Beware of REPRO, FAKE or COUNTERFEIT Brazilian Atari Games

TomBrazil · June 7, 2021

Hello friends,

As I posted in AA FB Forum, this topic deserves your attention here as well:

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About BRAZILIAN REPRO labels and carts: I wanna state very clearly that I am AGAINST this practice. I am posting this cause recently a member posted some repro pictures using my name and mentioning our local Brazilian forum (AtariBrazil) as if we were endorsing it.

Problem is... one thing can be used for good (recovering carts with no label, preserving history, etc) or for evil (selling counterfeit products). The second is what I have been observing the most lately.

BEWARE of buying any Atari stuff from Brazil: the market has been flooded with FAKE LABELS in recent years. I have even bought back some Brazilian carts from a very reliable AA member, only to find that some had fake labels. He didn't know, but was fooled by some Brazilian seller.

That's why buying stuff in Brazil has become particularly risky. And, with incentive (like those repro label projects), this can lead to far worse scenarios very bad for collectors, like not knowing the authentic from the fake.

So, that's why I do not endorse it. Thank you very much.

I'm also quoting @lazzeri:

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Unfortunately I must agree that this “repro Brazilian” has gone way off hand.

At first we had horrendous replacement labels. Those were pretty easy to spot and only served to make the owner looks foolish.

Then labels started getting better and some counterfeit of the really rare games (like the rarest CCE) started showing up. For instance, pretty much anyone can take a $5 Fast Eddie CCE Supergame and change its label for the $100 thematic one. That was a real kick in the nuts.

Lately we started seeing a flood of boxes too. And those are being professionally printed on high-end machines to match originals at a near 1:1 quality.

The maker of those repros first stated that the boxes would be clearly labeled as such. That reassured me for a while - he sent me pics showing those watermarks. Unfortunately those were way easier to remove than I hoped but hey, that showed some commitment.

But later on that changed to “full repro”. Box is marked but manual and labels are not. So that changed everything to me.

As an alert, those are the manufacturers that are being “reproed” as of June 2021:

- CCE

- Polyvox

- Tron

- Microsoft / Onyx

- Grow

One must take extra care when getting those. You should assume a decent chance of a counterfeit, especially if it looks too good to be true - it probably isn’t.

Really dark times.