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SHOPS in Tsim Sha Tsui's notorious tourist honey trap, Nathan Road, are openly flouting the law by selling illegally produced computer games.

  The target for the cheats is the giant Nintendo corporation and its Game Boy series of products.

  An investigation by the South China Morning Post has discovered six shops selling scores of bootleg copies in the retail complex under the Hyatt Regency Hotel and on the opposite side of the road.

  Further inquiries revealed other outlets selling the illicit goods in Wan Chai, Causeway Bay, Shamshuipo and Western.

  The huge sums Nintendo earns from its hand-held Game Boy computers are being hit because of the counterfeiting.

  On November 18, Nintendo reported that pre-tax profits for the six months to September this year had tumbled by 24 per cent to US$566 million (HK$4.37 billion), the first such decline for a decade.

  The corporation blames the high yen, which has hit exports, and low interest rates, which have reduced income from bank deposits.

  But bootlegging and competition have also played their part, according to market analysts.

  Game Boys are battery-operated, pocket-size computers into which game cassettes can be inserted.

  Nintendo's marketing strategy is to sell games individually at a recommended price varying from $79 to $229 depending upon their complexity and popularity.

  But legitimate games are being mass-copied, bulk-loaded on to cassettes and sold at a massive discount.

  In a visit to Tsim Sha Tsui, the Post was offered cassettes containing anything from eight to 128 games.

  The cassette with 128 games is offered for sale at $850 but bargaining reduced the price in some shops to as little as $450.

  That means that each individual game could be obtained for the equivalent of less than $4 - a discount of $96 on the average price of a legitimate cartridge.

  If the full price had been paid for each game, assuming the average cost is $100 per game, the customer would have had to fork out a staggering $12,800 - nearly 30 times the price of bootleg copies.

  There is little to distinguish the bootlegs from genuine cassettes. They are identical in design although the quality of the graphics on the boxes is generally poorer. The bootleg copies the Post bought performed just as well as the genuine ones.

  The disadvantages for the consumer are that no instructions come with the counterfeit copies and they possess no manufacturer's guarantee. Some of the games are also exclusively in Japanese.

  All the shops visited displayed genuine Nintendo games in the window or near the entrance but when a potential customer expressed an interest, the salesman would steer them to bootlegs either kept under or behind the counter.

  Some salesmen admitted the games were illegal copies while others denied they were. However, all of them pointed out the financial bargain they presented and used strong sales techniques to persuade the customer to choose a counterfeit rather than a genuine game.

  In August, customs officers seized more than 2,800 bootleg Nintendo cartridges at the Man Kam To border control point and in subsequent raids at Hong Kong locations, indicating that Chinese companies are behind the pirating.

  The head of the Intellectual Property Investigation Bureau of the Customs and Excise Department, Vincent Poon Yeung-kwong, said the sale of the goods infringed the Copyright Ordinance and that dealers faced fines of $1,000 per counterfeit item and a maximum of one year in prison.

  Nintendo has been judged by the Tokyo Stock Exchange to be Japan's most successful company, consistently earning more than $1 billion a year, largely from a generation of youngsters hooked on video games.

  Nintendo's agents in Hong Kong declined to comment on the revelations and nobody returned phone calls to the company offices in America.



Pirate video games flooding the streets