Gaming

Inside the $100K+ forgery scandal that’s roiling PC game collecting

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Before last month, Enrico Ricciardi was one of the most respected members of a niche community of classic PC game collectors, with a practically unrivaled collection of rarities that he regularly bragged about on social media. Today, he’s a pariah in that community, the central figure in a wide-ranging alleged forgery scandal that has changed the way many collectors look at their hobby. At least seven PC game collectors have publicly or privately identified dozens of suspected forgeries they say Ricciardi traded or sold as far back as 2015 and as recently as last month. Collectors estimate that those trades and sales include games that would be valued at well over $100,000 total on the open market if they were authentic. Ricciardi told Ars he is also a victim who simply unknowingly passed along suspect collectibles without checking them thoroughly enough. Regardless, the overwhelming evidence suggesting that there are many forgeries circulating through the world of rare PC games has shaken the trust of that community to the core. "It’s like finding a double agent in an intelligence organization," collector Dan Chisarick told Ars. "He knows the holistic value of classic games and the kind of damage that fake copies can cause."

A rift in the community

The world of PC game collecting has yet to attract the kind of eye-popping, seven-figure-dollar sales seen with some rare Nintendo games. Still, a committed collecting community has developed around older PC titles, with some people paying thousands of dollars for intact disks, packaging, and materials of computer games from the '70s, '80s, and '90s. Collector Stephane Racle told Ars that games that used to sell for tens of dollars now routinely go for "hundreds" on sites like eBay. "PC game collecting is niche, but it's growing because console collectors are finishing their collections and looking for the next frontier," said Joel McCoy, founder of the 6,000-member strong Big Box PC Game Collectors Facebook group (BBPCGC). "And there are few games as rare as old PC games."
The members of the BBPCGC group are "generally friends," Racle said, and they are happy to share their big finds and arrange trades or purchases with fellow members (McCoy made it clear to Ars that the group does "not take any responsibility for transactions among members," though). Trading in a "fairly congenial sort of community" like that, "you form relationships with people" that aren't possible when buying from random eBay sellers, Racle said. "It’s not all about money… You [sometimes] get two people who agree on a trade, and no money changes hands... You kind of assume that everything you get is legitimate." Collectors told Ars that this is an assumption they will no longer make. On May 30, the BBPCGC published an extensive set of documents outlining evidence of forgeries within three members’ collections, all tied to trades and sales made by Ricciardi. Ars also reviewed similar evidence recently published by Racle (who was coincidentally investigating some of his own items without knowledge of the wider BBPCGC investigation) and provided privately by other collectors, some of whom asked to remain anonymous. Speaking to Ars, McCoy made it clear that while all of these alleged forgeries came through Ricciardi, the BBPCGC can’t say for sure that Ricciardi was the one actually making them. McCoy said the group’s investigation was focused exclusively on whether Ricciardi was "selling and trading fake games." "That was proven and is grounds enough to be ejected from the group," McCoy said. "I believe [Ricciardi] should have been able to spot fakes," he added.

A once-trusted source

Ricciardi, who served as a long-standing moderator of the BBPCGC until May 29, was widely considered an authority in the highly specialized PC game collecting space, especially regarding early Ultima and Sierra titles. One PC game collector who asked to remain anonymous said Ricciardi was one of the "known experts in the community that people go to for verification and to compare possible purchases… that is why this has the potential to be so incredibly damaging." There are public examples of discussions in which Ricciardi pointed out suspected forgeries from others as well. A fashion photographer by day, Ricciardi also contributed illustrations for Through the Moongate, a series of books telling the story of Ultima creator Richard Garriott and his first studio, Origin Systems. Collectors said that Ricciardi’s strong ties and long history with the collecting world made it difficult to believe that he would betray the community. "I've known [Ricciardi] for some years now, so I thought we were friends, and he's been putting himself out there as such an authority," said collector Kevin Ng. "It was hard to believe because he's a game collector who has been known to other collectors for years—decades, even," Chisarick added. "He was a friend of mine, and I considered his collection to be incredible," McCoy said. "If I could have afforded to buy these types of games, I would have bought from him personally and not thought twice about it."
On the other hand, collector Ian Baronofsky said he "found [Ricciardi] to be suspicious from the start." "When he started posting photos of his collection, I was baffled as to where he had sourced it all," Baronofsky said. But "people have a tendency to trust those with an established reputation," collector Antoine Vignau added.

