How to tell if your Pokémon cartridge is fake?

For the past few years, original Pokémon cartridges for Game Boy, GBC, and GBA have been selling at completely crazy prices — and the market is flooded with fakes. Before you open your wallet, here’s what you need to check.

The secondhand market is a bit of a jungle. For retro Pokémon cartridges, it’s basically Jurassic Park. Prices have skyrocketed, counterfeits have followed, and without the right know-how, you can quickly end up with a fake Pokémon Crystal paid for as if it were a real collector’s item. Not ideal.

Good news: with a few simple checks, spotting a counterfeit is well within reach for any player. We explain everything.

1. The label doesn’t lie (or almost)

It’s the first thing you look at, and it’s often enough to raise a big red flag. On a genuine Nintendo cartridge, the label is crisp, well-colored, with clean printing and vibrant tones. With a counterfeit, it’s a different story: faded colors, dull printing, sometimes blurry text… and in the worst cases, a label that starts peeling off after a few weeks. If it looks like a quickly glued-on photocopy, that’s a bad sign.

2. The engraved serial number

On the back of the cartridge, genuine Nintendo cartridges have a code engraved directly into the plastic — molded, not printed. On a fake, this code is often just stuck on, misaligned, or completely missing. It’s a detail many sellers don’t think to check in their photos, so don’t hesitate to ask for it explicitly before buying.

3. The tri-wing screw, the detail that gives it all away

Nintendo uses a tri-wing screw — a three-pronged screw — on all its GBA cartridges. It’s a proprietary standard, impossible to open with a regular screwdriver. If you flip the cartridge over and see a standard Phillips screw instead, you have your answer. Counterfeit manufacturers don’t bother with this kind of detail.

4. The save: the sneakiest test

This is the most treacherous sign, and the most painful to discover. Fake cartridges use cheap memory that might last a few hours… before suddenly erasing all your progress. Experts call this the "save wipe," and it’s the absolute nightmare for any collector or player who wanted to replay the Pokémon League for the 15th time. Start a game, save, turn off the console, turn it back on: if your save is gone, the cartridge is fake.

On the secondhand market, it’s best to know what you’re buying. These four checks take two minutes and can save you from paying top dollar for a bad copy.

And if you’re still unsure, online collector communities are usually very responsive and can help you decide!

Cartridge, Gameboy, Pokemon, Retrogaming

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