If it looks too good to be true, it probably is... I like to buy games with video store rental stickers, names written on them, and maybe a few light scratches. That way I know they are real. I have never personally encountered an artificially aged counterfeit game.
I recently got ninja gaiden 3 for 57$ i thought it might have been fake because of the price. But the picture has a few small rips and looks a bit faded. Also the top is a little broken for some reason.
I've seen and even bought a fake game that had rental stickers on it. That isnt always a safe bet. Some sellers are clever and will either use a damaged shell or make it look more damaged to make a fake game appear more legit.
Nothing wrong with repro cartridges, as long as you know what you're buying and nobody's trying to scam you. I own a lot of Gameboy games- both original and repro- and I've never come across any issues with the latter. They work and save just fine. Heck, some are even better than the original ones because they're using onboard memory to save progress instead of physical batteries. And some feature battery sockets, something Nintendo should have considered implementing back in the day. Talk about convenient.
I loved the "Get outta there!" transitions, those cracked me up. I don't collect as much as I used to, but I didn't have to deal with this nearly as much even a few years ago. Makes me sad to see how many reproductions are floating around on eBay these days, and sometimes even the "honest" ones use weasel-words ("72-pins") so you might not be aware it's a repro unless you've already educated yourself. Great video, I really enjoy your channel!
The number of times I've brought a fake gameboy cart is ridiculous, especially the dang' pokemon and harvest moon ones. The carts sometimes with boxes look impeccable, only to be let down once you eventually decide to open the cart. I bet there's a factory somewhere in China dedicated to gameboy bootlegs. It's an epidemic.
Tip #1 stay away from Chinese eBay sellers. Tip #2 try to buy from sellers with 1000 or more positive feedback. Also real SNES labels can peel up as well. My lufia 1 and Castlevania IV had mint labels but we're starting to lift.
1000+ feedback is only going to happen for a reseller of some kind. It's true that those guys are going to be more concerned with their rep than some fly-by-night account created yesterday with a feedback score of 5, but.. if it's a personal account with 100 feedback over the last four years, that's also a significant investment in good trade etiquette, just at a lower scale. I have 550 or so, and I've had my account since around 1999. I do NOT want to start over. The main reason I bring this up -- besides the obvious point that there are tons of individuals out there selling and trading from their own collection, and some of that is good stuff at a fair price -- is that I have much better luck getting a known quantity from one-off sales vs. resellers. For example, if you go to eBay and try to snag a copy of Super Mario World, the dude with 150 feedback might have four pictures of the cart, a description that mentions "a minor scratch on the back label", and things like that. (It also might be a photo taken with a Polaroid and scanned with a webcam, and a description that says "works good", but I digress.) The bulk resellers almost always just take one great picture of their best copy, then fill the item description with three pages of HTML crap that looks like a balloon animal made sweet love to the classifieds section of a newspaper. There will be small italic text somewhere that says "stock photo - you will receive an item in similar condition." By that, of course, they mean you will receive a yellowed cart with half the label missing, that nobody has even casually brushed up against a roll of paper towels after having dipped it in melted cherry snow-cone. Opinions will differ, but I would rather know what I'm getting so I can judge for myself if it meets my standards for cosmetic condition. I would much rather have a perfect authentic shell with a non-working PCB than a working game that looks like it was pulled from the bottom of a dumpster. After all, I can always find a cheap dumpster copy and swap the PCB myself.
Excellent video...definately an important subject that doesn't often have examples like you had. Now remember kids, if it's fake then...GET OUTTA THERE!
Thanks for this. I’m 34 and just started collecting NES games and consoles. I have money that’s not an issue. The issue is verifying fakes and authenticating true games and systems. I’m arming myself with knowledge from this video this week when I finally go into my local shops that sell these.
I got 2 super famicom games from Ebay a few months ago and they were swapped with Mario Paint boards. Not even expensive games. It's a thing for sure. Great video, thanks!!
NESComplex I know man the seller claimed they were her sons and he would never do such a thing but it even had the name of the game on the board in Sharpie. On Street Fighter 2 of all things lol.
I have Cool Spot for SNES that was swapped into an NBA Live shell... one of my friends had given it to me. Seems they might have rented Cool Spot and stuck it into a sports game they bought on clearance back in the late 90s. It was nearly a decade later when it was given to me so I kept it, not worried about it possible having been stolen as the store it was rented from probably had went out of business anyway.
