Your Pokémons, Let You Show Me Them Oh Hey These Are Fake
Nintendo just sent out a press release crowing about big busts against those who broker in counterfeit Pokémon trading cards.
BELLEVUE, Wash.—April 7, 2008 – Pokémon USA, Inc., a worldwide leader in trading card games, today announced the results of recent anti-piracy actions taken in cooperation with Nintendo of America Inc. to combat the production and distribution of counterfeit Pokémon® Trading Card Game products. On March 26, law enforcement officials in New York raided seven stores known to be selling fraudulent Pokémon Trading Card Game merchandise. Thousands of products were seized and several arrests were made. In early April, one action at a production facility in China secured nearly 1.2 million counterfeit cards and investigations continue.These bits of paper with easily copied numbers and art, made valuable only through contrived scarcity will not— I repeat: will not—be allowed to fall in the hands of our children, or as Nintendo prefers to call them, "Our Lil'est Consumers."During the past 16 months, more than 47 million counterfeit products have been seized at production facilities in Thailand, Singapore, Poland, Italy, the Czech Republic, Australia, and China. One seizure in China in 2007 netted more than 26 million illegally produced cards. Nintendo and Pokémon will continue to target the retailers and manufacturers trafficking in counterfeit Pokémon product.
“Pokémon wants to send a message to importers and producers that we will not stand for the distribution of fraudulent Pokémon product,” [This aggression will not stand, man! – Ed.] says Pokémon spokesperson, J.C. Smith. “Pokémon is committed to ensuring our fans receive the quality product they've come to expect.”
I tease—mostly—but I just love the incongruence of a personified corporate Pokémon raising its electric yellow paw to the heavens and bellowing out a warning of "no quarter."
Image: Pokemonholic.com
the latest
latest episodes
As long as I can still get Cute and Fuzzy Cockfighting Seizure Monsters I'm ok.
A friend of mine's little brother bought some yugio (I think it is a good thing I can't spell that) cards from a flea market. When he opened them up, they looked as if they had been machine translated by someone who didn't speak Japanese or English. The results were hilarious. He wanted to throw them away and was very mad about them, so I took them - I've been meaning to blog about them but now I don't even know where I put them.
Back then, collecting cards helped me differentiate the counterfeit from the real. A few decades later, it helped me understand perfectionism and details in graphic design does make a difference!
It was always an educational/annoying debate/experience when a kid used a counterfeit card to win, and the other kid argued that the card was invalid ("It did not have the power! It's a fake!").
I've recently started playing the card game again, and after throwing together a deck I notice some of the cards just didn't look right at first glance.
that's when I remembered that I got some spanish and italian back in the day and apparently just threw them in the shoebox with the others. . . oops
Also when I first started playing I only had like two and a half decks worth of cards that didn't even go together because I was kinda poor. So later on when the really shallow trendy kids started getting rid of their cards I'd trade them some game demo discs that at that time were already five years old; so they were mostly DOS games, and this was the time when people were switching over to win98.
Let's just say I traded alotta stacks of paper for some frustration on a disc