A crack in the case

For some of the questionable items that have been tied to Ricciardi, the evidence of forgery is strong. Take, for instance, the copy of Chambers of Xenobia that Racle received in a trade with Ricciardi last month. Racle told Ars he’d never even seen an authentic, original copy of the little-known Apple II RPG since he first heard about the game in 2003. So when he received his long-sought Xenobia from Ricciardi through an intermediary on May 17, he excitedly tweeted about his new acquisition, calling it a game "for which no [other] original copies seem[ed] to exist." But when Racle made a disk image of his rare find for preservation purposes, that excitement quickly turned to disgust and distrust. With the help of an Apple II preservation expert going by the handle "4am," Racle found that the disk he received contained a cracked version of the game, complete with a loading screen sporting the message "Presented by the Data Killer."
Needless to say, that message would not appear on an authentic 1981 version of the disk with its original copy protection intact. It does, however, appear on cracked copies of the game that have been floating around the Internet for years. In addition to the cracked version of Xenobia, Racle said he also received a copy of Apple II RPG Fracas from Ricciardi. That copy contained a disk operating system called Pronto-DOS, Racle said, which is suspicious because that OS wasn’t created until 1982, two years after the release of Fracas. John Morris, an Apple II expert and the creator of Apple disk copying utility Applesauce, examined data Racle provided from his Chambers of Xenobia and Fracas disks. By looking at the specific data padding patterns in both cracked copies, Morris told Ars he could determine that both disks were created by the same source using the same tools. This is despite the fact that the games seemingly did not come to Ricciardi from the same lot (according to the person who sold a copy of Xenobia to Ricciardi). The data discrepancies extend to a supposed cassette tape copy of the early resource management game Santa Paravia and Fiumaccio that Racle said he received from Ricciardi. Instead of game data, the tape contains "mostly junk noise" with a few moments of what sounds like people talking in the background, Racle said.

Going to print

There are other, less obvious signs of forgery across much of the printed matter that came with some of the games Ricciardi traded and sold. One consistent discrepancy in many items is the presence of a nearly microscopic "dot-pattern" of small cyan and magenta bubbles printed on areas that should be pure white. That "tells me they're basically prints of scans [since] single color printing shouldn't have those dots," said Ng, who kicked off the BBPCGC’s forgery investigation after noticing this issue on some games he obtained from Ricciardi. Other printed materials from Ricciardi differ significantly from known authentic copies in terms of color or print sharpness. Some disk labels vary slightly in size or shape from known authentic copies or have "smudges and other signs of age that have clearly been printed on them when you zoom in," as Racle put it. "Another consistent thing are bent edges on manuals and covers," said German collector Dominik Reichardt, who says he also received forged materials from Ricciardi. "A lot of the forged ones have all four edges bent. I guess this is for the forger to mark his work, to prevent accidentally selling the good copy or buying back the forgeries on eBay or [something]." Alone, these and other small differences might be attributable to changes in print runs or age-related weathering. "Publishers at that time weren't entirely uniform in their materials and methods," as collector Ian Baronofsky said. But seeing the same issues across so many games sourced from a single individual, a clear pattern starts to emerge.

A Fabriano fabrication?

For Racle and other collectors I talked to, one of the most telling bits of forgery evidence was a watermark that becomes visible when looking at the scans of the protective folder that came with Xenobia. That watermark reads "Fabriano," the name of a high-end Italian paper company that has existed for hundreds of years but wasn’t exactly a big source of commercial paper in the US 40 years ago. "I’m quite certain that [Xenobia publisher] Avant-Garde, a small company out of Oregon, did not use Fabriano paper for their early 1980s game packaging," Racle said.
Importantly, Racle said he found the watermark before he knew he was trading with Ricciardi, who resides in Italy. Only after finding the watermark did Racle ask David Bitton (who was acting as the trusted intermediary in the trade and confirmed Racle’s timeline) where the game came from. Ricciardi told Ars he had "no idea, honestly," about how that watermark may have gotten on the folder. "That whole thing about Italian paper... it's too many coincidences," Racle said. Despite all of that evidence, most collectors I talked to don’t think Ricciardi traded exclusively in forgeries. Racle said he also examined a copy of Enchanted Island that he received from Ricciardi last month, and "everything seemed to indicate that it was authentic." [Update: The day after this story was published, Racle posted an update suggesting his copy of Enchanted Island "is a forgery too."] Ng added that he couldn’t find anything wrong with a copy of Ultima II he got from Ricciardi.

Just another victim?

"The last three days were, apart my father and mother's death, the worst in my entire life," Ricciardi told me. Ricciardi said that before he talked to me, "it must be clear I am not a forger" (while Ricciardi's position was clear, Ars didn't agree to any preconditions for our chat). Instead, he insisted to Ars that he is "the victim of fraud from a person." At most, he said, he is guilty of unknowingly passing along items forged by others.
"Like everyone, I’m sure, I bought, in [the last] 25 years, things that can be fake," he told Ars over Facebook Messenger. That said, Ricciardi added that he wasn’t sure all of the alleged forgeries he traded and sold were actually forgeries. "Some of them had clear evidence, some not," he said. (Many of Ricciardi’s quotes throughout this article have been cleaned up to fix typos and small grammar issues.)
Ricciardi stressed multiple times that he has offered to return traded games or refund sales for anyone who suspects he provided them with a forgery (multiple affected collectors confirmed to Ars that he had made them this offer, and some have already received their traded games back). While Ricciardi said the offer "doesn't mean I admitted they were all fakes," he said that "I have faith in them, and I accepted to [give] back suspicious games, and they are getting games that they are satisfied with."

