SegaLeaks

Well folks, this is the final word. I'll no longer be updating after this because there's really no reason to. The site has basically been disproven completely by that Sonic trailer that's for PS3 and Xbox 360. Wasn't Sega supposed to stop publishing for other consoles to gear up for the launch of "Neptune?" Hrm. I'm calling this SegaLeaks in the hopes that this will pop up right under the actual site/before the actual site for anyone who should type SegaLeaks into their Google search.

What do I think SegaLeaks is?

Trolling, plain and simple.

Not by the comments, but by the "writers," of which it's pretty easy to discern there's only one. My final coup-de-grace was to really get into SegaLeaks with some false info. Here's what happened when I emailed "Mr. Morris:"

I don't know about you guys but, I don't let anyone else access my email under any circumstances. Even if it's an account that would be made separately for something like SegaLeaks. I shot myself in the foot by not using a proxy to hide my location, and they used the board's IP function to find my location at a university. I backtracked and told Brian he was right about comradesnarky being a Sega employee (because I had also posted on the forums as comradesnarky without a proxy), and that I was currently doing a guest lecture series at said university. This was seemingly believed. How's that for gullible?

Anyhow, I went on and faked a video of an emulation section of the alleged Sega Neptune. It was somehow passed on for "Mr. Morris'" viewing, even though he couldn't access his email. I was told it would be posted by the FGN admins, who share the same email as "Zach Morris" (I'm not going to screenshot to prove that; go on and register, the administrative emails come from the same email account I was told to contact "Mr. Morris" at) and use the same vocabulary. It was posted here and surprisingly not believed by ringtard. Since they'll probably edit that thread as soon as they see this, you can see it on YouTube here. It was fun putting it together. It took about 10 minutes, and it was fun to imagine what a new Sega console would be like... which is what thinking about Sega consoles should be, since it's not going to happen any time soon. If you're curious about how I did it, I reskinned the program EmuLaunch, which is a great program if you're a Mac user. I got lazy on the Master System section because I felt 10 minutes was already too great of a time commitment. So that was supposed to be "no data" in the Master System section.

If you're somehow still doubting that all of these users are the same person, just take a look at almost every registered user on the FGN forums. Their ages are all in the 60s and up. If those aren't accounts made by someone in a hurry to put in an age and just make an account, I don't know what is. Same goes for the profile that commented on the YouTube video, and same goes for Haneda's profile over at the official Sega forums. Besides that, if Haneda was really a member of any Sega skunkworks team, they'd easily be able to determine who it was and how they were leaking the information. Businesses sort of keep employment records. Besides that, what good are sources in Sega Europe? When was the last time Sega Europe did anything?

What is our conclusion?

Zach Morris doesn't exist except in Saved by the Bell. If someone was really a 46-year veteran of the industry or whatever, they'd be well known. That would be from when console development teams were microscopic, and making games was a one or two man affair. There's no way his name slipped through the cracks for 46-years and he's only now surfacing in high profile on a WordPress site. Besides that, Haneda has claimed SegaLeaks gets over 10,000 hits a day. While that's clearly bullshit, if it were true, the site would've spread like wildfire by now. It would've been reported to Kotaku or Destructoid, and they would've been able to confirm or deny the rumors using genuine sources. Then if those rumors were confirmed to be true...here's "Mr. Morris," using his real name to pass this information off.

Haneda is as real as the Flying Spaghetti Monster. If he is an engineer, he's a shitty one. As nice as ray tracing is, as I posted in that FGN thread that will probably deleted, the Quake Wars ray traced demo ran on a 16-core machine and it barely attained 30 FPS. If Sega's next console has a 16-core processor, it'll be thousands of dollars. Priced out of the market is an understatement. As mentioned earlier, he'd be incredibly easy for Sega to identify if he were leaking crucial information. That could easily be called industrial espionage, and with how Sega takes legal action pretty easily, he'd be shut up by now.

Who is Brian Holzhauer though? Well, no one as far as I can tell. It could be his real name, it could be an alias. Googling Brian Holzhauer turns up a thousand and one people, and since he doesn't have any known internet aliases except for such classy names as "PUSSY EATER" and "pornostar100" it's pretty impossible to track him down for discrediting his identity. The closest thing I could find was a Brady Holzhauer on LinkedIn whose only experience with gaming was as a "seasonal game advisor" at GameStop, which is a nice and fancy way of saying temporary employee over the holiday. Basically, Brian Holzhauer is a virgin. Who else has such an obsession with asses and sex?

So, what do we do now?

Internet vigilance. It'll be a case of trolls trolling trolls, but to hell with it. Obviously there's some people who buy into this shit. Maybe even Holzhauer himself believes he's telling the truth, but I sort of doubt it since that video would be the hardest evidence anyone ever had of the console, and it was dismissed pretty quickly.

Pound the site with spam comments. Do it every day on every article. He'll turn comment moderation back on, but he'll have to sift through every comment to determine the real ones. New people coming to the site will see no comments and think it's just a hoax site, and they'll be right. I'm sure eventually he'll move to a new site; don't stop then either.

If there's somehow an ability to IP ban, and we get IP banned, use a proxy site.

Before I go, ask yourself really genuinely... would you really want a new Sega console at this point? Many developers have said that Sammy destroyed Sega's atmosphere and really stifled the company. While we all have fond memories of the original Sega, they're long gone, and it's a sad fact. They're probably never going to be the same, and good Sega games are few and far between these days.

So, SegaLeaks/Reeks readers who have a brain inside of their skull, fight the good fight.

comradesnarky, out.