Italian police seize £40,000,000 worth of fake retro consoles

Over £40 cardinal worthy of counterfeit retro consoles person been seized by constabulary successful Italy, featuring games similar Street Fighter and Super Mario Bros.

The terms of retro video games has ballooned implicit the past decade, particularly erstwhile it comes to sealed boxed copies of games that are either uncommon oregon person humanities significance.

In 2021, a pristine transcript of Super Mario Bros. sold for $2 million (£1.44 million) successful the US during an auction. Just a fewer months prior, a copy of Super Mario 64 sold for $1.56 cardinal (£1.12m).

The consoles themselves are often worthy a batch too, if they’re successful bully moving order, and that makes the imaginable of fakes inevitable – thing which has travel to airy via a busted video crippled trafficking ringing successful Italy.

According to Turin police, astir 12,000 consoles holding implicit 47 cardinal pirated games were seized past week. The machines were faked versions of Nintendo, Sega, and Atari consoles, which were fitted with non-certified batteries and circuits that did not conscionable EU information standards.

It’s said the consoles, which were sourced from China and sold successful specialised shops and online, included pirated versions of Super Mario Bros. and Street Fighter, among galore different games from the 1980s and 1990s.

As reported by the BBC, the haul is estimated to beryllium worthy implicit €47.5m (£40 million) successful total, which includes the worth of the consoles and licences for the pirated games.

Nine Italian nationals person been arrested and charged with trading successful counterfeited goods implicit the incident. If recovered guilty, they look up to 8 years successful prison.

Police authorities the seized items person been destroyed.

While galore bargain retro games purely based connected their monetary worth, immoderate collectors question retired titles based connected their ain nostalgia. Earlier this year, a collector bought a transcript of Castlevania connected the NES for £70,900 to honour his mum.

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