Sega Pluto prototype allegedly revealed by former Sega employee

One of two alleged prototypes of a Sega console codenamed "Pluto" has been photographed and detailed on the Assembler Games forums by a poster who says he's a former employee of the company. Pluto, he says, is a variation on the Sega Saturn, with a built-in NetLink modem, that never made it to production.

The hardware, said to be about 14 years old, is reportedly in working condition, but region-locked. The poster in possession of the hardware, who goes by the handle Super Magnetic, describes the hardware in a series of posts.

"The front features two controller ports, and on top you have a flip-top drive bay, a cart slot, a Power button, and the venerable Reset button," the poster wrote. "Note that the logo still says Saturn, so I'm guessing the Pluto codename was simply that, and they were thinking of branding it with the Saturn name. (The logo is printed on production-style though, so I'm guessing they were fairly serious about this one.) The left and right sides feature beautiful-and-exotic vents, while the back is standard Saturn, save for the Netlink ports. The bottom has nothing of note except for the "PLUTO-02" sticker (which is, of course, of note)."

Sega's NetLink modem was compatible with a handful of Sega Saturn games, including Virtual-On, Sega Rally, Saturn Bomberman and a special version of Daytona USA.

Pluto was one of many reported planet-themed codenames for Sega hardware. Sega's 32X add-on was originally codenamed Mars and a scrapped 32X/Genesis combo unit was codenamed Neptune.