So apparently when I was away from the forum a bit the TG-16 turned into the damned Neo f*cking Geo and pirate shit is everywhere and noobs are getting owned. f*ck.
So I'm starting this thread as a place to examine where we are at with fakes and whatever in 2015. We can talk about specific scams but I'm more interested in prognostication.
A while back there was the big blow up over US Aero Fighters 3 for AES. A nearly iron clad source for a case of this never released game fooled a great number of guys out of many thousands of dollars. When this was going on, when the game was thought by many to be real and by many to be fake, it occurred to me that in the case of many of these things we will eventually get to the point where spotting fakes will be impossible because there will be very few differences that don't require a professional archivist and a scanning electron microscope.
So what happens then?
Well, luckily there is some precedence for this. Collectards have been with us for centuries at least since the time of the dawn of the USA if not much earlier. There are even some historical parallels to what we are seeing now where the game is mostly real (ie: the CD) but the case and whatever is fake and how collectors and the market react to this.
A while back I read a book called Banvard's Folly. In this book there is a chapter about This guy:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Henry_IrelandLong story short, he faked a lot of Shakespere collectible junk like hotel receipts, signed plays, etc. Skepticism was much less common in those days and he got away with a lot. It's a long story and a very good one but if you want to know more, just read the book. It's terrific. What I want to mention what I found most interesting is that his fakes are actually worth money now too. This is because there are other things that can make something valuable to a collectards. Even if its fake, it's a fascinating fake because of how many dudes this guy fooled. He was more significant in the world of collectable Shakespere shit than Shakespear was for a time just because of the volume this guy produced.
So compare that to something like the bootleg Sapphires dickface made. Obviously they aren't worth hundreds like a legit copy, but what *are* they worth? Well, it's a stamped CD with Sapphire on it. That's worth something. It looks %99.9 identical to a real one and unless you have one to compare it to or somebody tells you, you'll never know. So the value is between $1 and $600 (or whatever a real one costs) but where, exactly? At one point I said "$37" and paid that, but now I'm sure it's more. A fake does a better job than a CD-R does after all. If you can fool someone into believing it's fake, then it's worth $600, but what if it's known to be a fake?
Those fakes are easy to get, but what about 10 years from now, 20 years from now? The real copies will be as hard to find as ever before, the fakes will then be well known as fakes, but still coveted because of how fun they are to play and also because of the weird cultural significance.
What about when we get to the point where even the copies of Monster Maker are fake and represent the majority of TG-16 games?
The only way to know will be to wait and see, but I still find it interesting to talk about.
There are so many different moving targets when trying to pin down something like this. As time goes by, everything is changing. As we become more of a download-only society, the appeal of anything that exists on a physical format is constant changing and the "noob market" is always growing, never shrinking. Soon the people who actually have memories of playing TG-16 in-period will be a tiny minority. I often get pissed when collectards get into a scene I'm involved in who didn't even the shit exist a year or two earlier. It's hard to hear someone tell you what your collection is worth when it's older than they are! However, some day us old timers will be all dead and EVERYONE who collects TG-16 will be one of those noobs who never say the stuff in its prime. The definition of "expert" will have to change...and what's he going to consider valuable?
