Man arrested for selling NES roms in Japan

The NES (aka Famicom) is, of course,fondly remembered in Japan. Maybe that's why a 33-year old man from Tochigi prefecture decided he could make a little money on the side by selling pirated NES games.

The man in question sold burned collections of NES roms on CD-Rs via a cell phone-accessible online auction site. Billed as a “Collection of over 2000 Famicom games,” these burned discs sold for anywhere between 60,000 and 74,800 Yen (about $700 to $850) between September of 2009 and September of 2010. Since ROMS are easily found online, the man's only cost was the CD-R. That's a 7480% profit margin.

When you're selling to the kind of person dumb enough to pay hundreds of dollars for NES roms, the money flows, apparently - and the duped customers didn't even get what they paid for. Each of the discs had only 1,135 games on them.

The unemployed man's name was not released by the police. His only comment about his crime? “I was broke so I did it to make money.”

[Source: Game Business(Japanese)]

Jan 13, 2011