I had no idea that a game could be faked like that, they get sold often and how expensive games got in America! But these days I can’t afford free anyways
I’ve been lucky to not run into many counterfeit games in my neck of the woods. But then again, I don’t come across retro games that much at all in the wild. So that might have something to do with it. :P Great tips! I’ll keep them in mind the next time I go out hunting and spot a rare one. ;)
I have a bootleg that embarrassingly fooled me for the better part of a year. I got Ninja Spirit for the original Game Boy at a swap meet for 5 bucks. It did have a sticker with the name over the top portion of the label, but it was so "rare" and hard to find online, the only other one I saw had the same sticker (and $100 price), and it is very high quality. I assumed the factory misprinted the name and stuck the sticker on. The game works perfectly. The font on the raised lettering is great. Only later did I figure out to slide the cartridge open, see the glob top on the board, and sadly realize this whole year, I forgot Ninja Spirit only came out in Japan on GB 😑. And it says "Original Seal of Quality" instead of official. I still love it, and apparently it's an older bootleg and I collect those, like this old Chinese copy of Sailor Moon for MegaDrive I found.
Heck yeah! Super stoked about a new upload from you! Equally as excited for this new video as I was for Saturday morning cartoons when I was a kid!! Keep up the fantastic work man!
We don't really get fake nes games in the UK but snes however does. We have alot of repro boxes getting traded in to stores and also more expensive title labels over crappy games also. It's put me off buying snes games online really as it's a pain to keep sending them back
PSA for those in NA: The guy selling the copy of Xenoblade Chronicles (and other harder-to-find titles) for 25% less than everyone else, still in shrink wrap, with only a stock photo of the cover? Yeah, it IS (probably) authentic, BUT, it's a copy meant to be sold in Singapore and the UAE. It should work in a US console, but if you're a collector, be aware that there are markings on the cover and the disc that show its intended region, and it has no trade value. If in doubt, only go for auctions with a real photo of the actual item. If it looks like a NA copy but there's a circle on the bottom right of the cover, approximately 1.5" in diameter, and divided into three green/blue/gray colored sections from top to bottom -- that's an import. They are cheaper than legit US copies, and so are commonly resold at near-US prices for a quick and easy markup. Judgment call on whether to bite or not, just an FYI so you know what you're getting.
Great video for new collector's but here are some other helpful tips. Not all games had glossy labels. Almost all games released during '95-'02 had paper labels. This includes SNES, N64, GB, GBC, and GBA. Some companies like Acclaim used cheap labels as well as their own boards for their games which a newbie may consider fake. The printed 24 on the back of some NES games is real. Several NES games have them. If an expensive game is in perfectly flawless condition, it may be a fake. Always bring a game bit with you to inspect it.
Awesome video! I recently bought an Earthbound cart, and I checked it thoroughly, even looking at pictures online before I got the cart. After watching this I'm going to check it again, just for good measure!
So, I bought a Mario Kart 64 cartridge with a crooked back label. As far as I know, there were no numbers punched into the back labels of N64 cartridges, so I can't use that as a guide. What's the likelihood this is a fake?
N64 is a different animal altogether! Authentic labels are paper and not glossy. I’d look at the board and search for comparisons online. It’s probably legit though.
Heh...reminded me of two GBA games in the box I found at a local thrift store going for 90 cents: Monsters Inc and Spider-Man: Mysterio's Revenge. The boxes were a lot shinier than standard GBA boxes, then the carts themselves were just rattling around in the box: no inserts to keep them in place. Then the "manual" was just a print of the wraparound cover with some information on the inside. But the real fun was when I fired up the Spider-Man cart...the bootlegger didn't even bother to remove the original ripper's information off the ROM, complete with the f-word in the description! I still have both simply for the hilarity of it all.
Yep... most of the major points covered. GREAT video, and straight to the point. In the case of Gb, Gbc and Gba most of those things served me through the years. a) Check the label, even online... if there is a real photo, sometimes you can make out the 2 digit stamp impresss on the cover. b) Check the plastic is not flat, and the "nintendo GAME BOY" is complete and with the proper font. c) Checking the board is always definitive. But point a and b reduce the chances of getting a bootleg online. Never buy without a photo, and never buy from china or hong kong.
Ohhh man, I got burned on a case of Zelda phantom hourglass for DS. Fortunately I had the money that it didn't kill me for jumping the gun. Looking to buy TMNT IV right now, which is what sent me to your video, looking at a cartridge on ebay that has NO sticker on the back, it's all embossed and I don't ever remember seeing that before.
A while back I actually bought a PlayStation 3 controller off of eBay for $30 and when it came in I thought it looked legit, but I noticed something was off when I tried playing Little Big Planet and Sackboy's head was constantly looking down and to the right. Realizing something was wrong I turned the system off, unscrewed the back of the controller and found it was missing one of the rumble motors and the battery was half the size of a real one and was stuck to the board with electrical tape.
Pay attention to the detail is the most important thing. Ideally, you should buy from a local seller who uses their own images instead of 'stock images'.
Thanks for the video NESComplex. I just purchased two metroid games and after watching your video discovered they were fake! Luckily I was able to get a full refund from the seller.
