An alleged vintage gaming trafficking ring was recently busted up in Italy. Authorities say 12,000 counterfeit copies of the Atari 2600, SNES, and Sega Genesis, collectively housing millions of pirated games, have been seized and will be destroyed. Now, 12,000 fewer people will be subjected to running Super Mario Bros. on an emulator. Imagine the horror.
“Around 12,000 consoles on which more than 47 million pirated video games were illegally stored were seized, for an estimated value of more than €47.5 million (US$52.5 million),” Alessandro Langella, head of the economic crime unit for Turin’s financial police, told AFP on Friday. The downloaded games reportedly hailed from franchises like Street Fighter and Star Wars.
The fake retro consoles, meanwhile, were manufactured in China and sold online and in stores, and apparently ran afoul of EU technical and safety standards. Police arrested nine men in connection with the fake consoles, and charged them with trading in counterfeit goods.
It certainly sounds like these counterfeit consoles were your run-of-the-mill emulation devices running stolen ROMs, the type you see pop up at mall kiosks around the holidays—just potentially in plastic housings that replicated the look of the originals. While the market for vintage games has blown up in recent years, retro emulation devices on which to play your favorite childhood games on largely remain pretty cheap.
It’s unclear if Turin’s financial police have a whole special investigative unit for fighting retro gaming piracy, or if this was a bust they stumbled into while looking for more generic counterfeiting crimes. Still, 12,000 consoles is a lot. We’ll see if they eventually end up in a landfill somewhere. Somehow I think the flood of fake consoles manufactured abroad will continue.