RetroTeam itch.io Scam

RetroTeam itch.io scam

Mid August saw 3 games sold on itch.io by a new group called RetroTeam. The first was "Sword of Destiny", an oldschool platforms and ladders game that perfectly captured the oldschool mid 80's feel. The second was "Cosmic Lander", an unforgiving inertia game that was redolent of post commercial era homebrew. Then "Zetrix" followed, a tetris game similar to so many 1990s Russian clones.

And strangley enough, it soon transpired that that was EXACTLY what they were! Sword of Destiny was a cracked version of a 1985 Croatian game called "Cudesni Mac", Cosmic Lander was a crack of a 1993 Russian game called "Soft Landing" and Zetrix was the 1995 Belarusian "Ammytris". The only changes were loading screen, font and translated text...

At least BITD, Harry S Price put in a bit of effort!

Thanks to the eagled-eyed people on the SC forum that spotted this scam, and subsequently reported it to itch.io, the Retroteam page is now a 404 error. Hopefully we don't see more of this. The most worrying part is that it's likely to have been done by a member of the community.

If any of the issues in this article affect you, like the suffering of losing money to that crook, then please contact the Woot counselling service (I've got to recoup that fiver somehow!) Maybe this is karma for all those playground pirated tapes I had...