Brian Costelloe is visibly nervous as he parks outside the ramshackle junkyard complex. He steps out of his car to fetch his camera from its boot, because he wants to film the excursion for his YouTube channel. He crosses the road before changing his mind, returning to his car to put the camera back in the boot. He does up his jacket over a Sonic The Hedgehog T-shirt. “I don’t want to be too obvious,” he says.

As we step into the junkyard, signs around the entrance are so immediately hostile to potential wrongdoers that I understand his caution. ‘WARNING, AREA UNDER SURVEILLANCE’. ‘NO DUMPING, WE WILL FORWARD YOUR REGO TO THE POLICE’. And the real doozy: ‘GOD SAYS YOU SHOULD FORGIVE THOSE WHO TRESPASS AGAINST YOU. NOT ME, I SHOOT THE BASTARDS’.

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“ Sonic is missing an arm, Sally is missing all her limbs, and their remaining paint is at the mercy of the weather.

We’re 15 minutes outside Blacktown, a large suburb in Sydney’s west, but it feels more like we’re stepping into one of George Miller’s storyboards. Filthy bumper cars are piled on top of one another behind a childish hand-scrawled message: “Museum Display. Not For Sale.” The sign that once greeted visitors to Sydney’s long-shuttered Wonderland theme park is propped up against an abandoned train carriage, featuring a faded Spider-Man and The Hulk, stripped of all their gravitas. In one corner there’s a pile of kitchen sinks, as if the owner wants to make a bleakly humorous point.As we move further into the junkyard, I can’t grasp at any discernible theme among the treasure. 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. The vague threat of menace, of guard dogs and shotguns, permeates.

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. 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.

The Junkyard 34 IMAGES

The SEGA Kid

Brian gazes longingly at the sideshow freaks, his fingers entwining in the fence wire. “I think we could restore them.”

Brian is a big SEGA fan. 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 speaks. 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.

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“People say that I’m biased”, he says. “I just didn’t think the NES was worth the hype.”Though conventional wisdom balks at fanboyism, it rarely accounts for upbringings like Brian’s. 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. His love of video games was only sated at the arcade, where he poured over SEGA’s machines: Zaxxon, Turbo, Flicky, and Space Harrier.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. “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. He figured that it had the SEGA logo on it, and a couple of cool games, and that was enough for now.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. 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. It lasted five issues, each of which he would send to Australia’s SEGA branch SEGA-Ozisoft, who quickly pegged him as a superfan, a Chosen One, and were willing to give him their time over the phone.One day, Brian got a call to go to SEGA-Ozisoft’s headquarters in the city with the thrilling promise he would be shown “something big.” “It's gonna be bigger than Mario, they were saying.” During his school holidays, Brian was sat down and introduced to the beta version of Sonic The Hedgehog, six months before it was released in the country. “And they turn it on,” Brian remembers, “and compared to all the other games that were around, Sonic was just so appealing, so alive.”

Brian has documented these years with remarkable thoroughness and care. He shows me a clipping of a newspaper article written about him at the time, his youthful face beaming underneath a head of floppy brown hair and the headline “Brian Leading a Double Life – Computer whiz leads a double life as a student and magazine publisher”.

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“I’ve promised everyone a bumper issue after my HSC exams,” he was quoted as saying.His dedication to the brand paid off. Two weeks after he graduated high school in 1991, Brian recalls his father walking into the living room to tell him that he better get a job. That same day he got a phone call from SEGA-Ozisoft, asking him to come in for an interview for a fledgling hotline. The interview, he recalls, was a cakewalk. “They asked me ‘Can you play Alex Kidd?’” I replied, “can I play it? I finished it.”Brian worked at the SEGA hotline for three years.

As Brian tells me his stories of roadshows and previewing games and fan letters, it struck me that written down they might suggest he was living in some hubristic delusion of his past. But that’s not Brian. His stories are told with self-deprecation and an unabashed wistfulness for what was clearly the greatest time of his life; the photos and clippings presented to me with a mixture of embarrassment and puppy-dog enthusiasm.

