Ever bought any fake games? Any bootlegs and repros are interesting but particularly fakes trying to pass themselves off as the real thing are.
What fakes have you seen? Do you own any?
Seems like GBA and DS have so many fakes on the market it’s harder to get a hold of a real game sometimes, especially for Pokémon.
my favorite flavor of bootleg game is probably pirates cramming Half Life/Quake/Doom/whatever mods onto a CD/DVD and trying to pass it off as legit:
what is DALEK unbidden? who knows. i’ve heard of (and played) most of the mods on these discs, but these bootleg discs from Russia/Ukraine serve as highly interesting examples of modding bricolage. sometimes a pirate will just cram a mod no one has played or heard of onto a pirate disc, and it’s entirely possible an .iso of that specific disc might become the only known accessible method of rediscovering that mod
It’s less a bootleg and more a copy of Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa with a NES adapter attached to it, but I remember renting something like this from a local video store as a kid (technically it listed it as Super Mario Bros 4: Baby Mario). You’d say “well even as a kid you should be able to realize that something was off” and you’d be right… but the same rental place at the same time got a copy of the Japanese version of SMB3 several months before it came out in the US so it was just possible enough.
I used to order really really cheap used DVDs from a site called Glyde (I dunno if they’re around anymore, last I checked they just did cell phone trade ins and gave up on CDs/DVDs/games years ago). I ordered a copy of DBZ Supersonic Warriors 2 for the DS and got a pretty obvious bootleg. Sent it back and that user got banned. Whoops!
I got a burned copy of some 0079 Gundam game for Playstation from a guy who got it in Pakistan when he visited relatives one year, that was kinda odd. Worked since I was using a serial swap cart to play imported DBZ games.
But intentionally? Just translated repros of Clock Tower and Marvellous: Another Treasure Island, for my Super Nt, right before I got a Mister and then never went back to it 
similar to the pc first person shooter discs above, in the middle east, africa, and south america, there’s a whole industry of weird ps2 hacks. the most common base games, as far as i can tell, are gta san andreas and dragonball z budokai tenkaichi 3.
oh, and hacks of mega drive games to give them the title screens of other games, usually from russia. so like, i think there’s been lotus turbo challenge turned into gran turismo, crack down turned into metal gear solid, etc.
i was actually surprised when i went to a retro game market near my house recently, and there were boxed copies of metal gear for mega drive, and they actually contained a fanmade port, and not just crack down with a changed title screen.
back when pokemon gold/silver were new, a friend came back from a holiday in spain with a 2-in-1 cartridge containing both of them, with a nonsense translation. while the cartridge itself had no save battery, it did keep a save going for as long as the game boy’s battery lasted, which is something i hadn’t encountered before or since.
most interesting of all are completely original games, like pokemon stadium for mega drive and snes, and mulan, also for mega drive.
one time in 1999? in the year 2000? i saw an ebay auction for a burned copy of Firepro Wrestling G, which i was never able to locate on irc bot transfers, public ftp sites, couldn’t rent&rip a copy from blockbuster, etc. Rare data, advanced wrestling. So I messaged this guy on ebay and begged him to let me trade him a large number (15? 20?) of my own previously burned copies of various playstation games, for this burned copy of Firepro Wrestling G. He eventually agreed, and then one day Firepro Wrestling G came in the mail end of story.
Bought a burned and maybe cracked copy of Command and Conquer Red Alert in high-school for like 10 bux. Played it for years. Pretty sure I got on battle.net with it with no problems.
Local Rhino Games used to stock blatantly fake GBA games which I thought were way cooler than regular units. Talking wrong color plastic and wonk labels.
