Sadly, I was on a plane when Stephen Emond alerted me to this eBay sale, which is almost certainly a scam, and so was unable to post about it before sales on the item finished. I greatly pity the “winner” of the auction, who is now out over $1,300 on an item that is almost assuredly fake.

Which, by the way, would be this:

Now, as a general rule, we can probably just take the good Mr. Emond’s word for it that this copy of Akalabeth is, well, a fake. I mean, [amazonify]1467934607::text::::he should know[/amazonify], right? A cursory glance at the auction page also gives reason for caution, such as the seller’s assertion that he found this item at a “Military-Surplus Flea-Market” in “1994”. Or his warning about the integrity of the package:

Item “SOLD AS IS” due to Untested condition, lack of necessary hardware/knowledge & long storage period, over 15 years.
Could be only good for retro Data restoration enthusiasts or arrive “DOA”-Dead On Arrival, unsure :-/

Which is really a lot of words with which to say “I will be sending you a blank tape.” But since there is still a tiny measure of plausibility to all of the above, Stephen Emond also suggests having a read of this Google Groups discussion, which gives the known history of the tape version of Akalabeth. Because as far as anyone knows, there was one copy made on tape, because that was the media that Richard Garriott intended to use to distribute the game. And he still has that one copy, which became obsolete with the advent of floppy disks (which happened just as he was looking to release the game). Heck, he even had it framed.

As far as anyone knows, including Garriott by his own assertions, there were no additional tape copies made. Which means the odds that a second tape copy somehow a) was made and b) turned up in a flea market are terrifyingly low.

Which, in turn, means that someone probably just got swindled out of $1,300…and more. Damn.