“ Back then, Brian was one of SEGA’s earliest and youngest community managers at 18 years old.

He laughs, shaking his head.

The Fall of SEGA World

“The kid must have been only eight years old or something.”Back then, Brian was one of SEGA’s earliest and youngest community managers at 18 years old. He’s in insurance now, and still lives in The Shire. The last time he was officially in the video game industry in any capacity was in 1995, where he worked for a retail store called The Gamesmen, primarily doing manual labour before being laid off a year or so later as the business struggled. “I went through a bad time, I guess you could say bad times, when I was working at The Gamesmen.”He doesn’t linger on it.

The statues of Sonic and Sally that Brian is coveting in the hostile junkyard 15 minutes out of Blacktown were once shiny features of Sydney’s SEGA World, a large indoor theme park in the central city that tripped at the starting line.

via Wikipedia

“ There was a corny half hour musical called Sonic Live in Sydney, with Sonic, Sally and Tails foiling Dr. Robotnik’s plan to take over Australia.

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In 1994, property development company Jacfun Pty. Ltd. acquired a 90-year lease for land in the tourist-oriented Darling Harbour precinct in Sydney. Jacfun was co-run by investor Kevin Bermeister, who was also the founder of SEGA-Ozisoft, and saw the land as an opportunity to expand the SEGA business – already doing well thanks to the global success of the Mega Drive – further in Australia.Bermeister and Jacfun convinced SEGA of Japan to invest $80 million into the theme park, which was to be one of many SEGA-operated parks and arcades around the globe, but on a much larger scale. SEGA World was to live up to its name: an all-encompassing world themed around SEGA properties, touted as “an interactive Disneyland” by the press, championed by Sonic instead of Mickey. It was going to be huge.And it was, for a hot minute. When SEGA World opened its doors in 1997 it was to a great deal of buzz thanks to a far-reaching marketing campaign and startling architecture. The park was fully indoors, housed in a big red cube topped with a blue cone, iconic enough that those I spoke to who grew up in Sydney but never visited the park still remember it as “oh, that building with the big blue cone.”Inside, the park was a mishmash of the traditional and the then-cutting-edge 3D rides. A mine train ride rubbed shoulders with motion simulators, a bumper car attraction called Mad Bazooka shared space with an interactive ghost train. SEGA World also featured over 100 arcade machines, and a corny half-hour musical called Sonic Live in Sydney , loosely based on the Sonic Animated series, with Sonic, Sally and Tails foiling Dr. Robotnik’s plan to take over Australia.Ticket sales begin to drop. “At the beginning the crowds were coming in thick and fast, especially on weekends,” remembers Marvin Lopez, who worked in the park’s fast food crew for six months. “If memory serves correctly, it started to slow down with attendance about three to six months after opening.” Year on year, SEGA World struggled to attract even half of the estimated 800,000 visitors a year it needed to be profitable. In 1999 SEGA of Japan, wrestling with bigger issues in the wake of the failed Saturn, sold its stake in the park.

SEGA World was now Jacfun’s sole responsibility, and the company clung on for as long as it could in the hopes that the 2000 Sydney Summer Olympics would reinvigorate the park with an influx of curious tourists, no doubt part of the reason Sydney was chosen as the park’s location in the first place. That year SEGA World didn’t break even, and in November 2000 its doors were shut for good.

