The classic PC game collectible scene was rocked by a sudden scandal last week when a prominent member of the community and the operator of a large Facebook group, was accused of selling to people. Use fake copies of classic games.
Enrico Ricciardi, who for many years has been an active member of the community as a buyer, seller and source of advice, has been kicked out of the Big Box PC Game Collectors group after several members presented evidence which they said proved that many of the boxes, floppy disks and works of art he had sold to people were not what they appeared to be.
The members of the group have collected all their evidence and accusations in a public documentsaid that after a member received a suspicious game — an alleged copy of The year 1979 of Akalabeth: World of Doomdeveloped by Richard Garriott before he started Ultima and was one of the first role-playing games ever made — they started looking at other titles that had been sold by Ricciardi, and found that many of them were also slightly discounted.
Comparing Ricciardi’s games with original games owned by other members, the team quickly discovered a number of differences with the previous game, such as the game labels being cut by hand rather than by In fact, stickers that are supposed to be decades old can only be created with modern printers and slight differences in things like font and logo placement. You can see these examples yourself here and here.
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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 If you’re a collector and this strikes you a bit, or you’re just an outside observer curious about how all this works, The Big Box PC Game Collectors team has an “anti-cheat guide”, it’s a fun read.
