Hey guys! I was wondering... how are we sure we are not buying repros when we are buying stuff released 20 years ago and are still in minty condition. I mean... yeah.. some of them are definately from a smoke free home and have been taken good care of. But then again there couldn't possibly be so many of them out in the market nowadays but there are! It is wierd that we can find so many copies of great and rare games in mint or near mint condition. Very few games are not easy to find in good condition for consoles like NES and SNES for example(like Earthbound, Kirby's Dreamland 3 etc.). Is it just normal or are there some dudes filling the market with exact copies of old games selling them as mints?
repros only making sence, when the game is uber rar and reaches prices beyond 200 bucks (like pce sapphire etc.) i can't see any big reason for faking $20 games. not even for some dirty china business! in japan, you still can find ubermint games of any kind retro systems. and quite a lot of new/sealed stuff. also there are a lot peeps, which took good care of their stuff over the years.
thnx 4 the info, tatsujin! The opinion of someone who lives in japan is very important on this matter. Though also in the US and Europe we have the same thing. No big retro stores (like super potato), many mint or sealed games..
but after the sapphire incident, which already took place some years back now, I'm also amazed by the fact of not encountering more fake/repro games like radiant silvergun e.g. but I woulnd't be much suprised, if one day other repros of todays rarities will hit the market resp. the BAY etc.
I've often wondered this, after buying old games in Japan that just look too mint. Like factory fresh from the 80s. I suppose it's more likely that it really is still mint & unused, but I've wondered if there isn't a factory somewhere slowly churning them out. Interestingly, this exact thing appears to have happened recently with the Saturn USB pads from a few years ago. They were completely sold out & not in production, but have resurfaced in China in huge numbers. They're currently available for $15 - $20 w/free shipping, when a little while ago they'd go for as much as $70 if you could even find one. Yes, there are bootlegs, but the majority of them are legit. I've bought a few myself. What people are suspecting is a factory worker/owner decided to get the assembly line running again, unauthorized. Either that or someone acquired all the assets to produce the parts/packaging/labels, etc. So it's like a "real" bootleg.
if you can erase a 1 dollar bill and print $100 on top of it, i'm sure that with the right equipment you could do something similar.
I find it funny when people sell shrink wrapped Super Famicom and Megadrive games as factory sealed or even just "new" (neither was shrink wrapped when new). Most of these are mint, but not new. The only way you could see if these are new is to use a good magnifying glass and a bright light, if it's mint then you will see vertical scratches where the edge connector rubs against the cartridge slot.
When you consider how many copies were produced of many old games, it's not really that surprising some of them have still never been opened.
Yeah but I don't think it was a coincidence that there was such a large and sudden influx of "sealed" games when fools started paying $300.00 for a sealed copy of Metroid. I'm guessing some folks decided to make up some boxes and learn how to properly shrink-wrap them. Those Super Mario Bros/Duck Hunt cartridges have to go somewhere after all.
Yeah, well, you're the guy that thinks jogging "burns muscle", right? MegaCD, PC-Engine, FM-Towns, Dreamcast... probably X68000 and old PC stuff.
Wrong, it is possible. If Sega could make it, someone else could do so too. Sega doesn't have divine powers. Just because no one has been known to produce bootable Saturn bootlegs doesn't mean it is not possible. Maybe you meant it wasn't economically feasible or something which I would agree with. Perhaps you should read up on what a CD-ROM is first. You certainly can't reset a pressed disc, it's a solid and permanent shape. If you meant somehow putting an existing security ring onto a CD-R, I don't think that will work either, the laser might stop tracking torward the ring. Also it would be a real bitch to somehow make a circular cut to trim the security ring portion of a Saturn disc off and then glue it onto another disc. I've never heard of anyone attempting that but it would look really ghetto. The main point about repros and bootlegs, is that they cost a considerable amount of money to produce. Older games just don't bring in enough money to bother massive bootlegging operations. And it's compounded because a factory will not produce small numbers of bootlegs as that is not worth their effort. If I recall that Sapphire bootleg run was financed by an individual, not some bootlegging outfit. It's not like there are groups of pirates thinking up what old titles will fetch money. I mean even if you pick games like castlevania dracula x on PCE CD, or Radiant Silvergun on Saturn, or whatever game you've seen someone trying to sell for 200 or 300 bucks... It's all bullshit. The general market will not pay those outragous prices, which means bootlegging those isn't as profitable. So to repeat again, producing the repros costs too much to do it right in massive quantities for the small amount of sales you might make for too little. Another issue is artwork. It's pretty easy to tell if a label is original or not. Same with boxes, manuals, and easily with Discs.
If it's on a computer, anything is possible. It's not reproducable on consumer hardware (or by anyone that would make repros in this case). I assumed that was inferred by the topic.
I'm pretty sure if it was possible, it would've been done by now. But there's not enough money in it to even bother any more. Pretty safe I would assume. I'd rather see someone learn how to mass produce GD-R's so at some point, someone can hack the few Naomi games that aren't on the DC and press them.
Well that would be the thing to do if you had the equipment, produce GD-Rs, but also Saturn CD-Rs, and you could probably even produce Sony PS1 CD-Rs that would be bootable. I remember seeing someone here recently selling like a spool of 50 GD-Rs which looks really cool but the bad thing is what you are talking about, once they are all used up that's it.
Btw... Dont forget that someone on ebay was mass producing GD-R "protos" (or so he would call them), with a sega katana and inside of the disc were retail versions of the games. rip off. That's why i think everyone MUST be more cautious about protos,extremely rare mints etc. etc.
