We all know that the SEGA empire that so many of us knew and loved crumbled in front of our very eyes when the Dreamcast couldn’t sustain their market and laid their last console to rest to focus on the software.  Since then, SEGA become a third party developer for a number of the very same consoles they had previously competed against. After all, who would have thought we’d ever see Mario and Sonic in the same game?

On August 6th SEGA had a private and clearly confidential meeting with Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) about Sony’s plans for the second half of the year and the spring of next year.

As you can imagine, SEGA was taking notes at the meeting and they made just a tiny little mistake by putting those meeting notes in their official, publicly accessible FTP site.  Today someone found the notes and the story has spread quickly through the gaming community.  Within these notes Sony shares a number of news and discussion items–some of them pretty major.  Here are the news highlights and a rare peek into the how things run behind the scenes between console manufacturers and third party developers.

• Sony plans to sell 13 million PS3s this year and to do it they had a big announcement sometime in the second half of the year.  We now know that this was the announcement of the PS3 Slim but it helps pin down the legitimacy of the notes.
• The Sony Motion Controller we saw at E3 is planned to be launched in the spring of next year and Sony agreed to recommend the Sega IP that they felt would make good Motion Controller games.
• Sonic Racing might include some PS3 IP characters via DLC.  Only Ratchet and Clank were mentioned as off limits.
• Sony could be bringing Japanese games to the US via an import section on the PSN and these imported titles would range from $9.99 to $39.99 for new games.
• Sony requested that SEGA would give Sony a period of exclusivity to these titles and in turn Sony will help with the marketing.
• Sony is considering doing a hybrid disks for movie tie-ins that would include both the game and the movie on the same disk.  Interesting move and one that would further differentiate Sony’s lead as a full media solution for your living room.
• We know that retailers are large part of the industry and have a lot of influence but who would have guessed that Sony would recommend that “Susan at Walmart” would be good person for SEGA to speak with about what they would like to be bundled with the game pack.  Especially prominent since she appeared to be on a first name basis with whomever was taking notes.
• Iron Man 2 and other Marvel content could be great opportunities to show off the Playstation HOME spaces that gamers explore.  Tony Stark’s lab was given as an example.  We’re curious if future plans may have changed at all with Marvel’s acquisition of a Sony’s competitor Disney.
• We may see some Sonic Anniversary collectors editions of old Sonic games including a possible “Best of Sonic” pack priced around $99.00.  Sony would also like PSN exclusive features like power ups and different game modes.
• Sony wants to sell all—that’s right—all PS2 titles on the Play Station Network (PSN) via an emulator.  It’s worth noting that this was specifically spelled out as as confidential information.
• Then there’s one more minor tidbit about SEGA providing a list of Dreamcast games that Sony could pick to bring to the PSN.  Dreamcast fans rejoice!

There’s a lot of sensitive information discussed in this meeting and outlined in the notes, a number of the items could affect total PS3 sales like leaking announcements out to the public.  Sony was still careful though, they didn’t take a chance telling even SEGA the details about the PS3 Slim that would be announced.  Sony has a reputation of being pretty protective of their secrets—though not quite as crazy Apple—but we can imagine they aren’t very happy about this (unintentional) leak to the public.  Will this hurt SEGA’s relationship with Sony or will Sony understand that this was probably just a simple mistake.  Yeah, we don’t really believe that either, but I doubt will see any public response from Sony.