The Statues

No sign of SEGA World Sydney exists in its original location today. Only a couple of months after it closed, Jacfun held an auction – by all accounts a thinly-veiled fire sale – to hastily get rid of its rides and other fixtures at discounted prices. Most of its rides went overseas, its arcade machines were sold to local buyers, and its various statues unceremoniously removed and sent to dumps. The big red cube with the blue cone went through a couple of miserable iterations – abandoned building and furniture warehouse respectively – until it was completely demolished in 2008 as part of a plan to reinvigorate Darling Harbour.For Australian fans who experienced the meteoric rise of SEGA first-hand in a country that typically has to embrace pop culture vicariously through the United States, the lack of preservation is heartbreaking. “I guess there was no choice but to recover some of the invested money,” Lopez says. “But I wish SEGA Japan could have stepped in and try to procure them and maybe create a SEGA museum of sorts.”It was a moment in time when Australia was one of only a handful of places in the world to be graced by SEGA’s magic, he continues. “I’m glad I was part of it, no matter how it ended.”Brian and I loiter around Sonic and Sally. He tells me these are smaller versions of larger statues that were once the big photo draws in the park. He briefly wonders about the fate of these big statues, before deciding they’re long gone.

Brian first heard about the junkyard from a former hotline colleague, who sent him the cryptic message “we gotta save Sonic” with a link to a post in a retro gaming themed Facebook group called ‘Aussie Gamer Cave’. Someone named ‘Salem Dickenballz’ (who works as a “stunt performer at Butt Doctor”, according to his Facebook bio) had visited the junkyard and posted a photo of the statues, though had little interest in chasing an acquisition.

So Brian took the baton and drove the hour-and-a-half to the junkyard to see the statues for himself, with the intention of buying them and restoring them. He was shut down by the first staff member he met, who point blank told him they’re not for sale.

He subsequently posted a video about his experience, and today, with an enthusiastic YouTube audience behind him, he’s trying again. "I knew I couldn't back away from it or just ignore it,” Brian tells me. “I had to follow it up.”

As we meander through the junkyard’s half-hearted attempt at an Americana theme – statues of Elvis and Marilyn are filthy and disoriented – we spot a reception of sorts, a ramshackle hut surrounded by glass cabinets filled with nonsense: poker chips, cups of nails and screws, a third-hand CPAP machine selling for $150.

Behind the counter is a heavily-tattooed man with a prominent beer belly who I would peg to be in his early sixties. We learn this is Gary, the owner. Gary is brusque and sarcastic. Brian introduces himself, explains to Gary that he used to work at SEGA, and tells him he would love to restore the statues.“It kills me to see them like that,” Brian says, with perhaps a little too much honesty in the face of a man who clearly cares little about the condition of his acquisitions. He offers Gary five thousand dollars to buy them.

“You’re breaking my heart. But they’re not for sale, at any price,” Gary spits.

“He won’t sell them,” a woman also sitting behind the counter says, with exhausted eyes. “I’m telling you, he won’t sell them.”

But Brian is carrying the spirit of SEGA on his shoulders, and he’s undeterred. They’re not for me, they’re for the community, he insists. He tells Gary how rare the statues are, and what a treasure he has on his hands. “Sally isn’t even acknowledged as canon by SEGA these days,” he says.

Gary mutters something I can’t quite understand. Something about how he was threatened, how someone was going to kill his dog and cut his throat and burn his house down.Unexpectedly, he invites us “round back.”

We follow Gary into a series of garages housing shells of cars and bubble-gum machines, plastered with petrol slogans and ancient advertisements for washing up liquid. “It’s why I’m a lunatic,” he explains. “Because they threatened to kill me, kill my dogs, for the Wonderland sign. I ain’t going to sell it.”

“ We follow Gary into a series of garages housing shells of cars and bubble-gum machines, plastered with petrol slogans and ancient advertisements for washing up liquid.

He gestures round his trash palace. “Look, I’m set up,” he explains. “I don’t need anything.”He doesn’t. Once in demolition – he found Sonic and Sally during a job at a dump 15 years ago – Gary tells us he worked hard for years to build what he has, and nowadays he’s got the luxury of doing what he wants. He points to some scattered bumper cars. “Just the other day I bought 30 of these.”

