The Vintage Video Game Collector's Scam & More Latest News Here – Up Jobs

The Italian photographer Enrico Ricciardi sold copies of supposedly unique classic computer games for more than 100,000 euros. They have turned out to be counterfeits distributed in a market that today moves millions

Between the video game collectors pc, Enrico Ricciardo It was until a few weeks ago one of the best known names. This Italian fashion photographer, whose images have landed on the covers of Playboy or Panoramahad spent decades amassing one of the most extensive and exclusive collections of PC video games, first editions of titles such as doomeither Wolfenstein 3D in boxes often signed by their very creators.

Today there is hardly any trace of Ricciardi on social networks. He maintains only his Instagram profile, dedicated exclusively to his photographic work. Neither does she write in the many collecting forums she used to participate in. Several people accuse him of having counterfeit and sold as originals highly coveted titles of which very few copies were published at the time, such as Akalabeth: World of Doomone of the first role-playing video games, the work of Richard Garriott, creator of the popular medieval fantasy-themed video game series Last.

These forgeries were incredibly well done. The labels on the floppy disks looked original, and the manuals and promotional pamphlets were dated. But Ricciardi’s attention to detail had limits, and when rumors of fakes began to circulate, many of his buyers began to discover small inconsistencies in their precious games.

The paper on which the manuals were printed, for example, had the watermark of an Italian paper company. It is practically impossible that a developer in the 80s, in the USA, would have used it. Under magnification, these documents also showed tiny cyan and magenta dots, proof that they had been printed from a scanned original. On some discs, the version of the game had been published after the first print run, on others the content was directly unreadable. In total, those affected calculate that Ricciardi could have counterfeits worth more than €100,000.

The news has felt like a bucket of cold water among the community of PC game collectors, which is not as numerous or moves as much money as the console game community, -some cartridge games of the Nintendo original, for example, have come to be sold for millions of dollars-, but which has grown considerably in recent years and in which until now honesty was presupposed, especially for closed deals between acquaintances and members of the same forum. .

“These used to be the centerpieces of my collection. Old, rare and expensive games. Now it turns out that I have been scammed with counterfeits,” one of the buyers laments on Twitter. In Big Box PC Game Collectors, a Facebook forum that has more than 6,000 users and of which Ricciardi himself was a moderator, the welcome message is now a warning about possible counterfeits circulating on the market. In the world of console video game collecting, there are stores and third-party companies that certify the authenticity of the titles, but in the PC world they are still not common.

These collectors seek, above all, video games from the years 70, 80 and 90well-preserved classics that have become part of video game history, such as quake or LucasArts graphic adventure The Secret of Monkey Island. They are games that had luxurious editions in large boxes, with elaborate illustrations and luxurious finishes that already have completely disappeared from the market because of digital distribution.

They also look for titles of extreme raritygames of which many copies were not sold, such as the aforementioned akalabeth, which Garriott independently programmed in 1979 for Apple II computers and initially distributed by word of mouth or through small networks of local stores. They are games of which, in some cases, there are only a few dozen copies left in good condition.

In Spain, this type of collecting represents a very small market. “We are more consoleros“, explains Fernando Gil Mas, who has a YouTube channel, Retro Cabeza, dedicated to classic video games. national edition compared to foreigners. You get to pay real money for PAL Spain editions of games that still cost 10 in other regions. It’s crazy. But once the game is in a box that it will never openOf course they can sneak it in with counterfeit materials,” he explains.

This is one of the reasons it took so long for the enthusiast community to catch on to the hoax. Games are bought to keep on a shelf and are rarely played again. If what it is about is playing a game, there are very easy to download versions of all of them and hundreds of emulators to run them on modern PCs.

Among collectors, moreover, there are also many who seek directly faithful reproductions, not original, of the boxes and games. Are cheaper and in many cases what you want is to have those games that remind you of good times from childhood, not necessarily a museum piece, on display on a shelf or in a showcase. One that, in addition, can be false.

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