I think he believed in it too. The problem is that, like %99 of gamers, he severely underrates what it actually takes to make shit like this. In his particularly ignorant and aparently uneducatable case, he never actually said *what* the thing was, definitively, at any point in time, during the year he was talking about VGS shit. He waited for a millionaire to give him the money he needed to pay other people to do literally every single thing, and they never came. The classic American "fast buck" pipe dream. The same motivation that drives millions of morons to casinos and lotto shacks, having zero interest in reality, not even enough to help it grant fantasies. Perma-dumb.
I don't honestly think he set out to scam anyone, but he's so f*cking dumb and mentally ill that, when faced with certain defeat dozens of times, he just kept perpetuating the myth of the Retro VGS and anyone who didn't believe was a hater. It eventually morphed into what was basically a scam by the end.
He probably thinks he's the 21st century Preston Tucker, pulling all sorts of shenanigans to move the project forward...but Tucker actually did have a few good ideas, he had engineers and designers on staff, and did actually crank out a few dozen cars. This guy only ever succeeded in recasting Jag shells, which would have already been done ages earlier if those molds were in China like the molds for PlayStation, Dreamcast, etc.