Looking for "Mister X"

Initially, Ricciardi told me that "a good part" of the alleged forgeries he said he unknowingly passed along came from a trader he called "Mister X." This shadowy source sent him about 25 games over the last six or seven years, Ricciardi said, arranging the trades via email and shipping anonymously from a PO box. Mister X’s email address "magically doesn't work anymore since the tsunami started a few days ago," Ricciardi said. When asked to share evidence of his email correspondence with Mister X, Ricciardi said his lawyer had told him not to. Ricciardi also denied requests to provide a full list of the alleged forgeries that he could source to Mister X, to share more information about his interactions with Mister X, or even to provide the name of his lawyer.
But Ricciardi also said that at least some of the alleged forgeries he traded in did not come to him from Mister X. Those include the Chambers of Xenobia that he says he later sent to Racle; Ricciardi confirmed that he bought the copy from a well-known collector (who also directly confirmed to Ars that he sold a copy of the game to Ricciardi but asked to remain anonymous). Ricciardi also said a copy of Mystery House he sent to Ng came from a Yahoo Japan auction years earlier. McCoy said that, when confronted, Ricciardi cited "an old man in Los Angeles" as the source of some of the alleged forgeries the BBPCGC has seen. Ng said that Ricciardi told him that the copy of Akalabeth he sent came from a trader in Germany.
Despite the multiplicity of alleged forgeries that Ricciardi admits came to him from numerous sources, he insisted that "surely 99 percent of them [in my collection] are totally original." How could he be so sure? "Because when I collected those games, I was 40. Now I am 62, tired, stressed by three years [of] COVID, and I am paying [for] the decrease of my skills [in recognizing forgeries]. Maybe my eyes, too," he said. Every collector I talked to had trouble believing Ricciardi’s story of being an unknowing victim. "I find it hard to believe he had that much bad luck," Ng said. "And somehow I ended up with multiple fake things from multiple sources." "He has claimed to be an expert on these games and was the go-to guy to see whether a game was a forgery," Reichardt added. "How can you cheat someone like this?"

The telltale baggie?

Despite his argument that he is also a victim, Ricciardi also called into question some of the presented evidence that games he sent were forgeries in the first place. "[In my opinion], some of them look more 'original' in my copy than the one declared as original," he told me of the visual evidence presented by the BBPCGC group. "It's not like a Picasso painting. In those years, little companies printed on different material frequently."
Regarding an alleged forgery of a cassette copy of Escape from Mt. Drash, Ricciardi said that "to print words on a plastic cassette would be a nightmare. I am not Steven Spielberg." And regarding the Chamber of Xenobia he sent to Racle, he said, "I never declared and I will never declare [the Xenobia I received] was a forgery," Ricciardi said. When confronted about the apparent cracked version of the game that was on Racle’s Xenobia disk, Ricciardi said, "I had and I have no idea" how that happened and that he only knew about that cracked version "from Stephane [Racle’s] words." When I asked if he thought Racle was lying about the cracked version, he said I should "stop trying to put wrong words in [his] mouth." "Surely thousands of times when a game in a floppy doesn't work anymore for any reason, there is the chance for the owner to put in it the game, again, cracked or not." Ricciardi said. When I pointed out that such disk rewriting would make the game no longer truly authentic, especially if a cracked copy replaced the unmodified original, Ricciardi insisted that I was "try[ing] to work against [him]."
At one point, I showed Ricciardi comparisons between photos of the Xenobia he had received (provided directly by the collector who sold it to Ricciardi) and the product Racle received. The images included a number of subtle but noticeable differences, including the rounding of the corners and the alignment of the label on the disk; the presence or absence of "dimples" along the edge of the disk; and the presence or absence of a small black notch on the right side of in the final "A" on the title on the original Xenobia folder. Asked to account for those apparent differences noted by Racle, Ricciardi said that the "lights are different" in the photos and that "a 100 percent comparison between different [pictures] is impossible." In any case, he insisted, "I didn’t touch it… I didn’t change anything."
I then pointed out that pictures of the Xenobia folder Ricciardi received showed the game in a baggie with a distinctive red stripe across the top (small-batch games of the era were sometimes distributed in baggies before the "big box" became a PC standard). The Xenobia baggie Racle received did not have such a stripe. Only then did Ricciardi admit that he had changed the bag, "thinking it was not important, and, come on, it's a bag." "I took that bag because I liked it," he said. "I just changed the baggie. I think it's not a crime." When I pointed to Ricciardi’s earlier statements about not changing anything, he said that he "was referring to the game." "I didn't change the game," he said. "The bag is something that contains the game. We are exaggerating now." "I took a baggie," Ricciardi admitted. "[Stephane] didn't request that baggie with a contract. I got all his games without any baggie, and I [didn't] complain."
"I'm not sure whether that should make me laugh or make me angry," Racle said when I shared Ricciardi’s baggie defense. "To me, and to everyone I've shown it to, it's 100 percent clear that the baggie and the disk [of Xenobia] are different… I can only provide the evidence and explain it in a logical manner and let people apply their judgment."

