A museum based in Bologna, Italy has recently come into possession of the blueprints to a Sega game from the 1970s that has long been considered "lost" (the video game historian/preservationist Damiano Gerli recently informed us).
Heavyweight Champ was a boxing game that Sega originally released in the arcades back in 1976 (and is not to be confused with the company's 1987 game of the same name). Many historians consider it today to be a groundbreaking title in the history of gaming, with the game reportedly featuring what is widely regarded to be the first depiction of hand-to-hand combat in a video game, as well as the first ever depiction of a person of colour in gaming.
But despite that, though, no working cabinets of the title are believed to still be in existence today, with the closest anyone has come to locating a machine in the modern day being photos that surfaced on a forum post back in 2019, which were believed to have come from a Yahoo! Japan auction, and showed a machine with its glass screen in disrepair.
As a result, all we've had to rely on up until now to see what this historically significant title had to offer were news reports, the odd flyer, and other miscellaneous pieces of footage from old Japanese TV shows, with there being no way to play the title either through emulation or other means, and little information about how the game actually worked.
Yesterday, however, there was a bit of an exciting development made regarding the preservation of the game, with Federico Croci, the founder of the pinball museum Tilt; and Leandro Macrini, the creator of Bologna Nerd, making the exciting announcement on YouTube that the Italian museum had recently come into possession of the arcade machine's blueprints.
Not only does this mean we now have a better glimpse than ever into how the game was actually created, but it could also provide the key to how to bring it back from the abyss, should a machine ever be recovered that's in need of repairs.
The announcement was made as part of a wider 1 hour 13 minute livestream covering the history of the game in Italian, and can be viewed below if you want to find out more: