A Sega Veteran Is Quietly Cataloguing All 4,500 of Sega’s Games. He Wants Them All Playable.

Yosuke Okunari, the longtime Sega producer behind the Sega Ages line and a string of the company’s classic re-releases, has told Famitsu he has been building a complete internal catalogue of everything Sega has ever made, hardware and software, with the goal of getting the whole library playable on modern formats.

The numbers are the part that stopped me. By Okunari’s count there are roughly 2,800 distinct Sega game titles if you exclude ports and remakes, and about 4,500 once you count everything. He wants that entire collection available to play on current hardware. He is also realistic about it: he has said he will probably retire before the job is done and expects to hand it off to someone else.

I have spent a lot of words on this site arguing that preservation works best when it is treated as a mission rather than a product line, and here is a senior figure inside Sega saying the quiet part out loud. A company-led effort to document and re-release its own back catalogue is exactly what the rest of the industry keeps failing to do. Most publishers cannot tell you what they own, let alone keep it playable.

There is no commitment here, no launch, no list. It is one veteran’s passion project, filtered through a magazine interview, and it could easily stall the moment he steps away. But it is a real signal that someone with the keys cares about the whole of Sega’s history and not just the handful of mascots that still sell. I will be watching to see whether Sega the company decides to back him.