Gary hoards stuff and doesn’t care about its value to other people, in other words, but it’s clear he’s suffered for this attitude throughout the years. His obsession with Wonderland has hurt him in particular, and he tells us he’s had multiple threats from “The Wonderland Trust”; in part because he keeps the theme park’s very first 46-foot sign behind a chain-link fence at the bottom of his junkyard. “They can't buy me,” he says (that money means nothing to Gary is a point he continues to press; he tells us of a time when the popular ’90s Australian gardening and lifestyle show ‘Burke's Backyard’ wanted to buy “a tap” off him and he told them to get the f*ck off his land).

Brian asks if there is anything he could trade for the statues. If money is of no value, is there a “holy grail” he’s after?You’ll never find the holy grail, Gary replies. Certainly, if there is a holy grail, Gary already owns it, and keeps it buried under a pile of used bicycles. He does however, concede that he would make a trade for two things: “A 6 by 3 Castrol sign. Australian, not American. Or a bowser.”

I look around. Castrol signs, and bowsers – a colloquial Australian term for gas pump – are everywhere.

The Aftermath

“I collect ’em,” Gary says. “I could do it for a good mint Castrol. I’ve got four of ’em. Five of them. But if you’d turned up with it, I’d have to keep my word. I do keep my word. It gets me into that much trouble. Everyone’s out there to dud me.”Brian’s eyes are bright. He’s not there to ‘dud’ Gary, he explains. “I used to work for SEGA. My job when I left high school was to help kids play the games. Help them to get past the games; that was my job.”“I’d do it for the sign or a bowser,” Gary reiterates. “Money’s not going to fix me up”.As we leave the junkyard, I hear the woman with the exhausted eyes ask Gary if Brian had “learned his lesson”.I ask Brian how he’s feeling. He says he feels hopeful.He hasn’t learned his lesson.

I catch up with Brian via Skype two weeks later. So far, his efforts to find Gary’s Castrol sign or bowser have proven fruitless. He doesn’t have many leads; he’s reached out to friends who used to work at petrol stations years ago, with no luck. He reached out to a friend who lives in Newcastle, on the thin premise that “Newcastle’s the kind of area that has a lot of crap like that.”

“ Brian is desperate to preserve a part of Australia’s gaming history that has otherwise been wiped off the face of the planet.

Brian’s also worried about the money he might need to obtain the items. His cash is tied up with investments, he says, and a pristine Castrol sign would probably cost a lot. He could maybe raise the money via crowdfunding, but even then there’s no guarantee that Gary would keep his word.I ask Brian how he would feel if he doesn’t manage to find anything, and Sonic and Sally disintegrate in that junkyard, behind that fence, under that railway sign, in between those train carriages. “It’s just a wasted opportunity,” he says. “If they deteriorate any more there won’t be anything but a shell left.“But I've got faith there’s someone talented enough out there to be able to restore them. And even though this guy has been holding onto these like some sort of trophy for all these years doesn't mean they’re not something that he's not willing to let go for the right item.”Mostly, Brian is desperate to preserve a part of Australia’s gaming history that has otherwise been wiped off the face of the planet. “All we’ve got of SEGA World is memories and photos,” he says. “To be able to have something tangible and say that ‘yes that was part of SEGA World, we had that,’ would be amazing.”He cherishes the tape, he says. He reaches up to a shelf behind him and pulls it down to show me, its position in his muscle memory. “SEGA Mega-CD, coming to a Mega Drive near you!” the cover reads. It is beautifully preserved, in pristine condition.I think of beaten-down, broken Sonic and Sally, who are about to face another winter in Gary’s junkyard. I worry about them, but then nostalgia is deeply resilient, something that moves forward with us through so many years, yet has the power to drive us so determinedly towards the past. It seems unlikely this is where the story ends.

Lucy O'Brien is Games & Entertainment Editor at IGN’s Sydney office. Follow her on Twitter.