If the waves of deceptive pirate shit haven't devalued Neo nothing will. Too many Neo douche nozels want to protect their purchase to the point where they don't even want to know if their stuff is fake or not. The same thing is detailed in some degree in the art world in the amazing movie F for Fake.
When I was collecting Neo Geo the only thing you have to worry about was getting freaked carts. A company Neogeofreaks.com bought up a huge amount of NOS carts and basically put stickers on the manuals or anywhere else they could not be removed. Also they were douchbags. I wonder whatever happened to those guys?
My memory has since been jogged. I forgot about them making their own inserts and such and shredding the originals among other BS. Also the Jigen incident. I cant believe i forgot about all that
ChrisR still occasionally rears his head to remind the world that they are all peons unless they have a fully corrected NGF set and a Freaked KOF 2000 blessed by the Pope. Aparently Crazy Dion is no longer winning at life to the extent that he once was and I haven't heard from him in a while. He's no longer physically threatening people and destroying irreplaceable SNK stuff and bragging about how he worked at Neo Geo Word so they gave him the floor mat.
Now we just have fakes. NGF, as gross as they are, were less interested in selling you a genuine looking fake for money than they were in selling you a something that had the NGF mystique smeared all over it and convincing you that this made it better and more exclusive than genuine stuff. That made them feel cooler and more loved than SNK themselves. Somehow people did and STILL go for this. There are people who are like, "Is my US KOF 2000 real and complete?" Not undertataing that since every copy is Freaked that there is no such thing. NGF would have us believe that there are in fact FAKE US KOF 2000s, fake things perpetrated as NGF, which is semi-fake in the first place. It's a weird world.
Now we mainly have stuff that pretends to be real, like a case of fake US Aero Fighters 3 being sold for 10s of thousands of dollars per unit to people who clearly don't ask a lot of questions.
And I say "we" somewhat disingenuously. I am not and have never been an AES collector because I was born with a dick already. I have had other SNK systems though and have been mostly lurking in the US Neo scene since the mailing list days.
I wasn't joking about the Pope, btw.