Forgery accusations against longtime retro game seller leave collectors shaken

polygon.com:

Vintage game collecting is more than just a simple exercise in nostalgia; it’s a hobby that potentially sees thousands of dollars changing hands. In fact, pristine copies of highly coveted titles have even commanded more than $1 million, such as this copy of Super Mario 64 with a condition grading of 9.8 A++ — one of the highest grades for a game as issued by game certification company Wata Games. With so much at stake, it’s easy to see why the games collecting market is also ripe for forgeries, with one recent large-scale forgery involving an estimated €200,000 ($204,254) worth of transactions in counterfeit games.

That particular scandal was centered around game collector and glamour photographer Enrico Ricciardi, who was accused of defrauding several other collectors. (Ricciardi did not respond to repeated requests for comment.) As reported by Ars Technica, several members from a community of rare PC game collectors, known as Big Box PC Game Collectors (BBPCGC), have said they believe some games they purchased from Ricciardi are inauthentic. For his part, Ricciardi has denied any wrongdoing, stating that he was also a victim of the forgery who merely passed along these games, with a sizable bulk of them reportedly coming from a trader he has only referred to as “Mister X.”

Investigations into Ricciardi began when collector Kevin Ng became suspicious of fakery upon examining his copy of Akalabeth, the first game that Ultima creator Richard Garriott released in 1980, as well as a Japanese copy of Mystery House by Sierra On-Line from 1980. This was followed by several similar revelations on the part of other collectors; Dominik Reichardt was the first collector to <a