishize ‘memory’ and ‘materiality’ in the form of trauma and loss, even as we lose faith in history and make our lives every [sic] more dependent on the ‘virtual’.