Using my Christmas money that year, I had to make what seemed like a Sophie’s Choice to a middle-class 10-year-old: picking between a Super NES and Genesis as my first 16-bit console. After painful deliberation, I went with the Genesis, as it seemed like the better value to a cash-strapped preteen at the time. The first game I brought home with my new console: Sonic the Hedgehog 2. I replayed it constantly, exploring every stage again and again, finishing every level multiple times. When someone posted the level-select cheat code on a Prodigy gaming bulletin board well before it appeared in gaming magazines, I used the cheat to get to all of my favorite stages quickly. (I also made sure to print it out and share it in class, further cementing my nerd cred.)

I knew the game so well that, eventually, I realized something was missing. There was a piece of music in the game’s sound test that didn’t appear in the game itself. On top of that, there were screenshots in magazines of a stage I’d never encountered. Before the game’s release, Sega had sent out a batch of press images for media to use. A few screens stood out, portraying a strange, rocky-looking level called the Hidden Palace. I had sunk countless hours into Sonic 2, but I had never seen anything that even resembled these screens.

A few people wrote to magazines asking about the Hidden Palace, and editors would apologetically explain that the stage had been removed from the final version of the game. But, to me, there was a conspiracy afoot, a secret that Sega was keeping, and the proof was in those screens and that unused music.

Time passed, and eventually more Sonic games were released. They, too, had conspicuous bits of missing content. I moved on from obsessing about the Hidden Palace to trying to figure out why Mushroom Valley in the Sonic 3 stage select didn’t work. But I never forgot about it—and neither did an entire group of fans.

* * *

Around this time, one of the early types of console-game piracy had emerged in the form of game copier devices. These machines originated in Asia, and worked by copying the contents of cartridges onto floppy disks. The floppies could then be loaded and played back through the device as if they were a legit game cartridge. Even with the high cost of floppy disks, this was a far better value proposition than buying the games themselves.

If you didn’t have a cartridge to copy from, obtaining games for use with these devices was surprisingly easy: You just had to dial into underground servers and bulletin board systems using a PC modem to get game files to transfer onto disks, all while hoping mom wouldn’t try to make a phone call while a three-hour download was running over shaky dial-up. Copy the downloaded file onto a set of floppies, and presto: A brand-new, illicitly acquired game was yours, ready to play.