复古收藏家被指控出售价值 10 万美元的仿冒品

上周，一个出人意料的丑闻震惊了收集老式电脑游戏的场景，当时社区的一位知名成员，同时也是一个大型 Facebook 群组的版主，被指控向人们出售经典游戏的假冒副本。

Enrico Ricciardi 多年来一直是社区的活跃成员，作为买家、卖家和建议的来源，在几名成员提供证据证明许多盒子、软盘和他卖给人们的文物并不是看起来的那样。 .

小组成员收集了他们所有的证据和指控 公共文件，说在成员收到可疑游戏后 – 一个假定的副本 Akalbeth 1979：死亡领域，这是由 Richard Garriott 在开始之前开发的 创世纪 系列，它是有史以来最早制作的角色扮演游戏之一——他们开始坚持使用 Ricciardi 出售的其他游戏，发现其中许多游戏也有点偏离。

将 Ricciardi 的玩具与其他成员拥有的原创玩具进行比较后，该小组很快发现了与前一个玩具的许多不一致之处，例如玩具海报是手工切割而不是成形的，据称已有数十年历史的海报上的标记只能用现代打印机，以及字体和徽标位置等方面的细微差别。 您可以自己查看这些示例 这边 和 这边.

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The most damning evidence presented, though, was that in many cases the disks that had been sold by Ricciardi were blank, something many buyers were only discovering now that they had been prompted to check. If you’re thinking to yourself “why didn’t these guys check that before?”, we’re talking about disks and tapes that are in some cases over 40 years old, which as the Big Box PC Game Collectors members explain, means doing this isn’t always the best idea:

These disks are 40 years old, and the software is widely available online via emulators at this point. The goal in getting these games is not to play them, but to collect them (people who collect baseball trading cards do not trade them much either). “Testing” a 40-year-old disk can risk damaging the disk. Further, some collectors do not have access to the computers which originally ran these games.

With multiple members having now compared the games they received from Ricciardi to other, legitimate copies, it has become clear that he has been selling these intricate fakes for years (since at least 2015, by their reckoning), covering everything from old Sierra and Origin games to “multiple copies of Ultima: Escape from Mt. Drash, Akalabeth and Mystery House.”

Wildly, it’s even believed that while most of Ricciardi’s fakes were sold directly to buyers, the group says “there is at least one black box Ultima 1 that we think may be fake that was graded by WATA.”

It’s estimated that Ricciardi has been involved in “at least €100K in transactions of suspected counterfeit game items”, which at time of posting works out to be roughly USD$107,300. That’s…a lot of money, as you’d expect for games both this old and this important, though as the group explain 目前尚不清楚是否正在进行任何法律诉讼，或者是否会进行，因为他们说“受影响的个人选择了他们最好的补救措施，不希望公开讨论这个问题”。

如果你是一个收藏家，这有点吓人，或者你只是一个好奇这一切是如何运作的外部观察者， Big Box PC 游戏收藏家有一本“反骗子指南”，读起来很有趣.