How did they miss it?

Alleged forgeries weren’t completely unheard of in PC game collecting before this latest scandal. Collector Ian Baronofsky told Ars of "a flagrantly fake Akalabeth" he found on eBay years ago, for instance. Still, some observers may find it hard to believe that so many apparent forgeries could circulate in the community for so long without anyone noticing. Part of that was just down to blind trust. "I did not think [it was] possible to create forged versions of these games," Reichardt said. "Re-creating whole games was unthinkable to me." "Making a replica of a commercial game, even a bad replica, is a ton of work," Chisarick added. "You can't really mass-produce them because there are only so many channels where you can sell them, and people talk about their collections often. If a game is extremely rare and you have five copies of it for sale, there had better be a good reason why. This sort of narrows it down to a low volume of high-value titles to make it worthwhile."
McCoy said that Ricciardi often asked his trading partners to keep some of their biggest trades secret, purportedly to prevent jealousy among collectors or protect the original developers that had slipped him extra copies. "This artificially restricted public comparison and scrutiny" of some of the alleged forgeries, the BBPCGC said in a statement. Even with well-known trades, though, the small number of extant copies can make it difficult to identify forgeries when they do appear, collectors said. "Most collectors will not see one of these in their lives, let alone two or more," the BBPCGC said. "Finding examples to compare your alleged real version to is incredibly challenging." "A game like Escape from Mount Drash—there's only a handful known to exist, like less than 20, I think," McCoy told Ars. "How many of those are forgeries? We don't have an answer for that yet… The rub is, how do you scrutinize something that is essentially unique? That adds a layer of complication for a lot of people that's hard to overcome." And when it comes to looking at the data on the disks themselves, many collectors just never bothered before now. "These disks are 40 years old, and the software is widely available online via emulators at this point," the BBPCGC wrote. "'Testing a 40-year-old disk can risk damaging the disk. Further, some collectors do not have access to the computers which originally ran these games."

What now?

Thus far, no evidence has emerged that this alleged forgery scandal goes beyond games Ricciardi was involved with trading or selling. But some collectors are worried about just how widespread forgery problems could be. "I am afraid other forgeries exist," collector Antoine Vignau said. "I am always surprised by the number of Akalabeth copies out there." Baronofsky added that he was sure "there will be more forgeries to come, and unfortunately the specifics of how the forgeries were discovered will result in even better quality forgeries." The physical format of some classic computer games can also make them an easy target for forgers. "The items that tend to draw the highest prices are the earliest ones," Racle said. "And the earliest ones are the ones that were more rudimentarily packaged—photocopied sheets, that kind of thing—so they tend to be the ones that are easiest to forge." Rising prices in the marketplace may be changing the calculus of what’s worth forging, too. "While we feel our corner of the collecting world has been relatively safe,’ with prices and interest going up and people with money entering the scene, we've been concerned this could become a problem over time," Ng said. "Software collectors shouldn't be naive about the increasing sums that rare items are fetching, which puts us at risk for additional counterfeiting schemes," Baronofsky said.
Ng also echoed most collectors I talked to in saying that, while "I personally don't feel [forgeries are] widespread," the scandal should serve as "a scary wake-up call to be more vigilant as a collector." The BBPCGC has published a best practices guide to help collectors avoid being taken in by forgeries. Some collectors worry that the scandal will make people in the community less likely to share word of rare finds or high-quality scans that could potentially help forgers. But others think this incident could actually strengthen the community. "Collectors being social is what identified this incident, so I see this event as strengthening those bonds, not weakening them," Chisarick said. "While this is a blow that a long-time trusted colleague was involved, there's no reason to see this as systemic." For his part, Ricciardi told Ars that "after this nightmare… I’ve decided to stop collecting at all." Of his collection of 500 PC games, including what he says are "some of the rarest ever collected," he said that "when I die, I'll ask my wife to burn it." "You can't imagine how disgusted I am [with] everything games-related," Ricciardi said. "I am sad… terribly sad… At my age, this thing destroyed me."