You've heard of art forgeries, you probably remember forging a parent's signature on a failed test, but... PC video game forgeries? That's different.

Or, perhaps it's not so unlike art forgery (though certainly much less lucrative). Retro video games that have gone out of print are in high demand from an avid collector base. There's a robust and healthy community, one that was recently shaken when a discovery was made that one of its members had been selling forgeries.

Several members of the Big Box PC Game Collectors group came forward with evidence that proves one of the community's members, Enrico Ricciardi, has been selling fake copies of valuable PC games. Together, they collected evidence and laid their accusations out in a public document. After a member received a suspicious copy of 1979's Akalabeth: World of Doom they began to poke around after other titles sold by Ricciardi and found that many of them were a little "off" as well.

Members discovered that labels had been hand-cut instead of machine or that marks made on what were supposed to be decades-old stickers could have only been made by more modern printers. Slight differences in things like fonts and logo placements also caused members concern.

The most damning evidence came when some of the forgeries' owners decided to test the games to see if they ran. Many collectors do not actually collect the games to play them (some of them don't even have the means to play them at all because they're so old!), so it's not unusual that no one had tried previously. Sure enough, the discs were blank.

You can read the full article here.

Are you a retro game collector? Tell me about the pride of your collection!