Wait what? They can fake Mega Man X3 now? I thought X2 and X3 were unreproducible because of their special chips. I've never seen any fakes before. There must have been a breakthrough in repro science.......
thanks i just found out that all my pokemon gba games are fake. then i figured out both my castlevanias are fake and my metroid games. wow i own 10 fake games. all bought them on ebay. like 5 a pop .
That’s funny. I once got a fake snes2. The box was fake! Lots of spelling errors and lacked the cut out to read the serial number of the console. Crazy people put the efforts into faking a box.
Continued they have notches on the back of them street fighter 2 turbo has moulded English writing not Japanese printed sticker and the printed front labels a the way they're cut and b the printing.
I recently received a clearly fake Majyuuou Super Famicom cartridge from Japan. The only real feature was likely the cartridge shell. I received a full refund after eBay stepped in.
Those globs are called blacktop chips which are literally microchips with rubber cement in Lou of proper protective casing and are exclusive to counterfeit Nintendo games because the black top chip is designed discentagrate so there is no proof of Bebe's kid's.
Im sure your cleaning videos helped me to get it in gear and clean all my personal collection. I'll credit you, NesComplex, on those actions that lead to me getting hired at 1UP Games. Thank YOU.
I think the hilarity of that of that fake Bonks Adventure is they already went through the trouble of shelling with a authentic NES game so why the fake back label? Like just buy a $5 double dribble or something and it can be even more real without such a obvious flaw. Although, people will inevitably open it so it might not even be worth it.
I have a second release super castlevania 4. I bought it off eBay and didn’t realize what I had until I compared it with my two other first release super castlevania carts as they are the older plastic shell. I was kinda pissed and took it to my friend who’s an expert on these games and he looked at it and said it’s real right away. He even took it apart and showed me the circuit board and all the signs it’s real. It turns out that Nintendo released second issue games through a company named Majestico from Mexico. I swear that super castlevania cart that’s the second gen game shell sounds a little off and I noticed smaller details that’s also off.
The only time I've seen the security stickers was from blockbuster, hollywood video or some of the other more serious game rental places. If you messed with the sticker it usually meant an extra fee for trying to tamper with a game or vhs.
Make sure you get a game bit screwdriver. It’s almost impossible to fake the circuit board. At least with Nintendo games. The best way is to have at least one legit cartridge to reference. The boards of different games will look a little different but you’ll be able to tell if ones fake
Any tips on how to identify reproduction boxes of nes games? I recently bought a complete in box Mario 3 but it seems too good condition and I'm wondering if it's fake.
I’ve seen a lot of snes games on eBay that obviously are using plastic screws.... but then say whether or not if it’s authentic. I’m almost 100% sure they never used plastic screws.
Great tips. I'm almost at the point where I prefer worn labels on carts and price tags on older boxes just to lend to authenticity. So many fakes out there.
Dusty! A winner is you! I've been seeing that comment... it's an interesting point. I wonder how many counterfeiters intentionally distress their fakes?
counterfeits are gaining ground due to greedy scalpers, and in most cases they actually run better than originals due to them using outdated 90s chipsets.
I might be wrong but I do believe there are some legit games that have the two digit numbers are are printed rather than branded/stamped into the label.
NESComplex ive always been good at spotting fakes but there is a ton of people who have no clue they have a fake. If you bought the cheapest listing from ebay and it shipped from china its not probably real. I will share with my friends. I only have 2 friends though.
Yes it is! He's right next to Cobra Commander (I love them a Latta) I have him complete, but i didn't put in the missiles. I didn't want them to fire off behind the shelves.
I got a bootleg EVO: The Search for Eden for SNES, and it actually destroyed my SNES. Tried it, the SNES started putting out weird colors, then it died.
Ive encountered a fake megaman x recently and the reseller tried to play it off as he didnt know it was a megaman x like he didnt know the worth the bin had nothing but sports games and i seen a megaman x at first i was excited but then i started to look at the cartridge abit closer and well the screws were plastic so i passed on it plus the label didnt look very authentic sadly someone else bought it probably without knowing it was a fake
excellent video. would love to see more videos with fakes to see some other common things to look for. or would that just give the evil people ideas? thanks.
Evil people are always trying to be one step ahead. I think if you open the cart and compare the boards that’ll solve 95% of the problems. The other 5% is repro labels
Totally! I have everything on a Raspberry Pi but i still like to collect. It's fun, but it's also an investment! If a collector ever needs the cash they can always sell them
I've fortunately avoided counterfeits for the most part. The one time I got burned was a bootleg of Metroid Zero Mission. Had to pay 3x to get a legit copy afterwards.
You should mention that there are made in Mexico games on SNES that have crap labels and some may think they are fake, along with black & white manual.
I have noticed a shit ton of fakes comming from asia and also the middle east. Easy way if buying online. If the region isent correct then its more then likely fake. Ie a ntsc game comming from a pal region
