In 2025, London Police raided the home of Darius Khan. The junk dealer claims he was about to sell a set of SEGA dev kits, cartridges and prototypes to the Video Game Preservation Museum. After the items were confiscated and an eight hour interrogation, Khan says he was not formally charged but threatened with everything from theft to money laundering. When Gamers Nexus’ Steve Burke began to pick at the matter, a contractor hired to dispose of SEGA’s hardware mistakenly sent the wrong email, suggesting that it was corporate negligence, not criminal intent, that led to the misplaced bounty.
Burke and his investigative team visited Khan in London to get a clearer sequence of events. Khan flips trash for cash, visiting scrap yards in search of material he can sell elsewhere. The waste is there to be processed before being hauled off to Africa. Most of Khan’s finds net modest sums, but one day he seemed to hit the jackpot with a cache of hardware seemingly pulled from a SEGA office. He made a deal with an on-site manager and put the e-waste up for auction. To his surprise, it was a hot ticket item. The London-based non-profit Video Game Preservation Museum raised over £60,000 to secure the winning bid when Khan put the lot on eBay.
This is where things get a little cloak and dagger. According to the Daily Mail, Khan was soon reached out to by ‘Paul’ over Facebook Marketplace. Posing as the father to an autistic video game enthusiast, the man was in reality a private investigator, working for the firm FUSION 85, Nintendo’s go-to on matters of IP infringement and ROM sites. Not long after, at least ten police raided Khan’s home at 7AM, arresting him and two associates involved with the deal.
“They were like worker bees,” Khan tells Burke, “taking this, this and they start putting it into evidence bags.”
The Video Game Preservation Museum, having already put in a down-payment, were concerned by the radio silence before Khan had to break the weird, bad news. Dramatic enough as it was, things took another strange turn after Gamers Nexus reached out to Waste to Wonder.
Waste to Wonder is an office-clearing contractor hired by SEGA to dispose of sensitive hardware during an office relocation. When reached for comment, the company accidentally sent Gamers Nexus private correspondence between themselves and SEGA, implicating a sub-contractor, despite Khan taking all the heat.
From corporate gaming e-waste to private preservation auctions
When businesses, tech or otherwise, are cleared, it is common to hire contractors to dispose of all the junk that could prove compromising in the wrong hands. Papers shredded or incinerated. Hard drives are properly destroyed. With dev kits and prototypes, this could mean something as crude as having holes drilled into them or bashed with a hammer before being taken to another facility. Effective, but sloppy work could mean holes or hammer strikes to the wrong part of the hardware, leaving enough of the internal memory in-tact for a collector or trader to restore. Prototypes and dev kits can be holy grails to collectors and preservationists, with auction pages getting a lot of intrigue. Perhaps the most infamous remains the ‘Nintendo Play Station,’ which sold to an anonymous buyer for $369,000.
According to the emails accidentally sent to Gamers Nexus, SEGA instructed Waste to Wonder to clear mountains of e-waste left in their office (and from the looks of photos secured by Gamers Nexus, Sonic the Hedgehog’s head and shoes). Waste to Wonder then passed along the job to a subcontractor, who were instructed to take everything to a disposal site. In reality SEGA had assigned another firm, ITR Secure, to handle the more sensitive items, which never came to be.
The items in question largely date from the mid-to-late 2000s, including dev kits and prototypes for the Nintendo Wii and DS. In Gamers Nexus’ video, a prototype of BioWare’s Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood, can be seen. Khan is under investigation, but if the email sent to Gamers Nexus is accurate he’s not guilty of any crime. He purchased the hardware in good faith and did not breach any IP by reproducing them. The Video Game Preservation Museum sought the hardware for private copies, which is also legal. What occurred is a clear case of corporate negligence, but the deployment of a private investigator, coordinating with police officials, suggests an attempt to obfuscate these mistakes.
“If that is not an example of state power of intrusion being delegated to two private companies I don’t know what is,” Khan tells Burke.
